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Tutorial on giving feedback regarding the
work done on your
resume:
99% of the feedback we get is a
simple positive statement like 'Thanks! You did a great job.'
But occasionally a customer has some further concern and we hope
the tutorial below helps in developing better feedback. The
language is very honest and direct but we are sure you will
appreciate this...
People come to ResumeScorecard for
our advice and help with making a better resume (and sometimes
cover letter, cv, bio, etc., etc). they are good at their jobs
but they don't write resumes every day themselves. With our
accessible pricing and our staff with real world hiring
experience, Resume Scorecard has staff that have written
hundreds and hundreds of resumes over the past decade. So people
have the good sense to turn to experts like us for assistance
just like the would turn to a doctor if they were feeling ill
and weren't medical experts themselves.
But since we edit and write so
many resumes and since we help people who are not experts on
resumes themselves, it is inevitable that sometimes people do
not understand what we did and why even after we provide a
summary of work done. Some are very emotional and some have
trouble articulating themselves in a productive manner so this
is a quick tutorial of sorts to help those folks handle this
situation in a more productive manner:
1) Try to trust the expert! As explained above our staff
have a great deal of expertise with resumes. Most people have
the good sense to trust the expert advice and give it a try but
very occasionally someone might be unhappy because they did or
didn't see some particular thing on the resume. They may send in
an angry email demanding certain changes. This is very much like
going in to a doctor's office and instead of letting them do
their work, telling them what their diagnosis and
recommendations should be! But before jumping to conclusions and
telling others how to do their job consider whether you have a
similar level of expertise. How many resumes have you written?
[Most people have only written their own and at most perhaps
helped a friend or family member out. And they only work on a
resume every couple years when they switch jobs.] What has been
the success rate of the resumes you have written? [Many people
turn to us because they haven't had much success on their own.]
We make our pricing accessible (i.e. very affordable) at Resume
Scorecard since we want to help as many people as we can. [A
good resume is very valuable so most other resume writers charge
more than we do. We deliberately charge less than we could so
that we can make resume editing affordable to all.] It doesn't
cost much to give the resume we made a chance. You will almost
certainly find that your new resume will bring positive results.
[Provided of course you are sensible with the rest of your job
search. If you apply for jobs you are not qualified for, etc.,
etc., then even a good resume will not help obviously.]
2) Be courteous and respectful! For those with trouble
controlling their emotions they might get a moment of
satisfaction by being rude but if you would like someone to do
something for you then rudeness never elicits the best results.
Being rude to those that are trying to help you is not helpful.
It is difficult to do much to help you until your emotions are
under control.
3) Be reasonable! Would you demand that a doctor provide
you with free surgery just because you were late for your own
appointment? Demand a million dollars in compensation because
the cashier handing you that coffee you ordered didn't smile at
you in just the right way? Hopefully you have better sense than
that. Yet sometimes people make unreasonable demands on us.
People of course have the good sense to familiarize themselves
with our service and policies before purchasing but if they
forget for a moment then simple common sense will help too. We
provide a service so common sense dictates that once it is
provided you can't return our time. [You don't have a time
machine do you?] So we cannot refund you. You might not be happy
with the diagnosis but your doctor did provide you with his/her
time and expertise so you can't get a refund. on the other hand,
a reasonable course of action would be to either ask questions
for clarification and/or request some changes be done in a
second revision. [This is in fact explained in the satisfaction
guarantee section of our website that you of course read.]
4) Ask questions! Can't figure out why something got
changed on your resume or something didn't get changed on your
resume? Don't jump to conclusions and demand changes without
fully understanding things first. A polite email along these
lines would make an excellent start - 'I noticed that you didn't
reword such and such section on my resume. Could you help me
understand why?' [A common answer to this particular question by
the way is that we do not make unnecessary changes on people's
resumes. But email us with any question you have and we would be
delighted to elaborate on the work we did.]
5) Help us help you! To get the best results it is
important that you provide us with as much information as
possible. We don't know you personally and thus can only work
from the info you give us. And we will not just make things up.
Yet many people choose not to provide us with examples of job
ads they want to target, or provide us with info on their
achievements when we ask them. This makes it difficult to tailor
your resume or to add or change the content as much as we could
otherwise. If you will not tell us much about yourself then it
hard to say much about you obviously. Take some responsibility
and take some time to provide us with the extra information to
work from.
6) Be realistic and accurate! [This point often occurs in
conjunction with points #2 and #3 above.] Wild exaggerations or
inaccurate statements are not helpful. Often the first thing
people see is how we changed the format to make important things
stand out better so they might say something like 'You only
changed the format!' Well it is a rare thing indeed when that is
all we do on a resume. If we made a cover letter from scratch
for you for example then saying we only changed the format on
the resume is very obviously untrue. You might as well be
telling us the sky is red and the world is flat. [Another common
comment that goes beyond reality is that we didn't ask for
information. We are very good at what we do so we know to ask
for certain key things right up front like job ads for example.
We ask for achievements too. See the page on our website on our
editing service. It's right there. We ask for job ads, etc. Yet
time and again someone will say we didn't ask them for extra
info for some bizarre reason.] If your comments are
disassociated from reality then it is hard to help you.
7) Be specific about what you would like. Saying 'I
wanted you to reword the resume.' is a vague statement and makes
it hard to help you. [A comment like this is often associated
with point #6 above. We do typically reword resumes by fixing
spelling, improving the grammar, etc., etc. But if you wanted
MORE changes to the words on the resume you should say that
rather than exaggerating wildly.] What section do you want
reworded? What do you not like about it? Etc, etc. etc. Or are
you are convinced a particular word on your resume is spelled
wrong and want it fixed? Well how about telling us which word
you would swear is misspelled despite what the dictionary says.
If you had someone paint your house and you didn't like the
color then you could say 'I don't like the color. Paint it again
a different color.' But rather than making the painter guess or
try to read your mind you would get better results by telling
them what color you wanted or at the very least something like
whether you wanted something bright or dark, or whatever.
Similarly you will get better results on your second revision if
you take a moment to be specific with your requests. [And we
both want your resume fixed up right away so provide us with
specific requests right away rather than making us email you to
say that you are being vague and need to be more specific.]
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