The Difference Between Real Executive Resume Writers + the High-Profile Resume Influencers

Here’s the difference between Influencers and Real Executive Resume Writers:

• Influencer: Suggests that a 45-minute webinar or do-it-yourself download will result in your being able to create a meaningful resume story.
• Real Resume Writer: Invests weeks, even months in a process that delves into your who, what, where, when, why and how. She becomes entranced with your details, immersing in your content and internalizing your story.
• Sometimes, before she even etches a single word of your story, she’ll sit and soak in your story, for upwards to an hour or more–having spread your well-researched materials across multiple screens.
• She engages in earnest writing flow, and resides there for multiple, 45-60-minute writing blocks to ensure a rhythmic story commences over a process of days and weeks.
• Influencer: May never have written a resume before, or if she has, often is not privy to the tangible results of her deliverables. Perhaps she has an isolated story or two about her husband’s job search process or 1-2 execs who have responded to her posts, but as far as deep, long-term client relationships that have proven out the value of the collaboration in which she has immersed, her well is usually dry.
• Real Resume Writer: Has personally written for and conversed with hundreds (if not thousands) of executives in job search over a decade or more (2.5 decades on my end), and navigated alongside many of them through to the job-landing wins, garnering specific feedback and enabling her to apply learnings to your story. She is in-demand because her success record with prior clients has enabled an abundance of referrals.
• Influencer: Has lots of opinions about resume writing, but often outsources the writing to someone else, versus really understanding the strategy behind excellent resume composition. As well, many influencers claim a real resume writer must fill a plethora of historical job boxes; e.g., former recruiter, former HR professional, former hiring manager in order to imbue a hard-working resume.
• Real Resume Writer: Is a writer and strategist, which means, she is both educated and experienced in career storytelling and knows how to craft a compelling, pithy narrative that emphatically markets the value of the candidate.
• As long as she is a talented, naturally gifted writer and deeply passionate about mastering her craft–including proving her genuine commitment to interviewing and reflecting back a meaningful story–she will articulate muscular resume stories. She will  exceed expectations with a narrative that lands interviews, and if wielded correctly, can even influence the job- and salary-negotiation outcome.
• In fact, former recruiters, et al, often are blinded by their own biases vs. a writer who has the training and experience fleshing out marketing-centric stories that illuminate the je ne sais quois value of each individual candidate.
• Influencer: Focuses your resume on the technical and bottom-line details but omits the integral, below-the-surface foundational aspects of an excellent resume story.
• Real Resume Writer: Writes with more than bottom-line impact in mind. She builds leadership mini stories within the larger story that are both evocatively rich in contextual detail and compelled by tempo and rhythm.
• Influencer: Claims she will connect you to the perfect-fit hiring solution, such as a well-researched list of recruiters or introductions to her network; or she’ll allude that in some way her resume and process is the magic bullet to breaking open the elusive executive screening process.
• Real Resume Writer: May acquiesce to mailing your resume to a recruiter or private equity/venture capital list, but will emphasize that doing so is a virtual ‘crap shoot,’ based on the particular recruiters’ searches they are conducting at the time of the mailing.
• As well, a real resume writer is NOT a headhunter, and even if she has accumulated a plethora of executive recruiter contacts, colleagues and friends (like I have in my 25 years!), she won’t be able to introduce you to a headhunter that will be your job-search agent, doesn’t have a magic-bullet list of recruiters/agents in her personal arsenal to send your resume to (without annoying her recruiter network) and will honestly tell you so.
• As Chadd Balbi says, “Recruiters are loyal to those that pay their bills.” Recruiters work for the client company(ies) they represent and take great pride in personally, through their own initiative, finding the right-fit candidate.
• Influencer: Claims that a resume is uncomplicated, not that big of a deal to write.
• Real Resume Writer: Wrangles down dozens–sometimes 40+ pages–of career notes of complexity after having spent days (in my case, it can often be weeks) collaborating, conducting 1:1 interviews with the executive client to unearth focused, strategic content from which to write.
• From this place of enthusiastic research, she then navigates a strategic, intuitive writing process that takes hours and hours (days/weeks) to contemplate and distill into 2, 3, 4 and 5-page exec resume stories. More so, she capably can expand the writing process into 3 to 4 to 5 separate components that coalesce into a harmonious executive career portfolio.
• Influencer: Doesn’t necessarily work closely with an intimate roster of clients, but instead often is the marketing head of a corral of writers and invests a majority of her time marketing clever click-bait ideas via videos and long-form posts to get you to buy her often vacuous wisdom.
• Real Resume Writer: Collaborates closely with each client, juggling and navigating the ambiguity of individual client deadlines, and the unique stressors associated with real clients’ actual job search processes. This includes responding as elegantly as possible to client angst, amid the undulating wave of uncertainty related to each executive job seeker’s situation.
• Influencer: Has a cursory understanding of writing and can elicit — to the naked eye, at least — relatively correct sentences, with the acceptable buzzwords (that, unfortunately, read and often sound like every other resume).
• Real Resume Writer: Writes your story with orchestral elegance and meatiness. She then reads through your story silently, and again aloud to hear and correct overuse of words and phrases. She creates reader-lingering pauses on crucial sections of the story, compelling calls to action (calls to conversations).
• Influencer: Declares she has her finger on the pulse of the latest technological tricks and strategies to ensure a perfectly formatted resume that will game the ATS or other technological systems.
• Real Resume Writer: Embraces the ever-evolving dance between resume words and technologies, but also knows that a strong story is not confined by technology–ever. Moreover, an executive resume, used properly, is not dependent upon ATS systems, but instead, depends upon influencing human eyes and ears: those of C-suite execs and board members.
• Influencer: Claims the resume has one job: get you the interview. WRONG!
• Real Resume Writer: Knows that the resume (or executive biography or executive summary) will help catapult you to the final interviewing cut simply by bringing clarity and context to the interviewing conversation at the senior exec, C-suite and Board level.

So, while the video shorts and long-form posts that influencers — and even little ole’ me — produce from time-to-time are good and have their place, you need a career writer who is MUCH MORE. You need someone who has proven to be in it for the long game–someone willing to roll up their sleeves and really dig into the introspective details of your story; someone who applies patience and tenacity and grit and focuses, alongside with you, in a collaborative effort, even if it cuts into the writer’s social media time.

You want someone committed to YOU, the individual executive first and foremost, ensuring you feel you are the one and only client in her roster versus an audience of 10s of thousands.

This is a process that is not always thrilling every step of the way, but, one which is riddled with exhilaration and outcomes. This is a process that results in an Executive Resume Story beyond your wildest imagination!

Check out one of my recent career stories for an entrepreneur executive, here: Executive Resume Story. Or, take a peek at this Featured Executive Career Portfolio.

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I am one of only 50 master resume writers who has crafted more than 1,500 career stories. An intuitive listener, I reveal your stories using my journalist’s training (bachelor’s degree in writing/journalism): in-depth, tailored worksheet + phone interview fuel the writing strategy. I meld facts gathering with a unique sensitivity to your nuances and then imbue each line of your story. Contact me here for more information.