[Closed] Anyone tried one of those CV writing companies.

Q. Why don't CV writers and interview specialists have the best job in the world?

What's wrong with writing your own? Presumably you've already got an out of date one so it won't take particularly long to update it.

Yes, I did it about 8 years ago after faffing around trying to do my own for 6 months, I'm just not creative like that.
Cost about £120 or so and got me some decent paying IT jobs since then.

no but had a couple of mates who have been in charge of hiring/interviewing take a look. There are some basics about avoiding the HR cull/traps an some subtleties about giving the right impression.
For a sideways move knowing you and the role is key so harder for a 3rd party to do.

Its a complete re-write from a timeline to a skills based! Im not THAT literate you know 😉

Mike this is what im thinking. How can they know?

Ask to see some specimen CVs first.
One friend of mine paid for a CV, found that her role as company secretary had been transformed into secretary/typist. She wasn't amused.

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Although that is quite girly i am liking the stats section down the right hand side.

I went on a "career transitions workshop" when I left the Army, turned out to be a 3 day CV writing course. Very, very good. Not sure if theres a civvy version out there, but I'd highly recommend it if there ws.

Just re-read the OP.....to put a price on it, if I were charged £100 a day for the course I wouldn't have felt short changed. Your CV should be particular to the role, organisation, pay, nature etc of the job so £120 per CV seems way steeper than learning how to do it yourself. And as mentioned above, how well can they possibly know you?......

Never paid for anyone to write my CV. Mine is in this order:

1) Contact information

2) Relevant skills

3) Personal statement

4) Jobs in reverse chronological order, with some details about what you did and how you made a difference

5) Interests / memberships (of professional bodies and / or societies)

Works for me, anyway... You can have a link to my CV if you like (and it won't cost you £120, or indeed anything at all!)

I also suggest that you get onto LinkedIn and sort out a profile there which matches your CV. Then get some contacts and some recommendations from people you've worked with. I've had quite a few emails regarding jobs from LinkedIn, a couple of which turned into jobs.

What do you do, anyway?

Not sure if i should say on here in case my employer reads it TBF

I wasn't asking for specifics, bomberman, just a general thing...? Industry maybe? Don't say if it will cause problems, obviously!

It's not that difficult to write your own TBH

Needs common sense and motivation

It's environmental consultancy, a lot of acronyms in some of the job descriptions. I'm wondering if there are agencies that deal with specific fields like environmental consultancy...

mrmoofo - Member
It's not that difficult to write your own TBH

Needs common sense and motivation

I'd say it's really hard to write your own and nothing to do with common sense or motivation. I review a lot of CVs and most of them are absolute shite. And neither experience nor seniority seem to have any impact on how good or bad CVs are!

The most common errors I see are that people state what project / company they worked for, but give no indication of what they actually did, what their responsibilities were or what successes they achieved. It's actually quite hard to talk about your own successes in that way, so it's helpful to have someone develop that for you (doesn't have to be a pro-CV writer). "I was a Project Engineer for 6 years and worked on the following projects...." just doesn't cut it, but is what 75% of the CVs I see consist of.

Mediocrity is the norm, good stands out. Find someone who knows what they're doing (mate / colleague / CV writer) and get them to help you. And stick to 2 sides max 😉

I too see quite a few cvs and there is a lot of crap out there for, what I guess are very competant people. On the flip side, I've interviewed people who look great on paper and within 10 seconds of meeting them you know most of the stuff on their cv is fantasy. OP, if you think £100 is worth it, have a go. It's not a lot of cash in the grand scheme of things. One thing I know splits opinion are personal statements. You're not going to say anything bad about yourself so sometimes it's probably best leaving it out IMHO. My cv doesn't have one because I can't stand them and it's never held me back.

I used one. The end result was a cv that sold me rather than one that described me. As above if you're not a salesy person it can be hard to describe your succeses in the right way. Fwiw I effectively needed to rewrite some parts of it as the writer had either misdescribed my work or just misunderstood. Fact is that I would never have rewritten my cv like that. Was it worth it? Ask me tomorrow afternoon...

i use recruitment agencies, they always re-write it for me to suit whatever job they're putting me in for.

It was worth it - just been offered a new job. But TBF I'd been using their rewritten cv as my master version for a while so maybe it didn't work *that* well.

Get Perfect CV by Max Eggert. And Perfect Interview if they ring you up.

Write your own CV, but don't worry too much about embellishing the truth: your interviewers will be lying through their teeth as well 🙂

Theres a shit tonne of free resources on the internet for CV writing now. I've always written my own. Im also a graphic designer so my CVs look much much more presentable than your bog standard Word Document (Goes a LONG way!)

Always have received compliments on my CV design and it just landed me a great new job.

Interestingly enough, while I was looking for a job a CV writing company approached me with a "Free Review" - I took them up on it, their response was obviously a generic cut as paste as they were saying things that simply didn't relate to my CV - and for that reason, I was out!