How to Avoid a Scam Resume Writing Service

by | Oct 9, 2019

Advancing your career is critical. Paying for a skilled LinkedIn profile, resume, and digital cover letter writer makes sense. It’s a complicated, radically evolving, high-tech, tedious grammar endeavor that most professionals embrace with the same enthusiasm as getting a cavity filled at the dentist. Prior to retaining a resume writer, be sure you don’t fall victim to a scam. Low price offers are likely to be too good to be true.

How to Determine If a Resume Writing Service Might Be a Scam

Prices
Prices for resume or LinkedIn profile writing can range from $49 to $3,000. Be suspicious of a cost less than $299-$399 for resume or Linkedin profile writing. After subtracting for taxes, credit card processing fees, overhead, marketing, profit margins, etc., low-cost services like TopResume only pay one of their 1,500 outsourced writers approximately $20 for the entire job, not per hour. You need to invest more than $20 in growing your future career earning potential.

Search websites that report business complaints and scams
In Google, type the company name and “reviews.” Look at the first, second, and third page of search results. You do not want to see results like this:

Reviews
The breadth, depth, and source of the reviews on the website likely gives you more clues than anything else. Here are some red flags:

  • Their website has embedded testimonials from review websites like TrustPilot where the company can delete any negative reviews and insert their positive reviews that may be fake.
  • Reviews are limited to two or three untraceable people mysteriously named “Tony G” and Susie H.”
  • No verifiable client reviews from sources that let you see the real person who posted it, such as LinkedIn, Google, and Yelp.
  • TopResume and similar resume mills look promising upfront, but the work quality may be uneven, which is why they do not use verifiable third-party reviews.
  • Even TopResume’s free resume review feature sends the same, word-for-word analysis to different resumes that are submitted.

“Best of” Websites
Ignore websites that claim to list the top 10 resume writers for the current year or best resume writers for your city. These are either paid placements similar to advertisements or created by the company listed as number one on the list. Not surprisingly, Find My Profession’s website lists themselves as the best in all 50 cities they reviewed.

Other red flags in a resume writing service

  • Ambiguous information about what, if any, humans work there. This is a clue that the “company” is just a network of freelance, overseas writers.
  • No free, initial phone call (15 minutes or less) with the actual person who would be potentially writing your profile and resume if you hire them.
  • Customer service that is limited to a chatbot or a call center overseas.
  • No installation of the new LinkedIn profile they created, instead they only send you a list of 50 skills and a templated summary paragraph for you to install into your own LinkedIn account.

Elements of a High-Quality Professional/Executive Resume and LinkedIn Writing Service