Jacqui Poindexter writes resumes from scratch. That's her specialty. But she is, by default, a career coach, as well.
To write a resume, she has to interview her clients and if they can't deliver a clear value proposition or tell good stories to support their claims she puts them through a kind of boot camp that turns them from job hunting half-wits into people who, for the first time in their lives, can speak intelligently about the jobs they know like the back of their hands.
Inotherwords, she moulds a person not just a resume. But we're interested in resumes. So, why is a resume better when it's written by a pro?
Well, let's face it: most people aren't special and Jacqui aims to make them stand out, so she spends hours trying to tease something out of their experience that makes them seem mildy distinctive. That's called branding.
And why can't the mooch, I mean job hunter do that himself? Well, first of all, he doesn't know anything about marketing. Those needles Jacqui pulls out the haystack of experience are called value drivers. They increase the perceived value of the product, in this case the prospective employee.
Most people don't know anything about value drivers. You ask them what makes them special and they say uh, well... duh! That might be the real answer but the resume writer is like a tailor. She measures you up and down and then builds you a suit that attempts to compensate for your deficiencies. A little padding in the shoulders, double breasted to cover the gut, stripes to make the short man appear tall and voila, you cookin' daddy. She makes you look good. Or, at least, better.
The amateur doesn't know how to analyze her job. She doesn't know what to mention and what to leave out. All she knows is shop talk, day-to-day nitty gritty. That's going to serve her well when she speaks to the hiring manager; he's only interested in shop talk, too. But who does she have to impress to get to him? The know-nothing recruiter? The most junior person in HR? You've got to write something they can understand.
And is the average resume ready to appeal to a person like that? No, says Jacqui, but there are a lot of prima donnas in business who don't understand that they can't go it alone.
To help these fools, and win their business, resume writers have to bust them over the chops with testimonials that prove that a custom-made resume will get them off the dole and on the payroll faster than anything they can produce on their own.
Reference: Look ma, I can write my own (Crash!)
