Could a resume writing service actually help me find a job?
I apply for a job but I don’t get a response. I rarely hear back from the organizations I apply to. On rare occasions, I follow up immediately and ask for their thoughts on why I’m not a good fit. I never received a reply.
A friend suggested I try a resume development service. I’m keen to improve my applications as much as I can, so I followed their advice. However, the service’s response was inadequate. He was talking about a few general, common sense ideas, but I was already using them all. He mentioned more specific ones, but I definitely don’t believe they improved my resume; One in particular seemed like a very bad suggestion. Am I just a valuable person or have I been sold a lemon?
The experience you outlined at the beginning of your question represents a major, long-term shift in the way job applications are generally processed. One of the main by-products of this change is that talented, well-qualified people are seriously and consciously applying for jobs and hearing absolutely nothing in response.
Judging by the emails I’ve received, the conversations I’ve had, the articles I’ve read (from around the world), and the experts I’ve spoken to, this problem is now so pervasive and has been happening for so long that it almost feels like a steady state disease. This is still unpleasant – you don’t want this to happen to you – but it is no longer unusual.
I have no doubt that there are good resume development services out there that actually help job seekers, so I think your friend’s advice is reasonable. But I hope you didn’t follow this advice thinking, “My practices must be hopeless and I need to improve them immediately.”
The reality is that a variety of factors, including advances in artificial intelligence, mean that today’s job searches are radically different from the job searches of not so long ago, and are arguably much more deflating.
Whatever your reason for using this service, I think your reservations about its quality are probably well-founded.
It’s true that what you’re experiencing could be caused by a flawed resume, a cover letter that isn’t quite right, or a misunderstanding of where your own strengths lie. But I think it’s much more likely that he’ll be the product of a brutal and cold job application system in 2026.
Often, but not always, this system completely underestimates the time and effort invested by applicants and blithely ignores the harmful consequences of leaving a person hanging indefinitely.
Whatever your reason for using this service, I think your reservations about its quality are probably well-founded.
I agree with you that a suggestion made by the so-called author of your ‘Audit’ is shocking. We won’t publish exactly what you were told, but he generally suggested replacing your plain language with buzzwords.
He then seemed to imply that you should create statistics to measure your success. If I were as generous as possible, they might try to say: If you can use numbers to prove a point, you should. But that wasn’t clear enough.
The other big problem with what you’re given is that there are a lot of suggestions for things your resume already clearly does. In some cases the report acknowledged this, but in others it suggested that these were areas that needed improvement or elements that you had neglected.
This is one of many examples of statements in the report being inaccurate. Most of it reads a bit off. It points out something that I don’t think will surprise you in the slightest: I don’t think it was written by a human.
At best, it may have been sloppily edited by someone. This strikes me as a collection of generic “improvements” probably chosen from a long, pre-written list, roughly compiled, and then given an icon setting or two (a name here, a reference to a job there) in a modest attempt to personalize it.
But my biggest concern is that my initial perspective—that most of these touts are half-baked adaptations of dusty self-improvement waffle—is wrong. While the report essentially tells you to fill your resume with incomprehensible jargon, it actually offers you practical and useful advice.
To get your resume past the applicant tracking system that Gate uses for so many hiring managers these days, you really need to turn your resume into a catalog of extremely specific, stupid, and easy “keywords.”
To answer your ultimate question, in some ways I hope you have been sold lemons. God help us all if the advice you receive is the peachy equivalent of resume writing.
Jonathan Rivett is a writer living in Melbourne. He’s been writing about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.
