Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep84: Do you hire a resume writer? BAD idea.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of my Grow Your Career online and offline podcast. This is Mei Ping and today I have a very special update. I have upgraded my microphone.

Starting point is 00:00:41 So if you are loving this episode's audio quality as compared to the previous episodes make sure that you drop me a message on linkedin and let me know because i'm super duper excited to really upgrade the quality of my podcast um it's been about it's been more than a year running this podcast i love it um i like to share a lot of my corporate insights experiences and so forth and yeah i think it's really about time to get the audio and the microphone upgraded. So if you are loving this audio experience a little bit more, then definitely drop me a note on LinkedIn and let me know. All right. So let's jump right into today's episode. And today I really want to talk about why you should write your own resume.

Starting point is 00:01:26 For those of you who really hate writing your own resume or you always wonder if you could just hire somebody to do it, then make sure that you listen on because today, I'm going to share with you honestly why you should be the main person. You should be not even main person. You should be the only person to write your resume, at least the first draft. Over the years, right, I have had a lot of people reaching out to me, asking me if, you know, I can help write their resume for them, even when I was in a corporate job. And that was always something that I didn't really understand because I've always felt that

Starting point is 00:02:02 how could somebody else write your resume for you when you know you are the person who you know it's your career right you you did the job okay maybe you don't know how to articulate it very well or I think for some people I feel like they are trying to escape because writing their resume gives them a lot of stress and they feel that hey you know I don't think I can do a good job, then I'm just going to get somebody else to do it. And let me tell you today why it's a really bad idea, and I can tell you that when I was a hiring manager, corporate leader, business leader,

Starting point is 00:02:37 when I interview candidates, I can more or less tell whether the person wrote the resume themselves. And the reason is because if you didn't write it yourself, right, it's for a candidate, a job seeker, whatever, it's very difficult for you to express what is written in your resume if you didn't write it yourself. Because if you didn't write it right then you will not be able to express it you'll be you will not be able to use the same words that is being used in your seat in your resume because you did you didn't write it it's just like somebody else's expression

Starting point is 00:03:17 of your career and like how they would explain it so sometimes in the past when i used to interview candidates i feel like sometimes the way that they say it versus what I see in their CV is really, really different. It could be the lack of interview skills could be the case, but there are also instances I've seen where I just knew that they didn't write it themselves. And even when I drill into detail, the things that they say that they have done, right, you know, they vouch that they have done. They couldn't really explain that or they couldn't give me the level of detail that is required. And it kind of points back to the resume as well because it then makes me wonder,

Starting point is 00:03:56 okay, like if you did write it yourself, like how come it doesn't sound the same? Like it doesn't sound to me like it's the same person who wrote it versus the person who is interviewing and telling me that career story right now so if you're one of those people who have been you know wondering if you should hire a resume writer um personally i would strongly discourage that and the other thing also is that if you didn't put in the effort to at least come up with the first draft of your resume, you will never gain the kind of confidence that you need for any job interview. You will never gain that kind of confidence for your job search because you know deep down that you didn't prepare enough.

Starting point is 00:04:39 You didn't have the right skills. You didn't even bother to put in the effort. And this is really something that when a lot of my clients come to me at the start they always tell me mei ping i don't um i don't feel comfortable in my job search i'm afraid i feel like i'm not good enough i have no confidence i don't know what i'm doing yada yada yada so all these to be honest like really fair points right i mean it's a process that stresses out a lot of people however what's very important is that in the resume review session or at least the ones that i do with my clients i really make sure that they understand what their career story is of course i can help them help give them a little bit of structure to really draw that out and just by asking them some

Starting point is 00:05:24 questions to help them think through their career a little bit more structure to really draw that out and just by asking them some questions to help them think through their career a little bit more because sometimes you know when we are very busy working we don't really think about our career journey our entire career you know what we have done what we have achieved in the past and really where we want to go in the future and that really that really is the biggest problem and when you find yourself writing your cv writing your resume and you're afraid most of the time it's actually afraid of like not knowing what to say and because most of us don't really sit down slow down and really take stock on things that we've done what would you know contribution impact that we have made in the

Starting point is 00:06:02 role and more importantly where do we want to go next so like i said honestly i mean you know, contribution impact that we have made in the role? And more importantly, where do we want to go next? So like I said, honestly, I mean, you know, no hate for any resume writers out there. I'm sure there are many of them, but I am not one of them. And I think it's very important to, you need to be the first person to write your CV. Then of course, you can come to me, you can go to somebody else to do a review for you. Because even if you write it yourself, of course, there may be certain things that you're unsure about. There may be certain things that you don't see because maybe you were never in HR before. You were never hiring manager. You were never an interviewer. So you don't get the kind of perspectives that you need on how your resume comes across to the people who are actually hiring for candidates and

Starting point is 00:06:45 and it's fine to book a resume review session just to get that additional perspective get that professional feedback for sure and that's a lot of what a lot of my clients do as well however what is required is that you at least give it a try right and i was telling this to my somebody yesterday and i said that um i am the coach to teach you how to fish but i will not catch the fish for you i will not catch the fish for you because that is the worst thing a coach or a mentor can do for you which is just giving you the answer and not just giving you the answer literally doing it for you that is not a good thing like you may feel very excited that you got the answer you got hey i got somebody else to do it for me but it's not good it's not good for you in the long run because you

Starting point is 00:07:35 never truly learn how to do something with for yourself you know by yourself and resume writing is such an important skill that you can absolutely learn because it is really training that thought process to really help you identify value in every single thing that you do. I'd say that the thought process that I teach a lot of my clients is not even for the resume. It's something that they should really use throughout their career. It's a skill that they can use throughout their career i think that is really the more important part where i continuously

Starting point is 00:08:11 insist that you know for my clients to really take a step do it themselves first then of course you can come to me later because i can give you that expert view i can give you that professional feedback but you really need to do it yourself first then the the other thing i also notice is that some people um okay i'm not going to name names here but some people feel very entitled for somebody else to write a resume for them so i also sometimes receive messages from people saying that hey maybe i um i'm just going to pay you but i need you to write this for me. And when I explain to them exactly what I'm explaining to you right now on why you should do it yourself, they get really upset. This is the part I don't really understand. I'm like,

Starting point is 00:08:56 how can anybody else be responsible for your entire career? And secondly, why do you feel it's okay to just shove your own career responsibility to somebody else? Of course, right? There are many people who can help you, but what about you? What are you doing to help yourself? Besides trying to pay somebody else

Starting point is 00:09:16 to just do the whole thing for you and never truly learning how to fish, never truly learning the really important skill for your career success, then it really begs the question, are you really serious to want to make an improvement or, you know, you're just doing it because it's what everybody else is doing. And lastly, I'm just going to end with a point here. And I think this is another misconception that I hear a lot. And this misconception is that,

Starting point is 00:09:50 ah, I only need to start updating and writing my resume when I want to look for a job. No, that is not correct. And I can tell you that every single year, you should be updating your resume, a proper resume update version, because it also helps you plan through what is your next career direction and what does career growth look like for you and how can you consolidate your entire years of performance right and incorporate it within your career story and yes i do work with a lot of job seekers who are active job seekers they want their resume to be reviewed right now which is fair but i'd say that if you're an ambitious professional you should work

Starting point is 00:10:26 on your resume you should have like a version at least once a year like in the past i when i was working rising up the corporate ladder i always spend at least a little bit of time every six months to look at my resume and make sure that i update all my latest achievement in there which ever fits and of course if you're treating your LinkedIn profile just like your resume as well, then I will make sure I update those as well. So offline resume and online resume is something that you need to take charge of.

Starting point is 00:10:56 And if there's one thing that you take away from today's episode, I want it to be this question. Do you really want to learn how to fish learn it once and to be able to do it for your the rest of your career or do you just want to keep buying the fish all right i think that's the question that only you can answer and with that i'll end today's episode and i and actually if you have decided to update your resume, then drop me a message on LinkedIn and tell me that you have listened to this episode and this episode has inspired you to actually take a good look at your resume and really ask yourself, does this really reflect my

Starting point is 00:11:37 entire career journey at this point? So with that, I'll end today's episode.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep84: Do you hire a resume writer? BAD idea.

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