The Only 5 Resume Services You Should Trust
The Only 5 Resume Services You Should Trust in 2019 (and which services to avoid)
If you’re looking for resume writing services, then no doubt you’ve Googled and found sites with titles like “The Best Resume Writing Services 2019” or something like that.
The problem is, most of them are scams.
The scam is this: they’re using fake rankings. Who is behind that top 10 resume site? Most likely, it’s the same person that owns the site that just-so-happened to rank number #1. Clever, right? Create a ranking site and name yourself number one? That’s why if you check out five of those ranking sites, no two of them agree with who’s ranked highest. You'd think there would be some consistency... some site or other would regularly rank at least in the top three, every time.
I’m going to tell you the only five real resume companies in this industry so you can avoid the scammers. If that Top Whatever Resume site doesn’t have at least one of these five sites ranked highly, then you know they're trying to trick you.
The 5 Most Respected Resume Writing Companies in North America
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#1
ResumeWriters.com
Yes, we're first, and there's good reason for that... we've been around longer than anyone else (20 years in business this year) have the largest network of independent resume writers, have the best reputation in the industry. But we can get into all that later. If you don't trust your resume creation to us, please ONLY consider the following competitors as a second choice. These are the only resume companies we feel are worthy of the term competition.
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#2
TopResume.com
TopResume.com has been our main competitor for a few years now. They are a venture-backed startup (Talent Inc.) that works with a lot of the top resume writers in the industry—many writers that also work with us. They have not been around as long as we have, but they have made a big splash in the industry these past few years, are committed to doing good work, and have earned a reputation for a solid product.
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#3
CareerPerfect.com
CareerPerfect.com—in its original incarnation, Career Services Group—is one of our oldest competitors. Bruce Wayne, founder and former CEO of CareerPerfect, was one of the giants of the Resume Writing industry. When he recently sold CareerPerfect, we were pleased to see the resume service was not shuttered. CareerPerfect continues to create excellent career documents at industry standard prices.
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#4
GreatResumesFast.com
Jessica Hernandez, the founder of Great Resumes Fast, is someone else we've known for years. Her prices are slightly above industry average, but no one has ever complained about the quality of service her team provides, or the skill and quality of her writers.
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#5
ZipJob.com
ZipJob is another newcomer to the industry, but in their two and a half years in the biz, they have hired some top quality writers, have introduced some innovative products at industry-competitive prices and have garnered a decent reputation for quality.
Who Am I To Tell You This?
I’m Brian McCullough, the founder and CEO of ResumeWriters.com. I started this company in 1999. You can find out more about me and my qualifications here. But for our purposes, you should know this: I’ve been in the Resume Writing industry my entire life. I either know, or have met, or know by reputation, or have worked with, or have employed... nearly every single reputable resume professional in this industry.
Again, if you order a resume service, even if you don’t work with us, ONLY work with the five services I listed above. These are the only places that employ resume writers I respect. Anyone else is sketchy at best. Trust me.
Why Am I Telling You This?
Wait, you’re the owner of ResumeWriters.com, but you just recommended some of your competitors? Why are you doing this?
Because, as I’m about to explain, this industry has gotten flooded with scammers and ripoff-artists over the past few years, and I’m sick of it! The Resume Writing industry provides a vital, valuable service. If people continually encounter the fraudsters, this industry will get a bad reputation, and that hurts everyone.
Quite simply, if you don’t engage the services of ResumeWriters.com, I’d rather you work with one of the competitors I just listed so the industry doesn’t get a bad name.
What is the scam some resume sites are running?
In the 20 years I’ve been in this industry, I’ve seen everyone come and go. In the dotcom era there were venture capital backed companies like the original Resume.com. For years, our main competitor was ResumeEdge.com, until a multi-national bought them and ran them into the ground. Sadly. And there have always been the personal sites and personal companies that solo (but, often, exceedingly qualified) resume writers run for themselves.
But in the last few years, there’s been a dismaying trend of scam sites flooding into the market. It’s not hard to get a domain like ResumeGlobe or some such site, throw up a website, tell everyone you’ve been around for decades and claim to have dozens of qualified writers on payroll.
Here’s the secret though:
These sites hire subcontractors, sometimes from sites like Fiverr, but most often from sweatshops overseas. They send these contractors a bunch of resume templates, use clever software and simply cut and paste your resume together. The “writers” get paid $1-$2 (at best) and the scammers pocket the rest. I’ll explain more later about the tactics these scammers use and how to spot them, but for now, all you need to know is that this sucks. Lots of people get taken in by these sites and have horrible experiences and end up out a lot of money for a bad experience. This is damaging to real companies that employ actual, qualified, certified resume writers and pay them the standard rate their skills require.
What is the scam behind the top10 ranking sites?
The key to the scam is to make yourself look like a legitimate site overnight. The scam sites don’t have the decades of credibility in the industry, like we do. They don’t have the years of good reviews or rankings or customer testimonials.
Solution: they just make them up. Again, it’s not difficult to create a top10whatever.com site and get it listed on the search engines... or maybe even buy ads to promote your scam. When you’re only paying your writers $1-$2, you can afford it.
Heck, why not create 3 different resume sites, and then on your top10whatever.com site you can rank them 1, 2, 3. And the bonus is, you can trash any legitimate competitors at the same time by ranking them lower!
But again, the key is, the company that is ranked number 1 on top10whatver.com is also owned by the same person who created top10whatver.com. That’s why none of those sites agree on who is really in the top tier. They’re all (fake) promoting themselves!
How can you spot a scam resume site?
Oh, there are many, many ways:
As I said, if a site really is well respected and ranked, you’d expect to see them in the top three or so of most top10whatever.com sites. But Google around. Chances are you won’t see them ranked well anywhere else but on that scam ranking site. Meanwhile, sites like ResumeWriters.com or GreatResumesFast, or TopResume... they’re ranked well a lot of places. Here’s a list of about a dozen different places who have recommend ResumeWriters.com, even Time Magazine! So, if you only see a site recommended once, just ignore them.
Look for reviews that can’t be faked. Start with the Better Business Bureau. We put that front and center at ResumeWriters because we’re proud of our two decades of satisfied clients and customers. Guess what? That other resume site you’re considering? Look them up in the Better Business Bureau website (here). You might be surprised to find dozens, even HUNDREDS of complaints. Everyone gets a complaint now and then, but hundreds? And that’s even if a resume site is a member of the BBB. Most aren’t. Why not? What are they hiding? Bottom line: if they’re not proud to show you their BBB record, there’s probably a good reason for that.
Much simpler: just go to Google and search for “xyzresumes.com ripoff” or "xyzresumes.com scam” and see what comes up. Again, you might be surprised.
Do a Google search or a Google Maps search for their offices. Do they even list offices? A lot of scam sites don’t even bother. But even the ones that do list an address... why does it list “apartment 3” in some suburban street? If they’re really such a big and respected company, why don’t they have real offices? Look up our address. We’re at 68 Jay Street in Brooklyn. Its a 10-story office building that Etsy.com got its start in, along with many other tech companies. Again, we’re proud to show you we’re real.
A lot of these sites claim they’ve been in business for 20 years like we have. But there’s a couple of quick ways you can prove this. First, there’s the Wayback Machine. If you type: ResumeWriters.com in the Wayback Machine, the oldest snapshot of our site you can find is from 2003. It’s embarrassing to see our earliest version of the website, but hey, at least you know we were there! Plus, you can use this form to check when any domain first went live on the internet. See? ResumeWriters.com was registered in June of 1999, though we started the business a few months before that with our first clients. So, do a similar search with that other resume company you’re considering who claims they’ve been in business for 20 years. Again, you might be surprised by the truth.
Are they members of the Certifying Resume Writers organizations? We have been... for 20 years. We have regularly attended the industry conventions. Have won awards and recognition from our peers. Other sites don’t list these accreditations because they can’t.
Do they fill their staff with ONLY certified Resume Writers like ResumeWriters.com does? Sometimes other sites claim to have Certified Resume Writers on staff. Great. But if you have only listed one... is that just a front-person to provide cover for the overseas sweatshop workers who are actually just cutting and pasting resumes into templates? At ResumeWriters.com, you will EXCLUSIVELY work one-on-one with a certified professional resume writer. No middlemen. No templates. No BS.
Why you can trust ResumeWriters.com
Who is behind ResumeWriters.com? That's one of the funny things about most resume companies... they tend to want to hide behind a certain level of anonymity to suggest "bigness." But I know we're the biggest, oldest and best resume writing company in North America, so we don't have to pretend. Let me tell you who founded ResumeWriters.com, and then I'll tell you the ResumeWriters.com story.
That's me on the right, Brian McCullough. Most people know me either as the author of the best-selling book How The Internet Happened - From Netscape to the iPhone (Amazon author page) or as the host of the daily Techmeme Ride Home podcast (subscribe here). I also host the Internet History Podcast. I was an inaugural TED Resident (my TED Talk is here). I founded two other companies, WhereAreTheJobs.com and WhoToTalkTo.com in the early 2000s. I've written some stuff. Here's my LinkedIn profile if you're interested. But enough about me...
The ResumeWriters.com Story
The bottom line is this. Twenty years ago, I partnered with two other professional resume writers, bought the domain ResumeWriters.com and founded this company. We all had our own local resume services but we pooled our resources and talents into one network and decided to serve more clients than any of us could individually. That is why we chose the name. We were three resume writers. Thus ResumeWriters.com.
Today, we have more than 100 certified professional resume writers on our roster. Our model hasn’t changed in 20 years. All the writers in our network have their own local resume businesses, they merely partner with us to get more clients than they ever could work with individually. And we get to serve more clients because our writers can specialize in more industries than anyone else. Accountant? Teacher? Stock broker? Stay at home mom? Entrepreneur? Seasoned executive? We have someone we can match you with that has experience dealing with your industry or career.
As I said at the top, if you don’t engage our services for your resume writing needs, please consider one of the four other companies we listed above, and PLEASE, please avoid the scammers. Or hire someone local.
Sincerely, Brian McCullough, founder of ResumeWriters.com.