How do You Trust a Career Advisor?
By Soozy G. Miller, CPRW, CDCC, CDP
Trusting someone to help you land a job is a difficult subject.
Unless you’ve gotten a specific recommendation based on someone else’s success, it’s a tough choice of who would provide the best results for you, or if you even need that help.
There are so many other legit places where you could put your money.
That big house project you’ve been putting off
A vacation
Supporting your kids
Stock market investments
There are also a lot of bad actors in various forms on social media:
Ghost jobs
Recruiter scams
Self-proclaimed advisors contradicting each other
Social media influencers using scare tactics and shouting misconceptions
Resume writers with zero experience
You’re understandably wary to trust a stranger with your career.
I once trusted a “stranger” marketing company. I paid them a lot of money to do marketing for me and I got burned with no results. Their website was filled with both written and video testimonials, and a key player at the company was a colleague of mine. They promised me the world, but only sent me 3 prospects in about 3 months, none of whom wanted to talk to me.
I learned that I have to own my own strategy by doing research and asking better questions to see if they will really address my needs.
That’s what I recommend you do: Ask a lot of questions. Do more research.
I have seen a lot of postings lately on social media from people asking for resume writer recommendations. But, again, how would the person even trust the writer/coach once they’ve talked?
The range of prices for services is so wide ($25.00 to $30K) that it doesn’t help you decide. Sometimes my clients come to me after having spent thousands on a service, or just a resume, and they got nowhere fast. I look at their “updated” resume and I know why. There are always a variety of issues.
Has any of this happened to you? Maybe you haven’t started to look for help with your career because you have no idea where to look. There is no easy answer here because trust is difficult to feel when you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re getting conflicting advice.
Sometimes I get clients by word of mouth. But sometimes I get clients randomly; they are so stressed out from the job search, and feeling so desperate, that they will send me money and then plead, PLEASE HELP even though they have never talked to me before. Maybe they’ve seen this column or read my books? Anyway, everyone lands within an average 2 months.
Sometimes people come to me and actually start the conversation with, “I don’t need the help now!” and then weeks, or months, or even years later, when they are proverbially bleeding out in their career, they come back and admit, “I should have come to you sooner, I’ve wasted so much money elsewhere!”
I get it.
Spending money for help sometimes feels, well, lame. With all the tools and options out there to help yourself with the job search for less money, even no money, paying for someone else to do what you think you should be able to do yourself feels … redundant? Unnecessary? Wasteful?
Or you could be like a few of my clients who decided to trust me, and stretched their finances to afford my services because they wanted to make sure that they didn’t make any mistakes, miss any opportunities, or waste any time from the very beginning. And they didn’t.
Like I said, everyone who listens to me lands within an average 2 months. I’ve documented it.
So, how long do you want to wait to get help, and how much pain to do you want to feel? How much time, energy, and money do you want to waste?
My services start as low as a $25 personal resume review that helps you to identify strategies that work and don’t, updates you about your marketplace, and gives you what you need to know about hiring in general.
Maybe this isn’t such a difficult subject after all.
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Better job. More pay. More control.
For a resume review, please contact us at Control Your Career!