A lot of freelance writing can feel like producing content just for content’s sake. In some cases, that’s exactly why you’re doing it, but it can feel a little unrewarding since it’s not easy to know if you are really helping anyone with your work.
That certainly isn’t the case with résumé writing.
We hope you enjoy this quick guide to making money through writing CVs and résumés doesn’t answer all of your questions, leave us a comment at the bottom of the article.
TL;DR
- Side Hustle – if you’re good at it, résumé writing can make good money with modest time and effort invested
- Rewarding – writing résumés pays well and also gives a sense of achieving something worthwhile
- Easy to find work – there is never a shortage of potential clients, regardless of the amount of competition
- Free – there is no cost to starting as a résumé writer
- High effort – the lowest paying jobs are often those that require the hardest work
- Specialised skills – you will need to be a good writer, designer and communicator to succeed
What is Résumé Writing?
This is one of those ‘it’s exactly what it sounds like situations’ – résumé writing is the act of writing someone’s résumé for them and getting paid to do so. Simple.
If you’ve ever had a period in your life where you’ve been hunting for a job (which almost everyone has), you’ll know exactly how important a good résumé is, as well as how difficult to construct they are. You effectively need to compress your entire life story onto a single side of A4 – at the very most, two sides. And writing in a microscopic font isn’t an option, before you ask. It is the ultimate challenge of concise writing, making absolutely every word count.
The skill of writing a résumé somewhat overlaps with the skill of writing effective marketing copy. Instead of selling a product, you are selling a person, presenting their qualifications and experiences in the best possible way to encourage the employer to invest the time and effort into interviewing them and potentially moving them forward in the ‘transaction’ towards eventually hiring them. This can be especially difficult with freshly graduated students with little professional experience to their name since there’s so little to work with, but it can be even harder with a workplace veteran as you’ll need to compress all their experience into just a few sentences.
It’s not only first-class writing skills that are required, either. There’s the design to consider, because a solid page of text is going to be the most off-putting thing for a recruiter to see. All at once, a résumé has to be information dense, easy to read, clear and unique enough to stand out from a stack of hundreds of almost identical documents. That takes skill.
Résumé writing is not a skill that everyone has, though. Why would they? What benefit is it to a statistician or a coder or an accountant to be able to make the perfect CV? It’s something they’ll only need maybe a dozen times in their life. Between those times, they won’t be practising any of the skills required to make one.
So, like with so many aspects of work and life, the best thing to do when you have a temporary need for skills you don’t possess is to outsource it to someone who has those skills. And, if you do happen to have them, résumé writing can make a fairly rewarding side hustle. That’s ‘rewarding’ not only in the sense of financial remuneration, but in the sense that you can confidently say that your work will be helping someone further their career.
And, it can be very financially rewarding, with some résumé writers reporting income of over $300,000 per year!
How to Start As A Professional Resume Writer
Naturally enough, a certain amount of experience in the field is important if you want to get started as a résumé writer. The more successful ones started out working in corporate recruiting and HR, where they’re constantly exposed to both good and bad CVs. However, plenty of others gained their experience through a process of trial and error, refining their own résumé until it met the necessary standard. Some gained additional experience by helping out friends and family, too.
One highly recommended step to take you from helping out friends to helping paying clients is to get certified by the Professional Association of Résumé Writers and Career Coaches or similar organisations. Again, this is not an absolute essential – you will still be able to find work without it – but it will make potential clients much more likely to trust and hire you than someone without it. You may also be able to charge a bit more for your services.
In terms of where to find work, the options for résumé writers is basically the same as for any kind of writers, with freelancing platforms like Fiverr being a great place to start. You could also try marketing directly to the groups that are most likely to want your service, going to them instead of waiting for them to come to you. This includes new graduates, recently laid-off employees, people looking for a new job and also HR groups. That being the case, universities, careers fairs, recruiting agencies and job centres are all good places to promote yourself.
In terms of actually doing the work, you need as much skill in research as you have in writing and design. You will need to find out everything you can about the person you are writing the CV for in order to most effectively sell them to their prospective new employee. It’s best to know what questions to ask to get the answers you need, but you may have to figure out exactly what those questions are for yourself. With practise and experience, you should be able to refine the process. With regular successes, your reputation might even do some of your promotional work for you.
Things to consider when preparing CVs and Resumes
There are always people looking for work, so résumé writing is a pretty safe bet in terms of finding clients. However, the overwhelming majority of those clients are inevitably going to be those with very few qualifications and limited job experience, especially when you’re starting out. As such people are typically aiming for a relatively low-earning position, they’re not going to be willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a CV – that could be as much as a month’s income! Instead, you can expect to get only about $100 per résumé. Writing a résumé for a high-flying executive could get you thousands of dollars for a single page, but you’ll need a lot of experience (and probably a bit of luck) before you can start landing jobs like that. Given how hard it can be to write a CV for someone with little or no marketable skills, this creates the unfortunate situation where the hardest work pays the least.
The research aspect of the job is one that is a lot tougher than it seems. Working online, contacting clients by email or phone calls, it can be a struggle to get the necessary information out of them, especially if they’ve never tried to write a résumé before. They might not recognise the skills the have developed and should include on their CV as they might be secondary to what their actual job is. Depending on their circumstances, they might also just be reluctant to talk about their work life. If, for example, they were made redundant from their previous job, they might see that period of their life only with simmering bitterness. In short, you need to be more than just a good writer to write effective résumés – you need to be a good communicator.
Finally, it’s important to note that you can write the most amazing résumé in the world, but it could easily be beaten by an applicant who just has more qualifications and experience than your client does. As such, there’s inevitably going to be a chance that your work will receive some criticism. When someone spends $100 on a service, they generally assume that it will result in immediate and miraculous affects. If someone hires you to write their résumé and it doesn’t immediately net them a job, there might be some pushback.
Cost to get started as Resume Writer
There is no cost to getting started as a freelance résumé writer – just time spent practising, gaining experience and marketing yourself.