Before I say anything more, let me confess right up front that I am a certified professional resume writer (CPRW), and that I have experience resumes for professionals of all levels. So, yes, I certainly have a vested interest in seeing people purchase resume services. But listen, if I thought that doing it yourself was a good idea, I wouldn't be in this business. Period. Why try to sell a service that people can easily do themselves?

When it comes to the resume, there are two extremes that you want to avoid. The one that has you spending all kinds of time and money to learn how to do it yourself. And the one that has you spending top dollar.

Before hiring a professionally written resume service, you need to know what to expect from a resume service (setting the proper expectations), how much you should spend, and what the latest trends are in resume writing. Without a doubt, there are some poor writers out there, and you can waste valuable resources if you don't know what to look for.

But none of that negates the need for hiring a resume writer.

The main reason that writing your own resume is a bad idea is that no matter how great you are at writing and page layout, you need to be really good at marketing, knowing your audience, and most of all, presenting yourself objectively. That is a tough thing to do when you are talking about you, and it is a really tough thing for your spouse or close friend to do. They know you too well, and they probably don't know your audience at all.

This may come as a shock, but writing a resume is less about the candidate and more about the candidate's target market. All writing is about communicating to an audience. If you don't know how to appeal to that audience, then it doesn't matter how great the product is!

And sometimes we think we know our audience because we've been in that industry or field for a while, but the truth is we probably only know that field or industry from a certain point of view (and it may not always be the most up-to-date; let's face it, we don't all working for cutting-edge organizations).

A certified resume writer does this for a living. You don't. Your friend doesn't. Yes, you could buy a book or follow a template, but now you've reduced the resume-writing process to nothing more than filling in blanks on a page. And you've probably spent hours trying to create a document that basically looks like everyone else's or something you created in Microsoft Word.

Although I definitely agree that a resume is not all there is to conducting an effective job search, you should at least know that you have invested in a top-quality document that has a strategy to how it presents you.