I’ve been thinking about price since much of the economy has gone belly-up. It struck me that paying $150-$300 for a resume that works in highly competitive times, is good value.

A cheap resume writing service can damage your career prospects.

What one considers “cheap” depends on perspective. For an executive on $200K, a $1000 investment in a professionally written resume might seem reasonable.

However, if you’re a production manager earning $75,000 per year, $1,000 would seem steep.

Republic Resumes charges at the lower end because the majority of our clients are in trades, administrators or mid-level managers. The fees range from $150-$500.

Some people want our services for $100. That’s not going to work out.

You get what you pay for. There are only so many improvements you can make to a resume on a low budget. For example:

• Matching a resume to the job description.
• Injecting keywords from the job description.
• Adding standardised achievements and responsibilities.
• Updating layout and improving the grammar.

It’s possible to receive a relatively generic product geared toward a particular direction. These resumes are better than a poorly formatted list of roles. But it won’t produce great results.

There are two factors will help your resume grab the attention of recruiters and hiring managers:

Its ability to communicate a Unique Selling Proposition and the creation of a compelling narrative. They take work to find and they don’t come cheap.

Cheap resume writers don’t have the margins to hire high-quality talent. They also don’t have the experience to make commercially sound decisions about which aspects of your career need to be emphasised.

A cheap resume casts you as a lower-level candidate because it demonstrates the ways you were of value to past employers, rather than detailing your value to future employers.