Is using professional resume writing services worth the money for a new grad?

[Frederic]

I'm graduating in May (AAHHH ), and I've been applying to jobs like crazy for the past month. I've sent out maybe 30 applications and I've gotten exactly zero callbacks. Not even a rejection email. Just... silence. It's really starting to mess with my head.

I thought my resume was pretty good. I had the career center at school look at it, and they helped me format it. But my roommate, who has way less experience than me, just got a great internship, and she swears it's because she used one of those professional resume writing services online. She said they completely rewrote her bullet points to sound more impressive.

I'm a first-gen student, so I don't have family members in "professional" jobs who can help me. I'm seriously considering paying for a service, but I'm also broke from tuition.

Has anyone here actually used professional resume writing services? Is it worth the money for a new grad with not a ton of experience? Or is it a scam? I don't want to waste $200, but I also don't want to keep wasting my time with applications that go nowhere. Help!

 

[Buddy]

I used a professional service and have mixed feelings. The resume they wrote looked AMAZING—beautiful formatting, powerful language, all that. But during interviews, I kept getting asked about things on my resume that I couldn't fully explain because they'd exaggerated or reframed things in ways that weren't quite accurate.

Like, I'd done a small research assistant task for a professor once, and they turned it into "Co-authored groundbreaking research in cognitive psychology" which was... technically not a lie but also not really true. When interviewers asked about it, I stumbled.

So my advice: if you use a service, make sure you're intimately familiar with everything they write and that it genuinely reflects your experience. You need to be able to DEFEND that resume in an interview. A fancy resume won't help if you can't back it up.