To expect to find it hard to rewrite other people's CVs?

[NooNooHead1981]

Managed to get a bit of paid freelance work rewriting CVs and covering letters etc via a company that offers CV rewriting services etc. The jobs are very poorly paid though (think £11 per LinkedIn profile) and my first job has been to look at someone who is a business analyst and turn her CV into a LinkedIn profile.

While I am an experience copywriter and journalist with 11 years under my belt in publishing writing about boring subjects (think materials handling), AIBU to think the poorly paid writer's jobs I'm being offered are taking the mick a bit? I don't know the first thing about all the acronyms and business jargon that is scattered throughout this client's CV, but don't want to look a twit/ignorant and do a crappy job by not asking what these things mean.

When I did raise a query, I got a reply from the customer services saying I shouldn't worry about the industry specific speak, and that I would get used to it with experience. OTOH how the heck am I supposed to write a coherent LinkedIn profile that makes sense in a timeframe of 24 hours when I'm paid such a meagre amount?

Not wanting to sound lazy or ungrateful but I am tempted to tell them I find it too hard and not do it... I'm in their 'training' mode at the moment so haven't officially been offered work yet...

Plus, her CV was utterly long-winded and poorly written, and being able to take information from there and make it sound good will be another thing altogether. I have some guidelines and examples of how they want LinkedIn profiles to be written, plus some templates as examples, but I am feeling a bit daunted and overwhelmed by the deadline to be honest. God knows why, it's not like I'm being paid a fortune! I just hate doing a bad job and letting people down, so I feel obligated to finish it I suppose..

I'm a translator and sometimes the texts I am given to work on are utter dross. So strictly speaking my job is to reproduce that dross, accurately, in another language. There's always a temptation to improve. But really it's not in the remit.

Could this apply here too? Stop focusing on the fact that you've got crap to work with, and just get on with working with the crap? If you see what I mean. After all, the more you agonise over it, the more you reduce your hourly rate....

So sorry to hear that OP :(

I worked for another company in the past where I did very similar work on a freelance basis. It was absolute shite, but I needed the money.

Is there a 'q' anywhere in the company's name? The company who I worked for had a 'q' in their name, and they were bloody awful - they took advantage of everyone who worked for them.

Hi moi

I used to do similar work and it's part and parcel I'm afraid. I got paid by length of document rather than complexity, just as you appear to be getting a flat rate per CV, so I would sometimes suffer if something was particularly badly written or very specialist. I had to review and edit one particular thesis written by a foreign student with English as a second language that was barely understandable and contained a lot of sector-specific info that I had to research - I barely earned minimum wage for that one in terms of the time it took. Two weeks later I and got paid a really good amount for another thesis because it was twice the length, yet it was so well written to start with that I barely had to touch it. I'd guess you'll have a similar situation where some CVs will only require the odd crossed T and dotted I, and you'll be able to zip through them.