I just blogged about this exact subject last week.
https://cheetarah1980.blogspot.com/2012/01/consultation.htmlI voted yes I did hire a consultant. It's technically true but a bit misleading. I did not use a consultant to craft my story, update my resume, choose schools, etc. I did all of that with the help of friends and tons of introspection. I did hire Essay Snark to do a one-time critique on my Kellogg career goals essay. I was getting mixed reviews from people who read it. Some loved it, others liked it but were misunderstanding my message, and there were a couple who thought it wasn't working. While it would have been easy to only accept the positive feedback and brush off the criticism I didn't feel comfortable doing that. Essay Snark provided me with a marked up copy of my draft which pointed out all of the areas that he/she found problematic as well as the sections that worked well. ES also included 3 pages of detailed feedback that discussed what I could do to improve the essay. Honestly, I can't say that I followed the advice to a T (I didn't agree with all of it). However, the essay critique made it glaringly obvious to me that I was being unclear in my message. When someone reads your essay and interprets something that you're not even trying to say and totally misses what you are trying to convey, then there's a problem. Because of Essay Snark I fixed that problem and now everyone who reads my essay knows EXACTLY what I want to do and WHY. This was my first set of essays and I incorporated what I learned into every subsequent set. Considering that I paid a very discounted price for 1 essay, I can say that I got more than my money's worth.