Hi I'm Jenny Rae the Managing Director of Management Consulted, and I'm here
today to talk about the wording of your consulting resume. So, before we talked
about the overall formatting of the paper, then we talked about the structure
or the anatomy of the resume, now I'm going to get down into the nitty-gritty
of wording. Obviously I can't share everything that I know in just a couple
of minutes today. So, I'm just gonna share the high level, and some of the key
insights that we've gained from editing hundreds and hundreds of excellent
resumes every year. The first thing that is important to understand when you're
getting started is that you need to know what level of detail you're going to go
into for each of the entries on your resume. So by now, you've known how to
layout your page, you also know what you're going to put on there, now the
question is, what do you talk about for each one of the entries. And I have a
couple of key guidelines. The first is that you should use no more than five
high-level bullets to talk about the resume. So you can't have a list of 20
things that you've done in one specific entry. In addition, you can use a second
level of bullet, but you cannot do beyond that. So you can have three and four
levels of bullets. Just two total levels. In the second level, you can explain some
of what you've done in the top levels. So for example, if you have multiple
transactions and you want to lay down the difference between your transactions,
you can use the second level of bullets to explain those. So, in each entry 3 to 5
total bullets – 5 at a maximum. Underneath that you can have one level of sub bullet,
and you can have usually two to three under each one of the sub bullet areas.
In total, you don't want any one of your entries to take up more than a
quarter of a page. If it's longer than that, it's going to really bore the
reader. They're going to think there's so many words there and so much contained, I
will read it later – what that really means is that they'll never get to it,
and they'll just go ahead and skip over it. So just make sure that as
you're going through the process, keeping in mind that you want to be brief with
each of the experiences and highlight more experiences as opposed to just a
huge amount of information about one. That brings me to the next point which
is double entries. Sometimes there are those of you
who will have attended a university for multiple degrees, or you'll have stayed at
the same company for a long period of time – whether you received your promotion,
you got a return offer, maybe you moved positions inside the company – and it's
really helpful to group all of those together, because when you're talking
through your resume in the actual interview, or through the networking
process, you're going to generally do that. You're going to talk through the
experience that you had in pretty good detail, but just for that one area, and then you're
going to want to move on to a different area. So, make sure that in that case you
just have one heading, which is the name of the organization, and the location
where you worked. If you have multiple locations you can just put
slashes between them. Then underneath, to start each one of the entries, you'll
have a position that you held, or the degree that you received, as well as the
times that you were there – or in the case of your educational experience, your
graduation date. So it's helpful to understand how many bullets you can put
and also double entries. Now the question comes, what do you say when you actually
get down to the words. And this is something that we dedicate hours and
hours to for a number of our clients – but the method that we recommend here is
called the car method. The car method is the simplest way that we could come up
with to think about breathing down your structure, and it's just three parts.
Context, Action, and Results – which stands for car. So context, a lot of times those
of you may be working for organizations that are very large, you'll assume that
someone knows what the company does as a whole, but we don't have the context of
the team or the division that you're working on, or we don't know the context
of the project that you're working on. So we do need some context about what
you're doing. For those of you that work for smaller organizations, like
entrepreneurial groups, a lot of times we have no idea what the company actually does.
So, your actions are always in context to the other things that are
going on behind the scenes. We want to know what those things are, in order to
kind of explain what it is. So at the beginning you'll always want to include,
you know, "for this type of company," or "for this type of project" or "for this type of
team" – anytime you can include numbers that's going to be helpful.
In addition, the second part is the actions that you took – and in our consulting
resume and cover letter Bible, we have a tremendous list of all the action words
that we recommend, as well as a number that are highly recommended for
consulting in particular. The key focus here is that you want variety. You don't
really want to include the same action words on every line. In fact, within one
core entry you want to try to not include the same action word twice at all.
So it's really important as you're going through the process to make sure
you're using a variety of words. Again the goal is to demonstrate that you have
a variety of interests in a variety of areas of expertise. So that's why you
want to use variety in this area. Action words are important, but they do
not have to start every line. Sometimes having a little bit of context at the
beginning of lines can make it more engaging as you go through the reading
of the entire resume. And then finally, the final thing are results. Now results
are often misconstrued, and a lot of people say I don't have results. I don't
know, for an example, if this project was ever implemented, and then if it was
implemented how successful it was – and if it was successful, if that was ever
measured, then what the measurement was. Don't worry about that, use whatever
metrics you have to convey success in your roles. So if it was projected, the
project that you did was projected to win a certain amount of cost savings for
the business, just include the projection in there. If you for example, were able to
complete the project, and you worked again with your team, or you
received a return offer, that can be a result. Results come in many forms.
Some of the most common ones are outcomes, awards, or projections, like I said before.
So it doesn't necessarily only have to be the quantification of the actual
achievement, it can also be just the way that you measure it. So it's important to
include those three things in the car method – the context, the action, and the
results. One of the critical things that's important to know here is that,
because you're using the car method in your resume, you're actually preparing
yourself for the interview. You're going to use the car method when you start
talking about your stories later in the interview.
We'll make sure to bring that up in future videos. In the meantime, if you've
got questions, we love to work on resumes, and answer hairy resume questions. So
feel free to send them to us through our website, and you can also get access
to a ton of the resources that we have available for resumes directly on the
website at managementconsulted.com