Hi I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted, and I'm here today
to talk about a critical question for the consulting fit interview, probably
the most important one, it's "walk me through your resume." And I'm going to
give a couple of different examples of different versions of walk me through
your resume, some ways to prepare, and also just some key things to think about
as you're going through the process. So let's get started. The first thing that's
important to understand is that when somebody asks you to walk me through
your resume, generally it means that they haven't read your resume. So you have to
start with the assumption that you are beginning the process right from the
very beginning. And there are a couple of different versions of the questions. You
need to know how to recognize them. The first version is when somebody says just
that: walk me through your resume. That should be pretty straightforward, and
it's going to be a pretty clear way for you to actually just go through the
structure that I'm talking about here. The second one is when they say: tell me
a little bit about yourself. For the most part they're looking for a slightly less
formal version of walk me through your resume - they don't want you to refer to
your resume in such a formal way like you wouldn't walk me through your resume,
but they do want you to tell a story and use a similar structure. So you can use a
lot of the same words, but you're not going to use the same process. And then
finally, sometimes firms will mix it up a little bit and they'll say: tell me three
things about your backgrounds that are critical for me to know, or tell me three
things that aren't on your resume that are important for me to know, and that
will be the opening question of the interview. So it's really helpful to
understand just mentally that you might get a chance to kind of warm up into the
interview as you're walking through your resume, but you may not. So there are some
things that you'll just want to make sure that you remember and understand
about your structure and your experience that you prepare for some of those
alternatives. In addition, it's really important as you're going through the
walk me through your resume process, that you over invest in getting this part
absolutely nailed down. You should not be nervous, you should not make any mistakes,
you should not talk too long, you should not talk too short. You should absolutely
have this down so that you could do it in your sleep. And in order to do that,
you have a couple of things that you can do. The first is write it out. You have
your resume, it's already the bullet point version.
Don't use that. Actually write out walk me through your resume as an essay -
it should be about 500 words. It's going to be something similar to what you would
put in a cover letter, and it's going to be a great story that highlights
everything from your personal background all the way through to your most
important experiences, however it's only going to take two minutes. Writing it out
is going to help you edit what's the most important, what can be left out.
In addition to writing it out, it's important that you prepare and practice
it 5 to 10 times. So 5 to 10 times is what it's likely to take you before you
begin to get comfortable, not where you're an expert, but to the place where
you actually nail down exactly what you want to say after that. You probably
still have another 10 times to go through the practice process. And then
finally it's important to time yourself. It's important because throughout the
process of preparing for the interview, you need to become aware of times
nobody's going to look at their watch - they're not going to tell you when your
time is up. They will kind of hold this internal timer and talking for
longer than 2 minutes in this case is going to be too long. So what do you do when
you're thinking about walking through your resume? How do you pick what to talk about?
How do you build your story? Well I can spend an entire hour with
people going through this all-important question, and today I'm just going to
give you a couple of minutes on exactly what I like to do. The first thing that's
important to do is introduce your story to them. Remember that's why you're
giving the walk me through your resume. So it needs to be a story - it doesn't
need to be the overall data points of everything about your history. You don't
want to walk through everything. You want to tell it as a story. The second thing,
and potentially just as important or even more important, is that the walk
me through your resume question establishes your first impression. It's
your first opportunity to say something in the interview, and you want to come
across as confident and collected and a great storyteller. So what should you
actually talk about? It's important to highlight your education, 2 key work
experiences, and 1 leadership experience. Like I said before, you don't
want to go through every single thing on your resume - you'll never have time - so
you need to give some sweeping assumptions. I've had an 8-year career
in X and X industries. Overall in the last two
roles that I've held, I did this and this. So you kind of give some sweeping
generalizations and then you're able to focus on a couple of the specifics.
The reason that you generally start with your education is that oftentimes it
comes first, but also it's generally the level set the firm knows that you come
from a good school, but they just want to understand a little bit of the
motivation about why you went there. In addition, it's important to make sure
that you include both what you did as well as why. So you don't just want to
say, I worked here, I worked here, I worked here, but give it a little bit of
context of, I moved on to this role because of X. You never ever want to
refer something negative here, but the why, what you were looking for next, how you
wanted to expand yourself or grow in your career is really critical and
important. The next thing that's really important to understand is that you walk
through this in chronological order. You're not actually walking through your
resume from top to bottom, so make sure that you let them know that in the
beginning there's a little bit of personal context to your educational
experience, and then let them know where you are on the resume, if they actually
have it in front of them, because as you're talking through it the way that
it will make the most sense is to go in chronological order. It's also important
to understand that this should be under 2.5 minutes as an absolute
rule and generally under 2 minutes if you're really going to wow them. You want
to give them the sense that there's a lot to cover, and you're going to cover
it in a short amount of time. However the final thing that's on here is don't rush.
You really don't want to give them the sense that you're trying to tell them
everything all at once, you're not nervous, you're going to have a long and
fruitful conversation in your interview together, so you want to give them the
context that they need to ask good questions, and also to let them know that
you have a lot that you're going to be ready to talk about. So make sure that
you highlight all of these things as you're going through the process of
building your walk me through your resume story. If you have questions on
exactly how to do this, we've got a great resource, The Consulting Interview Bible.
We also have tons of information on our website at managementconsulted.com