Hi I am Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of ManagementConsulted.com and we're
back to talk about consulting resumes. In particular today I'm talking about what
you should highlight when you're thinking about constructing a consulting resume.
Now I've highlighted before that one of the key issues with consulting resumes is
that they're very competitive and you shouldn't just throw them together, and you
cannot just put it into the process blindly. The reason is that consulting
firms, once you've applied if they choose not to interview you, make you wait 18
months or more for a reapplication. So you don't have multiple chances. You
really just have one magic chance to get in the door. So my key focus today is
going to be to talking about the 5 things that they're looking for that you
can engineer your story to be more in line with what they're looking for.
I'm going to talk first about two key things that are highlighted in your academic
experience. Now one big misconception that a lot of people have, especially if
you are an experienced hire is that consulting firms aren't interested in
your academic or leadership experience that's outside of your work - it's not
true - they're interested in your academic experience whether it's core to what
you're doing now or whether it happened a long time ago because they want to see
distinction there. Generally a good indicator of success in consulting is
that you've been successful in competitive environments, so the first
thing that they're looking for is success under pressure. And one of the
ways that they look for that primarily is your GPA or the scores that you
receive at the end of the process. Now GPAs are a very finicky subject. I'm sure
we could talk about it over multiple videos, but the key is that when we're
working with a client and we're trying to determine whether or not a GPA should
be included, consulting firms are looking for GPAs generally over 3.5. They're
looking for high major GPAs as well and they're not really correcting those for
the difficulty of the course of study. So one of the focuses here is just
on really helping you make sure that the resume that you have gotten and the
one that you're building for yourself is going to highlight the key strengths -
demonstrating success under pressure. The other way other than a GPA that you can
demonstrate that is through honors, departmental honors or
university-wide honors. Not things like Dean's List which are general but something
that's specific to you, an award that you specifically won. The second thing
that's important to highlight is leadership experience. So outside the
classroom what were you involved in. They're looking for a couple of things here.
First, they're looking to see that you were in leadership and working with
people. They're looking for three directions of working with people - for
people working under you, people working as your peers, and people working as your
supervisor. They want to know that you've had experience working in all of these ways.
The second thing that they are looking for other than working with
people, is they want to understand what you've been managing. So they want to see
that you've been managing budgets, managing people, and managing activities.
They want to see that you've had responsibilities over something. So
therefore, leadership experience isn't just being involved in an activity, it's
actually holding a position of responsibility. These two things - success
under pressure and leadership experience - are usually best demonstrated in your
academic experience, although there are other places that you can also highlight them.
On the right side of the slide we have things that are more demonstrated
usually through your work experience. The first are quant skills. Quant skills are
key to success on the job in consulting, and the two things that they think of
most - first, are financial modeling and second, is market research. Now when we're
going through the two key things, there are a few reasons why this is important.
They want to see that you've done it before so they know that their training
is going to stick when they get you on board. They don't want to know that
you're completely a novice at either one of these areas. We also want to see that
you've been successful on a job where you've had to do these types of things
before, it's a general good indication that you're going to enjoy the
day-to-day work at the consulting firm. So quant skills, specifically financial
modeling and market research, are very important. Finally, on the right-hand side,
the other thing that we have is a demonstrated business interest.
It's important that not only have you worked for businesses but that you've thought
about your activities that are outside the classroom in a business way. So for
example, if you have a highly technical background, the firm isn't just
interested when they're evaluating you and what you've done technically, they're
interested in the insight that you have into
businesses operations. So how did your technical skills make an impact on the
bottom line of the business? The final thing that's really important to understand
here are brand name experiences. And brand name experiences, the core focus is on
an indication of whether or not you're likely to be successful in the
consulting environment. Consultants by nature are risk-averse, so they're looking
for success that you've had before to be a good indicator that you're going to be
successful again. It's not that you can't get valuable experience in an
entrepreneurial role or volunteering with a non-profit, it's just that they
don't have a good way to gauge exactly what you've done. So you're standing at
the beginning of the process where you're thinking about building your
resume, thinking about accumulating experience - these are important things to
think about, and hopefully you'll be able to be really strategic about what the
experience you build to prepare you for consulting. If you're not at the
beginning of the process but you've actually had a bunch of experience and
you're wondering how to work it all into a story, we can help! We offer resume
review services as well as resume edits where we actually go line by line and
word by word through your resume. So you can check us out on
managementconsulted.com where we have lots of resources and more information about our
services related to resumes.