Consulting resumes. We do thousands of edits for people that are interested in
applying to consulting and other super competitive fields, every year. And I'm
bringing you here some of our top tips that we'd recommend for you when you're
thinking about perfecting your consulting resume. Either before you work
with someone like us, or if you're just going it alone. I'm Jenny Rae, the
Managing Director of Management Consulted, and our focus today is on
resume tips. First of all I'm going to talk about formatting, because when we
get a resume the first thing that we do is make sure that it looks and "smells"
great. And when we're putting the format together there are a few things that you
need to make sure you remember. First of all, you need to make sure that you have
alignment and spacing that is equal. You would be shocked at how many resumes we
get, where they have different size fonts throughout the document, different levels
of spacing, and often those are from standard settings in Microsoft Word-
because we use it all the time we know what to look for. But you have to make
sure that your document, in entirety, is one single font size. It either needs to
be 10, 10.5, or 11 point font. And at the largest 11.5,
but we are rarely getting those these days. People are generally
over-involved rather than under. And overall, the main focus is on making sure
that you have that consistency throughout. The only exception is that
your name should be in bold letters at the top of the document in size 18 or
size 20 point font. Otherwise everything else is going to be exactly
the same amount. In addition you need to use tabs to make sure that you have
alignment on both the left and the right margin, and if you don't know how to do
that you can watch some of our videos on how to go through setting up your
information inside the resume. In addition you need to make sure that
your contact information is up-to-date. And interestingly, even though it's not
important that people send you mail, they are still interested in seeing the
location in which you're located. More than they're interested in seeing your
LinkedIn profile. Very few people will take your LinkedIn profile from your
resume, they're gonna take it maybe from an email but not from the resume. So just
put a classic explanation of where you live, what your email address is, and what
your phone number is, in case somebody wants
to contact you off of that. In addition when you're doing a first and a final
review, you have to make 100% sure that there are no typos in the document. No
misspellings, no miss punctuations, everything has to be 100% clean, because
consulting firms will teach you just about everything you need to know in
life, but they won't teach you how to dress or how to write. So you've got to
make sure that you put all of those things together. Then after you build the
format of the resume we go after structure. And we have a couple of key
rules for structure. Number one, you can have absolutely no information from
prior to college on your resume. You do need to start with your undergrad degree,
regardless of where you have come in your career. You might emphasize it just
a little bit, but your undergrad degree is super important. And then when you're
building your structure we recommend following the "rule of three", which is
that in each section, you have no more than three entries. And there are three
sections inside the document. There's the education section, the leadership section,
and the work experience section. There's a final section that's kind of a catch-all
section, that just has a few bullet points in it. And underneath each one of
the entries in each one of the sections, for example, inside your work experience
section where you have up to three entries, you'll have three bullet points
for each one of those. If you follow this rule you're gonna have a lot of balance,
and a lot of variety on your resume, and that's interesting for people to
engage with. And clearly that's a rule but not the ultimate standard. So there's
gonna be a little bit of variations, some people are gonna have four bullet points under something,
and some people are only gonna have two categories in a specific section,
but if that is what you know as your target that's going to help you in
the structure. The final piece is to make sure that your wording and the actual
content of your resume is strong. And when we do the formatting and the
structuring, that part takes us let's say five to 10 minutes for most people. But
the wording is where we invest most of our time. This is where we make sure that
somebody understands really clearly the power of what you've done. Not what
you've done, but the power of what you've done, and there's a huge distinction
between those. The way to make sure that you do that is
to ensure that in every entry there's context for what you're explaining and
the context is numerical. So you talk about the size of the company that you
worked for. The size of the organizations that you worked with. The number of
people on a team, the number of months of an actual engagement. And so in the first
half of the first line of every entry, you make sure that there is a number.
In addition, you need to highlight what the actions were the you took. This is where
people feel most comfortable. They explain the steps they took to
accomplish something. And then the final piece is that you need to make sure that
you quantify the results. Now there's a little confusion that we get for this.
Sometimes people will say, I don't know the results, or I don't have results from
something. And our answer is you always know or have results. Sometimes you just
have to define them a little bit differently. So for example, if you did a
student consulting project, your results might not be what they did with your
information, but rather what you recommended. If you identified the
change that you needed to make inside an organization, it could be that action
plan that you set out for that. Sometimes you just have to back up the bus a
little bit and make sure that you have information that will conclude the
thought, by stating a result. Even if it's not something that you saw fully to
completion, in the way that you would identify it in other settings. And then
finally in the wording piece, you have to make sure that there is an interests
line on your resume. That interest line is the final piece of every resume and
it needs to be interesting, vibrant! Not just you're interested in running and
cooking, but you're interested in running half marathons in seaside locations. Or
you're interested in cooking asian-fusion
along with southern American food. Something that really draws to life the
kind of person that you are, some variety that you have in your background, and
will be great conversation starters in your interviews. There's a lot more that
we can say and do when it comes to consulting resumes. And we have a really
popular editing service where we'd love to help you perfect your resume for
consulting and other competitive jobs. If you have other questions about resumes
please reach out to us. We're at www.managementconsulted.com, or on social.