Hi I'm Jenny Rae the Managing Director of Management Consulted and I'm here today
to talk about how consulting firms conduct the resume review in a team.
The team resume review is an incredibly important part of the recruiting process
because consultants themselves get involved – it's not just HR, and it's not a
computer review. And many of the consulting firms fill the majority of
their positions after conducting team reviews. So I'm gonna talk a little bit
about the process as I'm familiar with it, both from the work that I do at
management consultant, as well as my experience in resume reviews. A couple of
key things that are important to know. First, there are two parts of the review.
The first is the pre reviews, this happens before you actually get into the
room with the entire team, and then the second is the group meeting or team
review. So I'm gonna talk about both of those. In the pre review we would receive
all the information that was submitted from an applicant – we would receive a
resume, a cover letter, as well as any additional information like leadership
essays, or other information from their application. We would receive all of that
and it would be compiled into a booklet that was bound that we could read.
Usually over a weekend, or in very nice circumstances we would have up to a week
to review these. There would be about 500 resumes that would be considered in a
standard review. So that's the number that I'm gonna use as my parameter today.
In the pre review process I would need to go through every single one of the
resumes and give them a numerical score – usually the score would be on a one to
four, or one to five point scale. And that score would indicate your desire to see
that person interviewed. So for example, a four would be high desire, and a zero would
be no desire. And and so we would go through the process of ranking each one
of them, and some people we knew in advance what they were going to be
looking for, some people we had our eyes out for as a part of the networking
process, and other people we were just meeting cold through their resumes. So we
would have to go through that process. It would take many hours to go through the
ranking process, but that pre work was really essential to what then we would
do in the team. When we arrived together in the actual team environment, then
there would be a HR coordinator who would usually manage the entire
process. The team review meetings usually happened on a Friday afternoon when most
people were in the office, and we would order lunch in. And who would plan to be
there for as long as it took, sometimes the resume review process would take up
to four, or even eight hours. So an extensive period of time. The focus was
on really breaking down the process into three key areas. The first were the must
interviews, and these were covered in the first five to ten minutes, a list of the
people that were guaranteed an interview were put up on the screen and any
discussion was around a reason why we shouldn't interview them. Usually there
wasn't a reason. The way to get onto that list were if people were very very high
ranking and the pre resume review process, if they were referred by
somebody very senior in the firm like a partner. So for example, if you know
somebody had a personal relationship their families knew each other, or the
client relationship that the partner really valued, then oftentimes they would
refer somebody for an interview. Or it would be somebody who had previously
interviewed and done well, they may be for example gotten into the final round,
but had not received an offer – and the firm wanted to give them some more time
to practice their interviewing skills before they came back. The second part of
the process was getting rid of about 50% of the lower ranking scores. These were
generally people who did not perform well in the pretty resume review
across the board. So they had consistently low scores, or people who had really been
cataloged throughout the networking process as somebody who did not perform
well in a one-on-one environment. So someone who was really pushy, or somebody
who just people did not enjoy talking about, maybe an overshare, or somebody who
was incredibly long-winded, or not able to articulate themselves very well. That
was considered kind of their shot at the interview, and so they would be excluded
from the process. Generally we would spend about 20 minutes reviewing the
names of about 50%, so in this case 250 people for rejection from the pile so we
weren't going to discuss them anymore. We didn't go through each one of them
and discuss them, we just said, is there anyone from this trial that he wa nted to rescue.
if somebody was rescued they were placed in the third and final pile.
And this was middle pile on the slide, the discuss pile.
So for example we would have out of the 500 original people, about 230 of
them would be discussed. And in the discussion process we would go through
all of their application materials. So we would start with the resume, if a
decision can be made based on the resume, we would go into the cover letter and
some of the additional supporting materials. Generally people who are
successful at receiving, from that 230 the final 40 slots, for people who
generally ranked pretty well across the board, but maybe were just inconsistent
on one or two things– and those that had very very strong networking approaches
or networking skills. Usually somebody would advocate for them in the process.
So over the course of the remaining part of the afternoon, that could take one
hour, it could take four to seven hours to complete the total process. So like I
said, just to recap there was a pre resume review process, and a team review
that we would go through in order to fill the interview slots at Bain.
And the core focus was generally on filling the first 20 slots in the first five to
ten minutes, removing the bottom 50% of the applicants very quickly, and then
spending the remainder of the time to discuss the process. It's critical that
you understand that your resume has to do the job for you when you're in the
room. And if you don't know what that looks like, we would love to help.
We offer resume review services, as well as resume edit services, where we
actually build line by line and word by word through your resume. So if you have
questions about this, or any of our other services, please feel free to contact us
at our website managementconsulted.com