Hi I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted, and I'm back
today to talk about consulting resumes. Specifically today we're talking about
consulting formatting for resumes. Now when I'm talking about resumes, for those
of you that live outside the US, don't feel excluded, I'm talking about
something that is generally pretty universally applicable to consulting
firms, whether you're inside or outside the US. I'm just using the word resume
because it's easier to focus on. The general roles that I'm going to talk
about today will be true whether you're inside or outside the US. So there are
five key things that I'm going to focus on today for the building of your
consulting resume, and specifically the focus is going to be on formatting today.
The first thing that I want to talk about are margins. Now everybody knows
when you're cheating on margins, so the key rule here is do not cheat on
margins. The general minimum size that a margin should be is 0.5 inches.
When we're doing a resume edit, even if you send us something that's skinnier
than that, that's what we're going to bring it to. You can go all the way
up to a one inch margin but it's usually not the best use of space.
We recommend 0.5 inches because we'd rather see more space in between your
entries as opposed to on the outside of the pages. 0.5 inches however around the
border is very important. It doesn't matter if you can cheat a little bit.
It's generally just better to work on the wording to make sure that you don't
hang over with your lines. So margins are the first and most important thing. You
should make sure that you do set your margins to whatever your regions paper
sizes, so if you use a standard 8 by 10, make sure that your margins are
appropriate for that. If you use a standard A form, then make sure that your
margins are appropriate there as well, but 0.5 inches around the border is
going to be important. The second thing that it's important to look at is your
font size. Now there is a narrow range of font sizes that are appropriate - 10 to 11.5.
So you've got 4 choices in there 10, 10.5, 11, and 11.5.
You don't want to go larger - 12 point font says I'm in elementary school
and don't have a lot to talk about. You also don't want to go too much smaller -
9 or 8 says I have no idea what's most
important, I want to put everything on there and make you decide for me - so
somewhere in the middle, the 10 to 11.5 range is good for font size.
The third thing that it's important to look at is spacing. Now there are two
general good rules for spacing - your document should be single spaced and by
single spaced I mean there shouldn't be 1.15, or 1.5, or 2 points
in between each of the lines. It should be single spaced throughout the whole
document, but in addition there should be spaces between entries. So if you have,
for example, two different school experiences there should be a space in
between those. There should also be spaces in between sections - you don't want to
create a word wall on your page where it looks like everything is all together
and it makes it very difficult to discern the differences. So when it comes
to spacing, you want to make sure the document itself is single spaced and
that there is one space in between each one of the entries. That space can be a
full space, the smallest size that it can be is down to a half size space, but just
do make sure that there is space in between there. The next thing that's
important to look at is color. The general rule for consulting resumes is
that color is not allowed, it's not acceptable, and it's not desired.
In general the focus here is just on making your resume by the book. You want to
show them that you're the type of person who isn't going to rely when we come to
a client presentation on dazzles and blings, that your focus is just going to
be on delivering the core message through data-driven metrics and then you
can do that on your resume or CV as well. So no color anywhere on the document - you
need to stand out based on your experience and based on the other
clarity of the formatting. The final thing that's important to look at is the
font style. Different fonts can convey different messages as a part of the
networking process as well as in the resume review. So when you're going
through the process, you want to adhere to a narrow range of fonts. We have a
whole list of acceptable fonts inside our Consulting Resume and Cover Letter Bible,
but just as a couple of examples today you could choose Arial, Arial Narrow,
or Calibri in the Sans-Serif focus or you can choose
Times New Roman, Palatino Linotype, or Garamond in the Seraph focus. Either one
of these can convey something, like I said the sans-serif fonts are a little
bit more playful - they're often for people who are younger. The serif fonts
are a little bit more serious, more academic maybe for somebody who has a
lot more experience under their belt across the board. You can play around
with these and really determine which one works best for your experience, your
personality, and what you want to convey. So across the board there are these five
things that you want to remember to focus on when you're building a
consulting resume. The first is margins, the second font size, third spacing,
fourth color, and fifth font. If you have any questions about how to work with
your individual resume or CV, we'd love to help.
We offer resume editing and review services - we will go either with you in a
quick 30 minute review or we'll go line by line to actually identify
strengths and weaknesses of your document and make them better for you.
If you want to work with us you can just go directly to our website at managementconsulted.com.