R-E-S-U-M-E-S

• Your resume during recruiting is used for two purposes: first it is obviously the primary decision criteria to get you the interview, but secondly it will get nitpicked during your interviews as a focal point of conversation.   

• There is so much material out there on the web on resumes in terms of formatting and content that will help you get started.  In addition, attached below is the resume template that I used when I was a senior which you can feel free to copy if you’d like.  While not the primary focus of my business, if you need help with your resume whether it’s creating substantive and professional sounding bullets or just wanting someone to look it over, shoot me an email and we’ll see if we can work something out as I am fairly good at this.
  

• Like with cover letters, it’s crucial to make sure that you have a reader friendly resume.  Remember, your reviewers are human and will sift through yours and a hundred other resumes within a span of a few days.  There’s a good chance your resume could be #50 in the stack and your reviewer is feeling anxious and bored.  So try to make a good impression and help your reviewer the best you can.  Reviewers like readable fonts, organized easy-to-follow content, and ample use of white space.  Don’t try to cram every last word or try using some ridiculously sized font to fit everything on one page.  Speaking of which, don’t be the person who submits a two page resume.  It’s just not the type of attention you want to bring to yourself.  It either shows a high level of arrogance.  “Who does this punk college kid think he is thinking that he’s so important and accomplished that he needs a two page resume.”  (have you seen the ‘aleksey vayner’ resume video??!!!) Or it shows that there’s content on your resume that needs trimmed e.g. you don’t need to include your high school job at Wendy’s as an extreme example.  If you’re looking to save a couple lines of spacing, two fields I feel are relatively unnecessary are an objectives statement and a list of relevant coursework.
  

• One of the main insights that I can give you as an insider that may not be so obvious is the importance of your extracurricular activities.  Consulting firms and the working world in general for that matter don’t really expect 22 year old college seniors to have extensive professional experience.  Seriously, for the most part the corporate world views you as an empty shell it hopes to mold no matter what degree you have or school you went to.  Consulting firms are looking for people that will be able to ramp up quickly and easily be trained.  This is why firms extensively look for leadership and signs of initiative outside the classroom.  While yeah it’s important to have at least one semi-impressive sounding internship that looks good on paper, do not underestimate the importance of championing your outside initiatives and conveying yourself as someone passionate and hard working.  This is important for both your resume and your interviews.  Your extra-curricular accomplishments help make you look more well-rounded and your story congruent.  It’s easy to believe you have a strong work ethic when on top of grades and job experience, you can bullet point out significant and meaningful accomplishments done outside of the classroom whether it be in athletics, philanthropy, art, music, performance etc. 
  

• But be genuine and make sure your story is tight.  During your interviews, every word on your resume is fair game.  Because the qualitative resume portion of a consulting interviews may only be 10-15 minutes tops, you may not even utter a sentence about your professional experience during this segment of the interview.  Your interviewer may steer the conversation in a completely different direction than the traditional approach of ‘tell me about your experience at such and such firm.’  One of the first consulting interviews I went through was with a manager who had an autistic child.  Our entire conversation before the case portion was spent talking about my extensive experience working at the YMCA with young children including several autistic kids.  Not one word during this conversation was discussed about any of my other qualifications.  A second interview I vividly remember was with BCG where after talking about my collegiate experience, my interviewer and I spent 10 minutes debating the merits of my thesis of an essay I entered into a national essay contest.  This was one obscure bullet on my resume, yet so many of my interviewers extensively probed into it. It just shows you that you never know who will interview you, and what will perk their interest.  And this is why I offer my final insight for resumes which is to descriptively list four to five interests on the bottom of your resume.  Originally I thought posting interests on a resume was a waste of space.  But you’ll seriously be surprised how high at the top of the list someone’s interest were in terms of what I saw interviewers glancing over first when they initially reviewed a candidate’s resume.  One common interest is all it really takes to instantly establish repoire.  “So Brett, you enjoy creative writing too” or “Caitlin, I’m currently training for a triathlon myself.”  Be descriptive.  Even ‘avid golfer’ sounds better than ‘golfing’ as an interest.  Show some personality: my resume at the bottom would look like this
  

• Interests: Classic Rock Guitar, Wine Enthusiast, Youth Mentoring Programs, Playing and Watching Sports

While these are all things I genuinely enjoy doing, I instantly can have a friendly icebreaking conversation with anyone who enjoys music, sports, philanthropy, and ‘culture.’ 

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