MBA your resume: B-Schooled episode 255

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to B-Schooled, a podcast by Stacy Blackman Consulting, bringing you tips, advice, and insight into all aspects of the MBA admissions process and business school experience. And now, here's your host, writer, author, and Harvard MBA, who's been an MBA admissions consultant for over a decade, Erica Olson. Hi, everyone. Today, we'll be talking about resumes and how to make the most of that one precious page you have to somehow be your academic, professional, and extracurricular accomplishments to date, while also still differentiating yourself from the competition as much as possible. So before I get into some very specific advice, I first want to give you my take on how the resume functions in the bigger context of the rest of your MBA materials. I probably don't need to tell you that your resume is one of the most critical pieces. Actually, it's probably the most critical piece of your application. It's going to immediately give the admissions committee a knee-jerk impression of you, and then your recommendation letters or essays and perhaps a few extra details that you can add into the data form will either serve to further help your case or hurt it. But your resume really plays the crucial role of establishing the baseline impression of you. So you really don't want to mess it up. And on that note, I need to break it to you that you probably shouldn't be using just a slightly updated version of the resume that you've used before when applying for a job or interviewing. Most applicants I work with actually need to spend a significant amount of time on a complete resume overhaul for their MBA applications. That's because your typical job resume is-- I'll call it-- I'm just going to call it your job resume-- is likely focused on things that others in your industry or line of work, or maybe even in your own internal company, will understand and care about. They'll want to know if you have certain skills that are very relevant in your field, or if you have experience or certain software programs or analytical tools. But MBA admissions committees simply don't care about a lot of that stuff. They care about what-- if you've grown during the course of your career to date, they care about what kind of stories you'll be able to share with classmates, and those stories of whether or not they'll help your classmates learn something and benefit from your expertise. So what exactly do you have to do to turn your job resume into an MBA resume? First, let's talk about length. I already mentioned one page, but there are a few exceptions to that rule. If you're in your 30s, or if you have several years of military experience, you might be one of the few types of applicants where it could be OK to go over one page. But then again, that's only if the programs you're applying to don't specify a resume length, or otherwise specifically say it's OK for your resume to be two pages. There will, of course, be some other outliers and exceptions to the one-page rule. But in general, even if a program says you can have a two-page resume, you should stick to one page if you're not in your 30s or have extensive military experience or some other kind of outlying situation. There may be some admissions consultants who disagree with me on this, but I feel like one of the things MBA admissions committees are looking for are people who already know how to communicate succinctly, because that's what business leaders and C-level executives in this world have to do. Actually, that's pretty much what any successful person in this world needs to know how to do, get to the point. So some schools actually see how well you can do this by giving you character or word count limits from their essays that seem really restrictive, and then they assess whether or not you can make a compelling case for yourself and just say 1,200 characters, whereas others like Harvard or Booth take the exact opposite route and do not give a word count limit. But I assure you, there's still of the mindset that less is more when it comes to essay length, and the same goes with your resume about keeping it to one page. So I'm going to talk, for the rest of this episode, just proceeding with focusing on what the majority of applicants will submit, which is a one-page resume. So you've got this single page to communicate to the AdCom why you'd be an asset to their program. You should actually treat it as if it's the only thing they're going to read about your candidacy. And from this one page, they should be able to clearly understand what kind of stories you'd be sharing in class from your work experience or what kind of extracurricular experiences in college. And after graduation, you had that might have taught you some lessons that you could pass on to your peers in B school. So that's why if you're in, say, investment banking and you keep your typical job resume in the same format it's usually in that focuses heavily on the details of various deals you were involved with, I think you're doing yourself a disservice and not differentiating yourself enough or the way you need to be. I personally also think that you're wasting space if you keep the traditional representative transactions or highlighted deals or highlighted caseworks and consulting, those types of lines on your resumes. If your bullets are deal-focused or project-focused or case-focused instead of your achievements focused, I would advise you to just completely rewrite them. Same thing goes, like I said, for those in consulting whose resumes might showcase the deals of their cases and their projects more than what they actually contribute to those projects. But no matter what industry you're coming from, I'm just saying, especially if you're coming from banking or consulting, you need to remember that admissions committees want to know about what you contributed, who you interacted with, what results were that you were directly or partially responsible for. And so you can achieve this by reworking your resume so that it functions more as a progressive narrative about your career and outside interests. If you work in a really common pre-MBA position, don't waste precious space listing out your general, very high-level responsibilities that the M comes already going to know. There's usually a field for your responsibilities for each role in the data form anyway. So keep your resume focused on things you've worked on or achieved that are unique to you and that aren't something that literally every other analyst or consultant who ever lived could say on their own resumes. A way to force yourself to kind of do this is start every bullet with an action verb and use ones that convey leadership whenever possible. So words like lead, manage, spearheaded, oversaw, oversee are what I'm talking about. And it's especially important to have words like that for the section describing your current role. Because when I said your resume should show a progressive narrative, that means the ad comes gonna understand that you likely weren't leading work streams or spearheading big initiatives in your first job right out of college. You have to be working up to that, working up to your most impressive achievements with your and your action verbs throughout your resume are gonna reflect that. And so the easiest way to show that kind of growth over time in your career is by breaking out your resume into sections for each role that you've had within each company that you've worked for. And then also have the date range, meaning month and year, clearly delineated for each role so that the adcom can do a quick scan from the bottom up to the top of your resume and know exactly where you were when in chronological order. So don't make the admissions committees try and figure out exactly when you switched roles or got promoted, don't make them fill in any blanks. That's why having sections for each roles with your title on the left and the date range on the right for each of those roles is an easy and quick way for them to just be able to orient themselves about your career so far. A lot of times applicants tell me that they may have technically gotten a promotion or title or grade change but their roles actually weren't that different from each other. So they're unsure about how they'd go about having different sections with different pull points for each. And to that I say that they really do still need to break out those different roles on their resume because promotions are always a differentiator and formal progression as conveyed by a title change or something like that is something you should want that admissions committee to be aware of. So if you're claiming you didn't do a heck of a lot differently when you were a senior consultant versus say a consultant, I would push back on you and really challenge you to find a way to show growth between the two roles and then use action verbs at the outset of every bullet that kind of convey that growth. Now I'm gonna cover a few things that people forget in their resumes. So one thing a lot of times people forget to do is quantify everything wherever possible. My Stacy Batman Consulting colleague Karen and I talked about this in episode six where we gave advice to people about how to strengthen your quantitative profile but really every applicant should try and quantify results of their work as well as use numbers to help the ADCOM understand the scope of what you were involved with. So that might be a deal size or a revenue size of a company that you consulted to. It might be the number of work streams you were managing, the number of third party due diligence types of partners that you were juggling. It might be annual cost savings that your strategic recommendations led to. It might be telling them exactly what percentage you helped speed up a certain process. Also a lot of times people forget to add in if they informally managed somebody or just kind of informally oversaw somebody else's work. And yep, I'm even talking about interns here. So that is still a differentiator even if it's not directly managing somebody or being responsible for their salary or raises. It's still management experience. So you might have a line that says something like informally managed junior associate column colon determine responsibilities, quality check work and provide feedback for annual review or something like trained and mentored three summer interns. So you can get some of that informal management experience in that way. A lot of times people also forget to add in extracurricular involvement that they might have had through their job. This is especially important if you haven't got a lot to show for yourself and kind of more formal, volunteer extracurricular activities outside of work since you graduated from college. But if you've been involved in various community or charity events organized by your employer, that still counts. So I would definitely recommend dedicating a bullet or two to addressing that participation. And then finally, I think that people are so like all business and their resume that they forget their resume is gonna be used for interviews and people are looking for ice breakers. And so that's why I always encourage my clients that I work with to add in like a fun fact or kind of interest in that kind of bottom section or just bottom line, however much space they have. I think it's important to add that in. I don't think I've mentioned this on any episode before, but I had a client that I worked with in 2017 and on the last line of his resume, he put like fun fact, I have been struck by lightning. And so I worked with him like I said in 2017 on six schools and he got interviews to all six programs and every single interviewer asked him about that line. So even if you don't have something as crazy as that to include, it's really easy to just find a way to inject a little personality into the last section. And that can include your interests. One time I had a client right in her interest section that she was on a personal quest to find the best cookie in all of New York. And just like the guy who was struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale to six MBA interviewers, every one of the quote unquote best cookie applicants, interviewers asked her where her favorite cookie place was. So it's just something to kind of break the ice with interviews or show a little personality. One other thing about listing interests along the same lines is I really want to urge you to think long and hard about something like this interest list is going to differentiate you in any way whatsoever. So I'm talking about something like Chicago Bears football, golf, skiing, traveling. The answer is no, that's not going to differentiate you. So remember, this is your chance to set yourself apart. Do not list generic interests. I would seriously rather actually have you list no interest than generic ones. Don't list something like running. Really, no, because if you put something more specific, like ran six marathons, including one in Antarctica, or something like that, then fine. But these really high level interests like traveling, that's what I see all the time. No, no, no, you have to be more specific than that. Give them insight. Something like have visited 300 US national parks, have 119 to go, or something like that. Or list your interests as traveling, and then in parentheses have highlights include visiting the DMZ in South Korea and seeing the Northern Lights in Svalbard. Give them a sense of what you might have in common with or bond with your classmates about. And then one last quick thing about that interest section. I get a lot of questions about what people should name that section. And it really varies on what you're going to include in it. But some ideas are for the heading of that last section. Personal, other interests, activities, extracurricular, and interest, leadership, and interests. You can have two things as a heading. Now I'm going to quickly cover things that you shouldn't put on your resume. You should not put anything from high school on your resume unless you are applying to something like a 2+2 program and you're literally still in college right now. But if you're out of college, do not have anything from high school on your resume, even if you got a crazy high SAT score, even if you got some huge award to be blunt or possibly even harsh, you're trying to compete in the big leagues now. And high school is irrelevant to MBA admissions committees. Another thing you shouldn't waste space on in your resume is really your GRE or GMAT score, because they're already going to have that. You should also avoid acronyms or industry jargon. Or if you have to use an acronym, then write it out first. But try and get rid of those types of things and rephrase your accomplishments so that anybody could understand them. There's a few like M&A or IPO and obviously CEO that are so common, they've kind of entered the vernacular. So those don't need to be explained. But other than ones like those, you need to avoid terminology that's really specific to your industry or company. Another thing I mentioned earlier that bears repeating, if you're in a common pre-MBA role, don't have any bullet points or sub-headlines that list only general, vague, or high-level responsibilities, internships during college. If you're not tight on space, you could maybe include a line or two if it was really something that you think is important to the overall story and maybe career goals that you have. But the longer you've been out of college, the more irrelevant those internships seem. So I think the space would be better spent beefing up what you say about your extracurriculars because those are more differentiating. And then again, remember things that like awards or different languages you speak or specific courses you took in college. Don't always make sense to put on an MBA resume, especially if you're sure on space, because those things are already covered in other sections of the data form. They're already going to have your transcript listing your courses. They're already going to have a section on awards. So why repeat them on your resume and use up space? And then also, it should just be a given that everybody applying to business school is skilled in all of the Microsoft Office products. And they also expect people from banking to know how to use various common industry tools and software. So don't waste space listing out skills like that on your resume. So I've covered general advice, how your one page resume should function, as well as some things you should be sure to include, as well as things that aren't worth the space. Now, as we wrap up, I'm going to hit you with a few less comments regarding your resume layout. So first off, you should lead with the professional experience section and not education since you are no longer in school. Again, if you actually are still in school because you're applying to a 2+2 program, then obviously you would still lead with education because you're still in college. But once you're out of college, professional experience should be the top section. I also-- this is kind of more personal preference, but I personally feel like text should be less left justified and that people should not use block justification, where it kind of makes everything spaced out weird. I think that that's harder to read and kind of messes with spacing. Also, talking about harder to read, remember that admissions committees are going to be reading so much over the course of several weeks. Don't make their eyes hurt anymore by using teeny weeny font. Please use at least 10 point font. And then when you have this one page to use, you can play with spacing and margins a little bit. I don't think there's any need for a huge header and footer. Like might be the default in Word or other programs. I think that as long as you have at least a five inch margin on every side, then that's enough. But sometimes it's just a matter of playing with spacing in between sections to make everything needly fit on one page instead of going maybe like two lines over. And then finally, I just wanted to say, I'm personally not a fan of statements at the top of resumes. This goes back to maybe like the difference between a job resume and an MBA resume. And it also goes back to my show, Don't Tell Advice, from last week's episode about essay mistakes. If you have a personal statement at the top of your resume, I feel like that's telling the AdCom stuff that you think sets you apart. Instead, again, do all of the things that I've been talking about in this episode where you're giving them a narrative and using action verbs about leadership and show them what your accomplishments are. Show them what your qualities are through your achievements. Don't say, you know, I am good at this and I am a leader because whatever at a personal statement at the top, I just think that that is another kind of waste of space in most instances. So now you should be fully prepared to MBA your resume and wow the AdCom. I'm going to leave you with a totally cheesy inspirational quote related to everything we've been talking about. In fact, this is so cheesy. It was actually used as a slogan on an '80s dandruff shampoo commercial, but I don't care because it's still totally relevant when it comes to what we've been talking about about your MBA resume. And that quote is, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of "Be Schooled" from Stacy Blackman Consulting. If there's ever something you'd like us to cover, please email us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. We'd also encourage you to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. And finally, if you're planning to apply to business school at some point, make sure you've signed up for our weekly Stacy Blackman Consulting newsletter and download our free personal branding guide. Both can be found on stacyblackman.com under the hot topics menu. Thanks and until next time, be well. (upbeat music)