S23E11: 400 Bain Resumes Reviewed – 3 Mistakes She Saw Every Time

The biggest mistake that I see is that candidates describe the responsibilities instead of their actual measurable impact. And when that happens, that can make it really hard for me to actually know what you've actually done. And that can be kind of frustrating to me as I'm reviewing them because I'm like, okay, I know that they, you know, led stakeholder engagements, but I don't know with whom or how many or what the impact actually was. Miley Dyer reviewed over 400 resumes as a bane manager. If he was on the recruiting team, he decided who got interviews. Today on strategy simplified, Miley breaks down the three mistakes that she saw over and over again in structure, content, and formatting and exactly how to fix them. If you're applying to consulting in the next six months, this one's for you. If you want hands on help building a resume that actually gets you interviews, Black Belt is the place to start linking the show notes to join today. Let's get into it. Hi everyone. Glad you could make this session. It's a good one. If you're applying to consulting firms, I am the VP of Consumer Experience here at Management Consulted and I advise all of our Black Belt members who are aspiring consultants. So, okay, the big thing about resumes is that this is not just a job description and candidates are often feeling really excited about sharing everything about themselves, right? To show this is why I will be a value add to your firm. But the problem is this is often done the wrong way and we don't know it. We write exactly what we did instead of including the impact we made. We focus on skills that we think make us look good but may not connect to the job and the firm that we're seeking. And the other piece is we sit and wait and just hope. Hope that the firm will call us back. So, all of these things we need to take into consideration when we're putting together a resume. Today, we're going to unveil some of those secrets with Miley. But remember that you need to stand out from the beginning because firms will discard. 50% of resumes right off the bat just because you're not fitting the job description and you're not showing impact. All right, so as mentioned, I'm Miley Dyer. I'm a Management Consultant Coach. I had been with Management Consulted for about two and a half years and that's I really help candidates across the whole recruiting process obviously from which firm should I even be looking at to how does one network and then it's the application process. And so that's where the resume really comes in before we get to case interview prep or behavioral interview prep. I actually started out in Management Consulting out of my MBA program. I was at the University of Chicago at Booth and I started off as a summer associate at the Beanyork office and then I returned full-time after graduating and as J.F.F. mentioned, I was a manager there most recently. I have a lot of resume review experience. I have probably reviewed I have something like 100, maybe 500 resumes. I was a career coach over at Booth as a second year student so I actually edited a lot of resumes for my peers before going to Beane where actually was very involved with the recruiting team. And so that obviously included looking at resumes and ultimately deciding who we should interview. And then following that at Management Consulted, I was on the resume editing team for a year and a half so that's both resumes and cover letters. So I have a lot of experience and a lot of insights to share with you, but that's a little bit about me. All right, so let's get into the actual thing that we want to talk about in terms of what Beane and other firms are looking for. And that primarily comes down to what we call three mistakes. We really see these over and over again. They involve the structure of the resume, the content, and then the actual formatting of it to make it look nice and neat. So the first mistake we see is that there's a week resume structure and that this actually causes reviewers to miss your strongest qualifications. I'm so not sure how many of you have actually started any interview prep yet, but you will learn soon enough that structure and frameworks are super important. Consultants really gloves structure. We like things in neat little boxes, clearly labeled easy to follow. Basically, I want to see what like I want to be told when about to see before I get into the mid-degree details. So tell me what the structure sections are, what I'm looking at before I get into the specific bullet points. So make sure that it's it's very clear, you know, for most people that means you're going to have a heading and then for sections that follow the heading is pretty, you know, straightforward. It's name and contact info. You can put your first name last name, or first name, middle name last name up to you. Contact info is very simple. Email address, phone number, city and state or city and country. There is no need for linked in links. No one clicks on them. It can cause issues to just leave those off. But the four sections here, education, experience, leadership and personal are really the only things you need to have. I know some academics have a lot of publications and presentations, but typically that can fall under the personal section or education section depending on the level of experience you have with those. Now the order, as Katie mentioned, does matter if you are a current student or if you are a student who recently graduated and is still currently looking for a job. We do recommend that you put that education section up at the top underneath the heading. And for those, as Katie mentioned, who are working professionals, your experience section will come up first, likely follow with leadership if you have anything there and then education before your personal at the end. There are some people who have like a section between their heading and their first section where they put, you know, a couple of sentences summarizing who they are. We only recommend that you do this if you are somebody who has like 12 plus years of experience and you have had a lot of different experiences that need to kind of thread together. So say you've worked at a lot of different firms across many industries or especially if you're someone who's worked across a number of different functional areas like marketing and operations, then finances or financial roles. Then you're going to want to probably put something in there, two lines max that kind of threads the needle between those to make it clear like what you're actually pursuing. The reason why we only suggest that you include that with a lot of experience is because otherwise those two sentences can kind of come across as some sort of like a little bit of an insecurity. So we want to make sure that you're only including it if it's really necessary. Now in terms of the sections, we do want to think about how much you are allocating to each section. We very strongly recommend a one page resume, which I know is tough for some people, but I will say there are a number of times when I've gotten two or three page resumes, which I've kind of side and I'm like, oh no, because often times that means that you're putting a ton of fluff in there, which is not really great for me because I feel like I'm reading so much more than I need to, but be it's telling me that you don't know how to prioritize your experience and include things that are actually relevant. So make sure that there aren't things that are duplicative or things that are really not relevant to the job. You'll want to exclude those and focus on a single one page resume that really showcases the best that you have to offer. Again, some extreme situations in which you might have two or three pages that is really if you are working professional with maybe decades of experience, even then I would stop it at two pages. But be thoughtful about how much real estate you allocate to each page or sorry to each section. Education about 25% experience about 40%, leadership 20%, personal 15%. And personal is really those things like languages, maybe your technical skills and then interests. The reason why we want to be thoughtful about this is that we don't want any one section to really just dominate the page because it just looks ridiculous, honestly, but it also doesn't allow you to showcase all the different sections. So for somebody with a lot of degrees, you might have a slightly larger education section, that's fine. But ultimately, the experience section is going to be the most heavily weighted, just given that that's the one that firms are looking at the most. So having said all this, you know, we know AI is now something that actually is pretty useful day to day. It can help you write bullets, but structure is something where it does actually have a harder time with helping candidates. And so we want to make sure that you are being thoughtful about how to structure this because it won't be able to actually help you figure out how much you should be allocating to each section, for example. Oh, do this step first before you get on to writing your bullets. We'll be right back after this quick break. If you're trying to break into consulting this year, listen up. Management consulted just dropped a completely redesigned platform and it's built to make your prep way easier. No more guessing what to do next. You get step-by-step learning pathways that take you from zero to full-case interviews fast. Already have access through your school or a course? Log in. Your updated materials are ready. And if you're just getting started, you now get access to a brand new free case prep course to kick things off. Plus, there's a mobile app so you can keep your prep going anywhere on your commute between classes whenever you've got a few minutes. Bottom line, if you're serious about breaking into consulting, this is how you stay consistent and actually improve. Links to create a free account and download your app are in the show notes. Hey, strategy simplified. My name is Katie. I am the Blackfold Advisor for all of our cohort members. We have surveyed over 250 of our Blackbelt members who landed offers at firms like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture, Deloitte. The list goes on. And we asked them one question. How many cases did you do before you went to that interview and landed the offer? The answer? An average of 22. So what does that mean for you? You don't need to do hundreds of cases, but you do need a structured approach. And that is what our Blackbelt program offers. We provide one-on-one coaching with a structured plan tailored to your goals, your timeline, and your gaps. So if you are serious about consulting, click the link to learn more and join Blackbelt today. Okay, so we have a structure. The next mistake that we often see has to do with content. And this is something, you know, a lot of people have different ideas for how they should structure their bullets. The biggest mistake that I see is that candidates describe their responsibilities instead of their actual measurable impact. And that can be kind of frustrating to me as I'm reviewing them because I'm like, okay. I know that they, you know, led stakeholder engagements, but I don't know with whom or how many or what the impact actually was. And so you'll need to actually detail that out. We recommend strongly that you use this car format. And that allows you to see a context, action, and results. What we don't want to see, honestly, is when people like I get these resumes all the time and people have a music generic bullet points and it really looks like you just copied and pasted the job description from like the LinkedIn job posting from when you initially were applying for the job. So just be careful with this, but I'll write this down as a context context does two things. It first frames the story and it's also usually where the first number lies. So for example, you might say something like lead six person team that tells me right off that that you're leading a team and hey, there's a number of six six people. The actions obviously are what you specifically did. So I want to know, did you interview experts or did you analyze data? I want to know specifically what you did. So ultimately, I want to know what the result is. A lot of people forget to include this. And this is actually very important because it tells me what the business consequences. What impact did you as an individual have on the actual company. So it's pretty general just to say, hey, I identified cost opportunities. Okay, great. I think that applies to anyone who would have done the job. But what did you specifically accomplish. So maybe something like a decision that got made, it can be, you know, costs were reduced by 20% or could be sales increase by $5 million. You know, you want to think about what makes the most sense to include. Sometimes that's a percentage. Sometimes that's an absolute number. But that results really allows me to see the ultimate impact. I really recommend that you include a number for every line. Three reasons for this. One, as I mentioned, it tells me the measurable impact of your work. But it also makes it a lot easier for me as a reviewer to read your resume. Because if you just have blocks of texts with no numbers in it, it can be overwhelming for me to read. So it's a lot easier to digest. But here's an example of a bullet point that I've seen before and how you could potentially change it. So I might see a bullet point that says created a career coaching program. Okay, that's right. I don't really know what that means. What did you specifically do? Did you make training slides? Did you meet with people? So a way to make this a lot stronger is say created career coaching program for 25 students by scheduling monthly one on one mentorship sessions and hosting for group sessions resulting in 24 job offers. So now I know the context, which is there is a career coaching program that you created. I now understand that you did this by scheduling these mentorship sessions. And I know that you did group training sessions. So that's great. And so ultimately there are 24 job offers that indicates that there was success there with the program. So there are plenty of examples of what you could include to make it a much stronger bullet point, but I will say as a reviewer resumes, there are three things that these firms are looking for in terms of what kind of content is on there. You know, like problem solving or analytical skills. So these are things like building a financial model and Excel or it could be conducting a survey about students. There are a bunch of different types of skills you can include there, but this is the most important ones. You'll want to make sure that your resume includes a number of these. The second would be like client readiness and that includes things like, you know, working with clients to to come up with a with a project or a solution to the project rather. And you don't necessarily have to have a client for you to show client readiness. If you have clients great, you can talk about client calls you've led presentations for clients. It's great alternatively. Just talk about anything that you've presented or ideally worked with somebody more senior than you. So maybe you collaborated with senior management something on something or you advised a director on something ideally something like that where you can show a more formal situation or scenario, which you've completed some sort of work. And the last thing is team skills. You'll really want to make sure that you're showcasing something there that can be collaborating with in a team. It can be collaborating across teams. It could also be mentoring people or of course like directly supervising people. So a number of things you can include there, but you'll want to include again those three problem solving slash analytical skills, clients skills and then to skills. All right. So the third mistake we see has to do with formatting. So formatting mistakes can signal a leak attention to detail. So if I'm a consultant and I'm reviewing resume, then I see a resume that's very poorly formatted. That is going to be a very big red flag for me. Why? Well, I'm wondering, are my slides going to look like that? Because I don't know that I feel comfortable putting or having something on my team who's going to produce part that looks visually appealing. So you'll want to make sure that you are consistent with your formatting that it looks clean. A common mistake I see is that people want to be unique. And so they have very unique styles, whether it comes to fonts or even to some instrument cases, people put a lot of icons or shapes and colors. That might work for more creative type of role, but in the consulting incorporate types of roles, we are kind of expecting a very similar layout for all of our resumes that we get in again with those sections that we mentioned up front, but also just with the formatting. And so something like that at Bane, we would call it zero defetch, which basically means you want to make sure that things are consistent. You've proofed everything. There are no errors. I would say in terms of the common formatting things font is one, the fonts that we typically recommend are Calibri and Times New Roman. You want to be pretty standard, easy to read, font, again, no script or anything fancy like that. The font sizes should also be consistent across sections. So, you know, 10 point font for the bullet points, for example, should be consistent across sections. Maybe you have a slightly bigger font for the section headers, like maybe 12 point. And then maybe your name is even slightly larger, but you don't want more than that too many font sizes can, you know, be very distracting. I'd also say with the font style, you'll want to be consistent. So in a single line on your resume, you'll want to have the same exact format. So if you are somebody, you know, who has their company name on the left, and then their city and state where the company is located on the right side, that whole line you'll want to have in one font style, you don't want one side being bold and the other side, I tell a size only it's it's can get very distracting and confusing. Other things, punctuation. So if you are, you know, adding periods to the end of some of your bullet points. you will need to add it to all of your bullet points. Otherwise, it looks like a mistake. The margins, this is a common one I actually see where people have uneven margins going across the entire perimeter of the resume. We recommend half inch evenly distributed across the whole resume. I also see people often, instead of actually, for the margins setting the tab so that it's left justified and right justified. If you put a lot of spaces going from the last side to the right side, that doesn't work. You have to actually go into the settings and set it so that it's nicely and neatly up against the right side, for example. So be very due to oriented on your resume. It is incredibly important. And you should really have multiple people looking at your resume to check for this. So obviously they're checking for content, but also you'll want somebody to look at the final product to make sure that it's all set. Again, no links, so no linkedin URLs, no color, just very simple. Okay. So it's again to summarize, you know, this is really important that you set it up correctly and you follow these three steps. First step is structure. In that, you'll have one page, four sections, make sure it's distributed correctly. And then you'll want to go in very first chronological order. So the most recent experience would go first, moving backward. Step two, content, make sure that you have context, action and results, and that there's a number with every line. For formatting, excuse me, make sure that you are zero defect, so everything is consistent. And that's margins, font, spacing, et cetera. Again, make sure you're doing all three. Okay. Now, this dream mistake framework applies to almost everyone. For some folks who are coming from more to non-traditional background, you'll need to take one further step. So if you're someone coming from like medicine, academia, law, et cetera, you will need to actually translate your experiences into business language. And so we often see people describe the process instead of the actual business con. You might say something like, I conducted research on protein binding mechanisms. That's awesome, that sounds very interesting, but that doesn't really tell me what the impact is. And so I need to know specifically what this meant for the organization, what this meant, what this research actually resulted in. So did you publish a paper? And is that paper going to impact, I don't know, the ability to conduct this research in a future or like different additional research in the future? Is it going to potentially lower the cost of drugs? You know, so I need to know what the actual impact is of this research that you conducted. So make sure if you're a non-traditional background that you are thinking about it from a business lens. All right. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over. I believe to Katie. - Thank you, Miley. This was great. And I'm basically just going to build on everything you just said. All right. So all of these pieces are super important, as Miley mentioned, in building a really strong, compelling resume. And this is a big part of our Black Belt program. It is the starting point of your entire recruitment strategy. So Black Belt is a system where we help accelerate and optimize your chances of landing a role in consulting whether that's for an internship or a full-time role. The industry average is under 5% imagine all of these applications coming in. Our success rate is a Black Belt. It has 80% of our Black Belt land a successful offer, at least one. Like I said, whether that's an internship or a full-time offer. And at Leading Firms. This is Big Three, Big, or MBB, Big Four, Leading boutiques, you name it. And like I said, one of the first steps is your resume. This is a part of your strategy. It cannot be the only piece, and it cannot be forgotten. If your resume doesn't help you get in the door, then you're not going to get an interview. So the big pieces that we help with here are basically just what Miley covered. And we're just going to take that weight off of you. So we're going to help you build a story. Through our structured editing process, we have real editors, they're real people, and they go line by line, and they're all ex-consultants. We are going to make sure that you have the right content. As ex-consultants, our editors know what needs to be in that resume and what doesn't. And this ties into your entire strategy, your application, and your networking. Do you know where your stories come from? They come from your resume. And that's when you're giving a pitch in a coffee chat, or when you're in that behavioral interview during the actual first and final rounds. And this helps you become more confident in your experiences because we're going to show you that all of those bullet points are little and many stories that make you stand out and why you will add value. We want to help you. And if you're interested and fully committed to a process that does take work but is proven, then Black Belt is a great path for you. If you are still exploring, we're not a good fit because we are going to make you do work. If you are still considering alternatives, like IB or some other type of role, wait, right? Black Belt is for candidates who are serious about jumping into consulting. And if you're someone who likes to figure things out on your own, we're not a great fit. We are going to help you with advisors and we're going to tell you the hard truths and also get you to the right place, making you stronger. And like I said, it's a time commitment, but it's worth it if you're ready to jump in. And just a quick plug on why this is such a value ad. This is a tiny fraction of your first year salary. Huge ROI. And if you are in school or you're working professional, the re-recruiting time and the chances, they just diminish as you go again and again. Now it is possible, but if you're a junior and you just kind of like, haphazardly go through this journey now, it's just that much harder to bring yourself back and re-recruit next year before you graduate. So just think about that. If you're not sure what to do, you can talk to me. Something I didn't mention at the beginning, which I usually do is that I am also an ex-consultant. I spent three years at BCG and I actually went through Black Belt. This helped me. One thing that I don't want any of you to do is wait till the last minute like I did. So get the help earlier so that you're not as frazzled as I was. - Well, we'll wrap up the plane there. And so for this, I would love both Katie and Miley if you give a 30 second, the statement on your best piece of resume advice that you wish someone had given you when you were recruiting. Either one of you is welcome to kick off. - Okay, I'll start. Miley, I'll let you close since you're (laughs) the show here. I would say, don't be afraid to let go of experiences, right? Like, you know, folks are asking about high school and things like this. It's okay. You know, we want to see what really showcases what makes you great. And everything else, if it's not relevant or it's not as impressive, it's okay to leave it off. - That's a good one. Mine is the job description one where I early on was just writing a job description for myself. And then someone was like, yeah, I don't know what this means. What did you actually do? And she tore my resume apart and I went back and I like, I have to do so many edits. But it really is supposed to be a highlight real of your biggest accomplishments, not just your narrative things, it should be very specific and very quantified. So keep that in mind. There are examples out there, but you'll want to be specific. - Well, if you're ready to have your resume torn apart, join Black Belt. Usually what ends up happening for most resumes is that they kind of need a reboot. And so we'll do that with you. It might not feel great in a moment, but we're gonna give you a freaking kick ass resume and give you your best chance possible to land an offer. So join Black Belt, make all our closes tomorrow. Miley said something near the end of the episode that I want you to sit with. Early in her career, someone tore her resume apart and she realized she'd just been writing a job description without impact, without numbers, without a story. That's most resumes. Don't let it be yours. If you want Miley and our team to do exactly that for you, tear your resume apart and rebuild it the right way, Black Belt is how that happens. 80% of Black Belt's land at least one offer in consulting. today, link in the show. If this was useful to you, do me a favor, subscribe on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify. It goes a long way. Thanks for tuning in.