Consulting Resume Tips

A powerful resume is critical to success in consulting recruiting. After working with thousands of clients over the past 10+ years, we’ve seen it all and bring you are best consulting resume tips. Listen to MC Managing Director Jenny Rae as she outlines tips concerning: resume structure, resume formatting, resume wording and content, what NOT to included in your consulting resume, and more! Consulting firms have thousands of top candidates applying each year, and they literally spend 6-25 seconds looking at your resume. If your resume isn’t exactly what they value and are looking for, you won’t get an interview invite. Don’t waste your chance! Implement these consulting resume tips and get what you deserve- an interview!

Consulting Resume Tips- YouTube Transcription:

Consulting resumes. We do thousands of edits for people that are interested in applying to consulting and other super competitive fields, every year. And I’m giving you here, some of our top tips, that we recommend for you when you’re thinking about perfecting your consulting resume. Either before you work with someone like us, or if you’re just going it alone.

I’m Jenny Rae the Managing Director of Management Consulted, and our focus today is on resume tips.

Consulting Resume Formatting

First of all, I’m going to talk about formatting, because when we get a resume the first thing that we do is make sure that it looks and “smells” great. And when we’re putting the format together there are a few things that you need to make sure you remember.

Resume Alignment & Font Size

First of all, you need to make sure that you have alignment and spacing that is equal. You would be shocked, at how many resumes we get, where they have different size fonts throughout the document. Different levels of spacing, and often those are from standard settings in Microsoft Word because we use it all the time, we know what to look for.

But you have to make sure that your document in entirety, is one single font size. It either needs to be 10, 10.5 or 11 point font. And at the largest, 11.5 but we are rarely getting those these days. People are generally over-involved rather than under. And overall, the main focus is on making sure that you have that consistency throughout. The only exception is that your name should be in bold letters at the top of the document in size 18 or size 20 point font. But otherwise, everything else is going to be exactly the same amount.

In addition you need to use tabs to make sure that you have alignment on both the left and the right margin and if you don’t know how to do that, you can watch some of our videos on how to go through setting up your information inside the resume.

Resume Contact Information

For this in addition, you need to make sure that your contact information is up-to-date. And interestingly, even though it’s not important that people send you mail they are still interested in seeing the location in which you’re located, more than they’re interested in seeing your LinkedIn profile. Very few people will take your LinkedIn profile from your resume. They’re gonna take it maybe from an email, but not from the resume. So just put a classic explanation of where you live, what your email address is, and what your phone number is, in case somebody wants to contact you off of that.

Resume Proofreading

In addition, when you’re doing a first and a final review, you have to make 100% sure that there are no typos in the document. No misspellings, no miss punctuations. Everything has to be 100% clean, because consulting firms will teach you just about everything you need to know in life. But they won’t teach you how to dress, or how to write. So you’ve got to make sure that you put all of those things together. Then after you build the format of the resume, we go after structure.

Resume Structure

And we have a couple of key rules for structure. #1, you can have absolutely no information from prior to college on your resume. You do need to start with your undergrad degree regardless of where you have come in your career. You might emphasize it just a little bit but your undergrad degree is super important.

Rule of 3

And then when you’re building your structure, we recommend following the rule of three. Which is that in each section, you have no more than three entries. And there are three sections.

Sections Inside A Consulting Resume:

1. Education
2. Leadership
3. Work Experience

There’s a final section that’s kind of a catch-all section, that just has a few bullet points in it. And underneath each one of the entries in each one of the sections, for example, inside your work experience section where you have up to three entries, you’ll have three bullet points for each one of those.

If you follow this rule, you’re gonna have a lot of balance and a lot of variety on your resume, and it’s interesting for people to engage with. And clearly, that’s a rule, but not the ultimate standard. So there’s gonna be a little bit of variation. Some people are gonna have 4 bullet points under something, and some people are only gonna have two categories in a specific section, but if that is what you know as your target, it’s going to help you in the structure.

Resume Wording & Content

The final piece is to make sure that your wording and the actual content of your resume is strong. And when we do the formatting and the structuring, that part takes us let’s say 5 to 10 minutes for most people, but the wording is where we invest most of our time.

This is where we make sure that somebody understands really clearly the power of what you’ve done. Not what you’ve done, but the power of what you’ve done. And there’s a huge distinction between those. The way to make sure that you do that, is to ensure that in every entry, there’s context for what you’re explaining and the context is numerical.

So you talk about the size of the company that you worked for, the size of the organizations that you worked with. The number of people on a team, the number of months of an actual engagement. And so in the first half of the first line of every entry, you make sure that there is a number.

Resume Action Words

In addition, you need to highlight what the actions were that you took. This is where people feel most comfortable. They explain the steps they took to accomplish something. And then the final piece is that you need to make sure that you quantify the results.

Now there’s a little confusion that we get for this. Sometimes people will say, “I don’t know the results”, or “I don’t have results from something”. And our answer is you always know or have results. Sometimes you just have to define them a little bit differently. So for example, if you did a student consulting project, your results might not be what they did with your information, but rather what you recommend. If you identified the change that you needed to make inside an organization, it could be the action plan that you set out for that.

Sometimes you just have to back up the bus a little bit, and make sure that you have information that will conclude the thought, by stating a result. Even if it’s not something that you saw fully to completion, in the way that you would identify it in other settings.

Interests On Resume

And then finally, in the wording piece, you have to make sure that there is an interests line on your resume. That interest line is the final piece of every resume. And it needs to be interesting, vibrant, not just you’re interested in running and cooking, but you’re interested in running half marathons in Seaside locations. Or you’re interested in cooking asian-fusion, along with southern American food. Something that really draws to life the kind of person that you are, some variety that you have in your background, and will be great conversation starters in your interviews.

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot more that we can say and do, when it comes to consulting resumes. And we have a really popular editing service where we’d love to help you perfect your resume for consulting and other competitive jobs. If you have other questions about resumes, please reach out to us. We’re at www.managementconsulted.com or on social.