Seemingly minor mistakes
get most consulting resumes rejected
within 10 seconds!
If you ask a resume screener how much time they spend on a resume, the answer is usually “around a minute”. As a former consultant at McKinsey, having screened thousands of resumes, I can tell you they are understating the harshness of reality.
Consulting resume screeners at top firms like McKinsey, BCG or Bain must go through hundreds of applications at a time. Decisions are made within 30 seconds – and most of the time, you only have 10 seconds to make that most important first impression! And in those precious 10 seconds, any mistake will stick out like a sore thumb!
That’s why your consulting resume must be
ABSOLUTELY PERFECT to the last details!
But the question is, how do you know create the perfect consulting resume?
No one can write you that perfect resume…
The support of your friends, family, colleagues or your school’s career center wouldn’t get you far. Consulting resumes are vastly different, and much less forgiving than ordinary resumes – they are result-oriented, cold, professional, and flawless, just like the image top consulting firms want to project onto their clients.
Many people opt for resume review/editing services. These are offered by former consultants of McKinsey, BCG, Bain – who were themselves resume screeners at some point. They can make your resume consulting-perfect with a price – some $100-200 for each edit; but they cannot help you continuously improve your resume down the road, nor can they personalize the resume as much as you do – after all, you possess the best understanding of your own experience, skills and qualifications.
… so what you need is a comprehensive DIY resume-toolkit!
In the long run, consulting resume writing should be Do-It-Yourself.
That means diving into the deepest thought processes of resume screeners, identifying the most attractive features in a consulting resume, refining the language for a consulting job, avoiding the all-too-common yet destructive mistakes, benchmarking your resume against other applicants and setting a definite goal for this stage of consulting prep. The next question is, how can you do all of that at the same time?