Saturday, April 17, 2010

Your marketing pitch: the resume

The basis of your b-school application is clearly your resume. In my job prior to b-school I was hiring people for my team at work. Each time we published a job post, we received approx. 50 to 100 applications. I tell you guys: a lot of work to read through each and every application. My method quickly became to skim through the resumes first to narrow down the application pile.

This is how it works in the B-School as well. Even though the schools claim to read through all the essays, and yes they probably do, they will also skim over your resumes to gather a first impression of your skill set and in which pool (banker, consultant, international, female, …) you are likely to compete. The resume tells the admissions officers in 30 seconds if you are a potential fit. So, the resume becomes your most effective marketing tool and we better don´t mess it up:

Content-wise

  • Provide a balanced mix regarding academic strength, work experience (especially emphasize leadership) and social or extra-curricular assignments.
  • A method to make your points more effective is to follow “Content, Action, Result”. For example: Managed key accounts, negotiated high-impact deals with BMW´s senior management, increased account´s turnover by 234% in 2009
  • Your resume forms the basis for your stories in your essays, so position the points on your resume wisely and with consistency throughout your whole application package

Format-wise


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