Consulting Resumes

Process

Resume making is undoubtedly one of the most critical steps in the process. It will take up a good amount of time from your first term and general preparation period. It's also going to be a useful skill through out your career, and there will be fewer constraint on formats and facts later on. Most everyone manages to create a version of their resume which is quite polished by the end of the very many iterations that it goes through. Here I will try to make that process a little more streamlined, by laying down what I think are useful guidelines.

Here we will breakdown:
1. Purpose of the resume
2. Versions of a resume
3. Structure and format of a resume
4. Detailing out points
5. Writing and styling

Purpose

The purpose of your resume is two-fold:

1. To get you shortlisted -

This is what everyone focuses on; creating a resume crammed with every little highlight of their life, to ensure that they get an interview.

2. To guide your interview -

This key purpose is often overlooked. The interviewer is going to be looking at your resume for a little while before your interview begins, and during the early stages of your interview. Whatever jumps out at them is in large part going to be what your interview will be about.
To simplify our lives, it makes sense to focus on just one of these purposes, and the other would be effectively served. For most people that focus is the idea of getting shortlisted, because that's where the immediate fear is. I would suggest that while designing your resume the single guiding purpose in your mind should be how it reads during an interview, for the following reasons:

- End goal -

Your end goal is to have a good interview and get selected, not just to be the highest scoring candidate at the shortlist stage. Your approach should therefore lineup with your goals. While both of these purposes almost always require the same sort of resume design, when there is a choice between the two, focus on your end goal, and think about what will lead to a better interview.

- One will ensure the other -

Any resume which is interesting enough to lead to a smooth interview will get shortlisted. Resumes which are likely to lead to better interviews, are more likely to get shortlisted. The converse isn't necessarily true. You can throw in every single achievement, significant and insignificant, and ensure that there are enough grounds for you to get shortlisted. This will beat the shortlisting process, but likely won't impress a partner. The clutter might not give them anything interesting to ask about, or worse yet, the interview might be hinged on an obscure point that you can't talk about.

- Greater control -

Your achievements are pretty fixed in place. Out of the top 50 points that you have to choose from, you might select some 30-40 points. It's the top 10-20 points which will get you shortlisted. As such any optimisation tuned towards getting you shortlisted will not have very much impact. Either you have the required top 10-20 points or you don't. But how your interview will go is more likely to be impacted by the exact phrasing, the ordering, the choice of what points to include or leave out. While all of this will have an impact on shortlisting itself, it will have a limited impact, because despite common belief, HR will go through your entire resume.
All in all as you design your resume, keep thinking about what impression this is going to make on the interviewer during the interview, not the impression it will make on HR during shortlisting. It's a small difference in mindset, which could have a meaningful impact on how you design your resume. The principles outlined below, stem from this purpose.

Versions

It is usually recommended that you create a different version of your resume for each sector that you're applying to, because different types of resumes appeal to different types of companies. While each sector does index more heavily on different kinds of achievements, not everyone's resume lends itself to creating sector specific resumes. The more practical way of creating useful versions of the resume might be as follows:
- Create your first and main version of your resume
- Within the first draft identify the buckets (eg. academics, work experience, extra-curriculars, PoRs etc) which really stand out and sell your profile
- Try creating different versions by reordering these buckets, so that each important bucket is emphasised in one version
- Within each version, you may want to reorder some sub-points and move them to buckets which you're either trying to stress on, or which are coming off as too weak

Thus, you would have created different versions of your resume which are oriented towards different buckets of achievements, rather than different sectors itself. It is unlikely that you would be including / excluding points across versions, because if a point really bolsters one version of your resume, it will likely help another version too, even if the point belongs to a lower bucket in that version.
Across these differently created versions of your resume you will see one of two patterns:
- Just one or two versions reads much better than the other versions. This is usually the case, because most of us have significantly stronger points in one or two areas (buckets), even if we have good enough points in other areas. Thus, for most of us, it will be the same resume that we will use across sectors, because even if company A is interested in people who are good at X, I am more interesting as a candidate who is great at Y, not as one who is average at X.
- More than two versions read similarly well, but paint different pictures. This is rare, but happens for people who have a very well balanced resume, with equally eye catching points across multiple buckets. In these rare cases, you should spend some time figuring out which version of you is most interesting and useful to present for each company that you apply to.

Structure and Format

In developing the structure and format of your resume, there are a variety of considerations. Each of them is individually small, and it's easy to pick up someone else's format and mindlessly fill it in. However, a quick glance at some of these considerations might help you form a strong opinion on what works best for your resume:

- Bucketing of points -

Your resume might have 3-5 headings, such as "Work Experience", "Education", "Scholastic Achievements", "Positions of Responsibility", "Extra-Curricular Activities", "Sporting Achievements", "Projects" etc. Within each of these, you would have a range of distinct points which are grouped under sub-headings. For example, under work experience you would group points by employer, or even by role within the same employer. These groupings are what I refer to as buckets. Some buckets will naturally contain more points, and more powerful points than other buckets. Some of these points are also easy enough to move from one bucket to another, if there is an employer, education institute etc in common between them. Think about what can be done, to ensure that no bucket is too big, and that no bucket is too empty. The rule of thumb is that every bucket should have between 3 & 5 points, which are interesting. No more, no less, and nothing just for the sake of filling space.

- Formatting the bucket -

It is useful to create a spine on the left hand side your resume, where these bucket names (eg. "Assistant Manager GTM - Reckitt Apr '19-May '20") are called out. The benefit of this format over having in-line, underlined subheadings is that in one glance an interviewer will get a summary of your resume. In just looking at the left most inch, one knows the highlights of your resume, and can zoom in on what is of interest. Some other design choices to make include:
  - Where will you place the from-to dates? Inside the bucket, making it fuller, or on the right hand side, taking up more space
  - Within the bucket name will you bold / emphasise some portion of the text, or keep the whole thing uniform
  - Should the spine (bucket names) have a slightly darker background colour and be bolded to make it more clearly visible, or remain plain and simple for overall aesthetic beauty
The above are just some thoughts to get you started on what looks best and highlights your resume in an easy to read manner.

- Ordering of and within buckets (Top Loading) -

You will often be told to "top load" your resume, meaning that your points should appear in descending order of importance. This has some obvious and non-obvious limitations:
  - Your best points will be distributed across different headings. The order of headings should obviously be obeyed over and above this. Therefore, you should aim to top-load your best headings. For eg. Of your work experience > education > positions of responsibility, your best resume version would be one where the headings follow that order.
  - Within a heading, you might be tempted to rearrange buckets in the most impressive order. However, here chronology matters. On average, your most important points would be ones which are more recent. Even if they aren't, for eg. In 10th you might have got 90%, in 12th 95%, and in undergrad 7.2/10. You certainly can't rearrange the order in which this is presented. What you can do is change the number of points you present for each bucket. For eg. If your most recent role, wasn't as impactful as a role from a year back, dedicate only 2 lines to the most recent one, and then move on to the previous role from a year back, giving it 4-5 lines. You would have effectively moved your more impactful points upwards (top-loaded) without breaking chronology.
  - Within a bucket, you might want to rearrange points to ensure that you can top load the major achievements. Here also there are a few constraints on how you can order points. A lot of buckets are not self explanatory, and would require one point to explain your role, scope, objective etc. You can however ensure that in each bucket, no more than one point is ever spent on giving this context, thus effectively moving impact points as high up as possible.

- Chronology -

The buckets within any subheading should always come in reverse chronological order. The reasons that this is absolutely necessary are:
  - Order - It's important for buckets to be in either chronological or reverse chronological order. Otherwise to someone reading your resume everything appears to be jumbled up and confusing, even if they are seeing things in order of importance to you.
  - Completeness - For certain headings like work experience and education, you can't skip out on what you think are unimportant buckets. Having gaps in time frames might make it look like you took a gap year, when you didn't. This doesn't apply for things like extra-curriculars or positions of responsibility, where you may choose to present just the highlights. But completeness often paints a picture of consistency and commitment.
  - Recency - Reverse chronological order is the better way to go because:
    - You are more likely to have achieved something impressive more recently than when you were younger.
    - What you have done more recently is of more interest to an employer than something you may have achieved long back.

- Number of points -

The overall number of points in your resume doesn't have a positive correlation with your likelihood of getting selected. Packing your resume with all of your achievements in the hope that something will appeal to HR and get you shortlisted is a naïve, brute force method. This is one of the places where we need to keep our objective of the interview in mind. For an interviewer, a resume with 30 points well spaced out on a resume is easy to read, and is probably formatted such that their attention will go where the candidate wants their attention to go. On the other hand, a resume with 50 tightly crammed points, immediately gives the interviewer the impression that the candidate is disorganised (not an overachiever), and they might randomly pick out a not so relevant point to drive the interview. The points which will get you shortlisted are your top 10-20 points, and the interviewer won't register more than 5-10 of them. Keeping your resume crisp, helps you draw attention to the points you want to. It importantly shows a skill very crucial in consulting, synthesising.

Detailing

Now that we're clear on the overall format of the resume, and the buckets that will be present in it, we need to detail out the specific points that will go into each bucket. There are a few simple ideas that will guide what sort of points need to be covered in each bucket:

- STAR framework -

In each bucket, you want to be able to communicate the situation, task, action and result. There will be some buckets in which the situation and task are self-evident. But there are others where you will need to present these. This doesn't mean that you need to have 4 points per bucket, but that these 4 questions need to be answered across any number of points.

- Objective / Scope -

A better way to answer situation and task is by answering what the objective and scope are. The reason is that these answer essentially the same question, and a cool objective or a broad scope not only explain the bucket, but also sell it.

- Achievement & Result -

This is an absolute must. This is the core selling point of your bucket. Some of the general rules of thumb here are:
  - Keep it simple - People often advise you to add 'buzz words' to make sure that something pops. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. If you want to convey something complex, but there is a common buzz word that captures the idea, use it. For example, if you have built an ML model for fraud detection, don't go into the specifics of your model. Using the buzz words 'machine learning' keeps it simple for people who don't have your knowledge. Avoid using buzz words to spice up something. In those cases the core point of what you have achieved is missed, and the point is lost.
  - Be objective - Often this means quantifying the impact. In some cases quantification isn't possible, or doesn't really present why the point is important. Objectivity here means putting across why the achievement is important, and what really improved, from a customer's perspective.
  - Take a step back - Assume that the person reading your resume not only doesn't understand your context and industry, but that they don't understand very much. From this lens, you will see a lot of the jargon in your resume, which looks impressive to you, but is a hit or miss with any third party. Translating that into something that a 15 year old would understand usually helps. It may feel like breaking jargon into simpler words makes the sentence longer, or reduces the impact (sometimes it does), but it will often ensure that your point gets across. That's worth a lot more than an impressive point that no one understands.

- Not Top Down -

Often while, communicating in consulting and interviews in general, top-down communication is essential. In your resume, process oriented communication works better within each bucket. The format and parts of the styling will already make your resume fairly top-down. But when someone is reading each line, they need to be taken through the process of what the situation was, what you did, and what the outcome was.

- 3-5 points -

No bucket should exceed 5 points. A better rule would be to keep each bucket to 3 points, because it almost always can be done and reads better. There's a few reasons why fewer points are better within a bucket:
  - When you have more number of points a single story doesn't come out of it. The reader, quickly glancing through the resume, might end up focusing on and remembering less relevant, or interesting points.
  - Longer buckets inherently get more boring. Therefore the extra points aren't selling the bucket further, but are stealing space away from other buckets.

- So what -

At the end of each bucket, the main test to see if it's well written or not, is to read the name of the bucket and ask yourself "so what?". Consultants love doing this. Worked in ABC role, in XYZ company, so what? Held ABC PoR in XYZ institute, so what? Until the answer is a single crisp point, keep asking yourself "so what?". Once you have the answer, check if that final, crisp idea comes out from one read of the bucket. It likely won't come out verbatim, but that idea should jump out at the reader. If your final so what doesn't come out in one read, with zero pondering time, your bucket needs re-writing, and needs to be simpler, more objective and crisp.

Writing and Styling

At this point almost every element of the resume should be mapped out. You know what sort of buckets you want to have, how to organise them and even what points to include in each bucket, and in what order. What remains is how you're going to write each point. Here also we have a bunch of guidelines to help optimise how the resume will read:

- Front loading -

Much like top loading, this is a useful rule of thumb, but needs to be used correctly and appropriately. Let's begin by framing the purpose of front loading correctly. Often you will hear that you should be able to fold your resume along a vertical crease, and all of the key information should be covered in the left hand side. The reasonable motivator for front loading isn't that people will only read the first bit of each line in a hurry. While skimming through resumes or any reading humans tend to take 3 shortcuts:
  - Skip lines which seem similar or repetitive (that's why each bucket has only 3-5 points)
  - Skip words in between (this is why we bold keywords)
  - Over-index on beginnings. This is likely to manifest in people zoning out towards the end of lines, and resumes. This is why we front and top load.
With this reasoning in mind, let's pick out what kind of vocabulary we want to front load. We want keywords which sell the point to be front loaded, before the reader zones out. The keywords that are not worth front loading are:
  - Generic verbs - "Improved", "increased" etc don't add much value, because the expectation is that any point in a resume will talk about a place where you added value in some way or the other. Even if these words are present towards the end, or better yet, replaced with nicher keywords and frontloaded, you will get your point across.
  - Numbers - Objectivity helps the reader visualise and understand why your point matters. But at the beginning of the point you want to make sure that they understand what you achieved, not how much of it. The main purpose is to get the reader to understand and recall what you have done, because they aren't invested enough to remember the numbers from your resume anyway.
You should frontload:
  - Specific keywords which describe the action that you took
  - Any details which help the reader pre-empt what to expect through the rest of the sentence (in case they zone out)

- Bolding -

There are 2 key styles of bolding. One is for emphasis, where all of the main selling points are bolded. This includes important numbers, keywords which sell the point etc. The second, is for skimming. I think this is far more useful, because this better serves a third party who is skimming through your resume, instead of someone who is spending 10 minutes to really understand your story. In this style of bolding you need to ask yourself "what is the smallest set of keywords that I need to highlight in this bucket to present a crisp idea of the same?". I would recommend bolding by bucket, not by line, because:
  - The bucket represents the idea / achievement for a third party who is interested in the top 3-5 things from your life.
  - A few words bolded per line prevent anything from standing out, and make it tougher for the reader to figure out which lines to really skim through to get a summary of your work.
Avoid using another styling instrument like italics or underlining. In combination these make your resume more cluttered and less readable.

- Sentence structure -

The best sentence structures are repeated across almost every resume. So it shouldn't be hard to find a sentence structure which helps front load and succinctly express points in your resume. The key advice here is to consciously use only this one sentence structure across all points. For example, if your points read like "Achieved …", "Designed …", you need to continue going verb first. You should not have a point that reads like "1st rank in …", but instead should write it as "Ranked 1st in …". The idea here is that the reader's mind gets accustomed to a certain sentence structure and will assimilate more information in that format quickly. A shift in sentence structure slows them down, and could result in them losing the plot momentarily.

- Font and colour -

I'm sure that there are best practises in this area too. I would recommend using, a standard simple font. Only one font, do not use a second font anywhere. Your resume should contain as limited a colour palette as possible, black, white and maybe a shade of grey. I'm assuming here that college guidelines will prevent you from shifting from the grey scale to anything else. But whichever colour scale, one dark colour, white and one lighter shade of the dark colour at most. Font size variation should also be kept to a minimum. If possible stick to only 2 font sizes (headings and regular text), and at the very most, a third (subscript).

Takeaways

Those are a lot more details than will even fit into a resume, so here's the TL;DR:
1. Build your resume for an interviewer who will skim through it in a couple of minutes, while talking to you, looking for only the 10 points which stand out the most.
2. Provide a spine on the left of your resume, so that a reader knows the highlights of your profile in 5 seconds.
  1. Make sure the ordering of your key points is intuitive and interesting.
  2. Limit the number of points per bucket and overall, so the interviewer actually reads a decent portion of the story you want them to see.
3. Each buckets should paint a picture of the objective/scope, achievement and the result in no more than 3-5 points. Most importantly, skimming through the bucket should answer the question of "so what?"
4. Maintain simplicity and consistency in your writing style. Limit bolding, fonts, sizes, colours and get straight to the point in each sentence.