Consulting Resume Template

Free resume template to help land a job at a top consulting firm

Author: Christy Grimste
Christy Grimste
Christy Grimste
Real Estate | Investment Property Sales

Christy currently works as a senior associate for EdR Trust, a publicly traded multi-family REIT. Prior to joining EdR Trust, Christy works for CBRE in investment property sales. Before completing her MBA and breaking into finance, Christy founded and education startup in which she actively pursued for seven years and works as an internal auditor for the U.S. Department of State and CIA.

Christy has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland and a Master of Business Administrations from the University of London.

Reviewed By: Osman Ahmed
Osman Ahmed
Osman Ahmed
Investment Banking | Private Equity

Osman started his career as an investment banking analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners where he spent just over two years before moving into a growth equity investing role at Scale Venture Partners, focused on technology. He's currently a VP at KCK Group, the private equity arm of a middle eastern family office. Osman has a generalist industry focus on lower middle market growth equity and buyout transactions.

Osman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a Master of Business Administration with concentrations in Finance, Entrepreneurship, and Economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Last Updated:May 14, 2023

Attached to the bottom of this post, you will find the free Wall Street Oasis Consulting Resume Template for undergraduate students, used by the WSO paid service and thousands of candidates to successfully land a job at top consulting firms.

A resume is your first impression. It's the filter that decides whether you’re worth considering or not.

It’s simple: If the company doesn’t like what they see on your resume (there are a million and a half things that could turn them off), you get dinged.

For your consulting resume, you need to highlight a few characteristics while maintaining a properly formatted resume.

Additionally, you’ll hopefully have some relevant experience or prestigious internships to include. Some form of solid experience is basically a prerequisite for your resume.

It doesn’t matter if your resume is beautifully formatted and hits on all the right points; if it lacks substantial experience, you will get dinged 99 times out of 100.

Consulting Resume - Characteristics

Consulting firms look for certain characteristics in their applicants. Here are some of the features that you want to show in your resume (show, not tell) and how you could include them:

  • Problem solver: Simple enough, indicate a time you solved a problem. It could be something as simple as improving the allocation of funds at a club, for example. The more related to consulting it is, the better.
  • Leader: Ideally, you have some sort of leadership experience at a club, volunteer organization, etc.
  • Hard worker: An excellent GPA, solid internships, volunteering, etc., go a long way in demonstrating the fact that you’re a hard worker. The reality is that many of the applicants will meet all of these standards - it’s why consulting is such a competitive field - so anything to get you an edge is massively helpful. Tangible success in any of your experiences is huge and should be included in the resume bullets. The more you can quantify your success, the better.

  • Personable: It doesn’t matter if you blow the competition out of the water in terms of intelligence - if you aren’t somebody they can see themselves working with, you’ll get dinged. This feature is harder to demonstrate than the other features, but leadership experience goes a long way. Additionally, volunteering experience helps in showing that there’s more to you than chasing the money.

You want to show, not tell, that you qualify as having all four of these traits.

If including these four traits seems too abstract for you, then if you can demonstrate the four characteristics below somewhere in your resume with evidence, then you’re in a great spot.

What Is Relevant Experience for Consulting?

We said before that, if you lack relevant experience, you will get dinged 99% of the time.

So what is relevant experience, and how do you get it?

The obvious answer is to get a consulting internship, but there are limitations on one’s ability to get an internship.

Those limitations could harm their chances at getting a full time (FT) position at a top-tier firm (MBB: McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group).

MBB (McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group) Internships

If you’re gunning for a consulting position at MBB (it’s easy to understand why the desire for MBB is so much higher than all other consulting firms) then the optimal internship is obviously an MBB consulting internship.

Plan B, however, is not a consulting internship with a less prestigious firm.

Here’s @Fantastic on why an investment banking internship with a bulge bracket is better than a consulting internship with a tier-two (or below) consulting firm.


Practically speaking, either internship would be fine, as the "prestige" of both positions is relatively similar.

However, if you're really gunning for MBB, I'd probably recommend the bulge-bracket internship, just because it'd be easier to craft a convincing story for your interviews next year.

Think about it from the perspective of interviewing for full-time positions. While the work you do in a mid-tier consulting internship would obviously be more applicable for MBB, you'll also be faced with the unpleasant task of explaining why you didn't make it into MBB the first time around.

The prestige that comes with an investment banking internship at a bulge bracket is undeniable.

If you can craft a convincing story out of it, then the interviewers have a compelling reason to consider you.

On the other hand, the story coming out of a consulting internship with a tier-two consulting firm is that you failed to obtain an MBB internship the first time around.

Sophomore Consulting Internship - Is it Possible?

As far as MBB consulting internships go, getting an internship sophomore year is incredibly difficult.

Even if you’re an absolute rock star, there’s a very slim chance you’ll manage to land an internship.

So, what else can you do to set yourself for solid consulting internships?

There are usually three options for internships going into sophomore year to prepare yourself for consulting:

  • Consulting at a less prestigious firm
  • F500 internship
  • Investment banking at a bulge bracket/elite boutique (Note: it’s very difficult to land an investment banking internship sophomore year as a non-minority)

At first glance, you might be tempted to hone your efforts on obtaining a consulting internship with a lesser-known firm.

Even though it’s the most relevant option, it’s not the best for the same reason mentioned earlier. Beyond the prestige, having a prestigious bank or a F500 company on your resume is indicative of the fact that you’re a hard worker as they’re not easy internships to obtain.

Ultimately, relevant experience is not exclusive to consulting internships.

Prestige carries a big load in these waters, so it would be beneficial to consider internships beyond just consulting.

Come junior and senior year, you’ll hopefully have a solid name on your resume that you can leverage to get your foot in the door.

Format - Font Size, Tense, and More

The format for your consulting resume isn’t something that gets your foot in the door, it’s something that gets you dinged.

Inconsistent margins, font, or too much/little spacing can get you dinged.

Attention to detail is critical in consulting, so you better pay close attention to every tiny detail on your resume.

Font Size and Spacing

What happens if you have too much information to include? On the other end, what do you do if you don’t have enough experience, leaving you with an empty resume?

Use a font size, which you can adjust accordingly to leave your resume looking pretty.

Many of you won’t have enough information to pack a resume (assuming you are an undergrad).

With our resume template, you can reduce 5-20% of the content and up the font size by a point.

This helps you make a balanced resume with a good amount of content and enough white space.

If, on the other hand, you find yourself with too much content, you need to reduce that. The content to white space ratio on our resume template is as high as it should be; any more and your resume will look cluttered.

You can reduce the word count by either lowering the font size or by eliminating some of your content. We recommend eliminating some of your content and keeping the most critical bullets unless you are post-graduate. Undergraduates aren’t expected to fill a page to the brim with details of their work experience.

Page Count

Rule of thumb for every resume ever: never go over one page. Just don’t do it.

You're lucky to have stumbled upon this page because it means you have a format already made.

The spacing has been checked, the margins aligned, and the content fills the page just enough to present everything you need without clutter.

Simply fill in the blanks, get it proofread, and you'll have a quality resume.

WSO Resume Services

Getting a second set of eyes on your resume is critical.

There are a thousand tiny details on your resume that need to be properly aligned, properly sized, and properly spaced - that means there are a thousand different opportunities for you to fudge your resume, risking an automatic ding.

Our resume review service is ideal for those of you who are serious to get into consulting or any other finance profession. We have priced it a point that is low that it is accessible by everyone while being able to provide the required high-quality. Check it out by clicking the button below.

WSO's Resume Review Service

Interested in Consulting - Breaking In?

Consulting is one of the most exclusive professions in the world, particularly management consulting.

It’s one of the best career choices for building a lucrative career because of the versatility it offers.

But the simplest of mistakes during the interview will get you dinged; that’s how competitive these positions are.

Less than 1% of applicants get a top consulting job, which is why preparation is absolutely critical.

The WSO Consulting Case Interview Guide is the only crowdsourced guide available, perfected by countless professionals to give you the edge you need.

Check out the banner below to learn more.

More Resources:

We hope these templates help you land that dream consulting job! Please check out the following additional resources to help you advance your career:

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WSO Undergrad Consulting Resume Template 75.5 KB 75.5 KB