M7 MBA Candidate Resume Advice

I'm hitting my second year at an M7 and while I recruited for consulting, the process is very similar.

There are two things you need to be aware of. First, you don't need to touch your resume until Sep/Oct. Seriously. Don't waste your time. Your school will have deep resources available to help you craft your resume and your story. Relax for a while, you've hit the gold mine, you are almost assured of a banking job from an M7. Your background seems to check the boxes. You're underestimating how powerful the banking recruiting machine is at whatever school you're at.

I will, however, comment on your interests section (which is boring and it sucks). One thing about b-school recruiting - pretty much everyone you'll be recruiting with in banking will have a resume just as impressive as yours. Hiring managers don't pore over your resume bullets trying to figure out who was a little more impressive with different tasks etc. They frankly don't give a shit as long as you qualify. The rest is whoever they like the most, there's a lot of luck with individual firms, including how much of a prick an interviewer wants to be one day.

So most firm reps who do a lot of recruiting scan your resume and read: School, GMAT/GPA, name of the company you worked at, maybe a bullet catches there eye, and then they read your interests/skills in detail because that's where the fun shit is, and they are bored. I have had multiple managers tell me when they're bored of scanning resumes, they actually only read the interests section. HR reads the rest.

This is what yours reads: TECHNICAL SKILLS, LANGUAGES & ACTIVITIES Technical skills: Excel, PowerPoint, financial modelling (Breaking Into Wall Street) Languages: Romanian, Russian (native); English (fluent); French (intermediate/conversational) Activities: City FC (co-manager), music composer (various instruments)

I swear to god this is the most boring shit I have ever read and it give a hiring manager almost nothing to talk about. Here's what you need to do:

Get Excel, PowerPoint off your resume ASAP. It's actually embarrassing to put these on your resume in this day in age as an experienced professional. A hiring manager will glean this from your prior experience. You don't put something as a skill that 80-90% of your classmates are also proficient in.

I would suggest the same for BiWS, it is not a differentiator, everyone going into banking at my school actually did this as part of our program. It's an understanding you've done some training like this, you're at an M7, this shit is embarrassing to 'brag' about. If any bankers disagree, speak now, but I know people that would laugh at this on a resume.

City FC co-manager - this says absolutely nothing to catch someones eye. Same with music composer (various instruments). How many people in an elite MBA program do you think have played an instrument? Do you think a recruiter wants to read "I play an instrument. I play soccer. I play golf. I like to read" from 50 candidates? No, they absolutely do not, and it's a big deal with MBA recruiting!

This is how you want to phrase a bullet in an interest section:

"Composed first commercial orchestral piece for a viral multi network cat food commercial in Russia - received 200k views on youtube" "Visited the south of France to explore a growing passion for French wine; learned conversational mastery of the language in preparation of this journey" "Enjoy spreading my Russian heritage through local performances of famous classical compositions. Recently performed XXX in front of an audience of 150"

It needs to be different enough that a manager says "oh, I want to ask about that". You're immediate reaction might be "but I'm not special with that interest" or "Yeah but I haven't done anything like THAT". Trust me, think back over the next few months on how to spin your fun stories. The potential is there.

This feels different than how we're trained to write resumes (which is how you've clearly been trained - a list of skills and nouns of things we like). But in the MBA world, where every firm is dealing with 100 resumes dropped at once, you want an interesting piece that will catch a recruiter's eye or, more importantly, spark an interesting conversation with a hiring manager in an interview.

This can take a while to fine tune. Ignore the rest of your resume until the fall. But tomorrow morning, wake up and delete your whole interests section and start mulling over INTERESTING ways of portraying your interests that have some spark. It will pay off in the fall.

And, congrats!