MBA applicants often spend months cramming for the GMAT; they obsess over every word in their MBA admissions essays; they rehearse scores of answers to potential interview questions.
Yet their resumes remain woefully under-polished, despite the fact that top MBA programs are putting a greater emphasis on MBA candidates’ CVs while slashing essay requirements. I thought it would be helpful to share a few reminders about how to write a strong MBA resume.
I’ve found that MBA applicants typically underinvest in their resumes for two reasons:
- Most applicants already have a resume that they’ve used in their professional life. As such, they (mistakenly) feel like they only need to update and tweak it a bit to reflect their latest positions and accomplishments.
- Preparing a resume isn’t a brand new endeavor like taking the GMAT, writing MBA essays, or practicing for admissions interviews, so applicants can easily get complacent about it.
Under-preparing your business school resume can fatally damage your application, and unfortunately, it is a mistake applicants make far too often. So, as you consider your application to business school, here are a few tips on how to write an MBA resume that will impress admissions committees.
Writing a resume for MBA applications
When you’re preparing an MBA resume, you need to include numerous crucial components such as work experience, education history, awards and recognitions, and personal interests. It can be tough pick out the most important details to adequately highlight leadership experience while keeping the document down to one page.
A strong resume should highlight leadership experience, transferable skills, and accomplishments that align with the MBA program’s expectations. The goal of an MBA resume is to demonstrate a candidate’s potential to succeed in a business school environment and make a positive impact in the business world.
Admissions officers review countless resumes, so it’s essential to create a well-structured and concise document that stands out from other candidates. Here are some considerations:
Tip #1: Start from scratch.
I can appreciate that applying for business school is a lot of work. You have to invest a ton of time in writing essays and studying for the GMAT, and one corner you can easily cut is recycling an old resume with a fresh coat of paint. But you shouldn’t. Here’s why:
First, resumes are often documents that are built over time, and the content at the bottom tends to linger a little longer than its optimal shelf life. We become better writers with practice, and our narrative changes over time. Your resume — your whole resume — needs to reflect both of these evolutions.
Second, resumes for MBA applications need to be written through a whole different lens. Consider the following bullet point; you’ll see something like it on almost all business school candidates’ resumes:
- Evaluated opportunities to increase downloads of company’s mobile app
Seems reasonable enough, but it’s so bland (and so easy to fix!).
Tip #2: Make it about people, not profits.
Resumes written for private-sector, nonprofit, and government jobs all require that the applicant demonstrate their value to the organization’s bottom line — however that is measured — and highlight the transferable skills they have gained from their professional experience.
In contrast, a resume written for an MBA application needs to demonstrate the applicant’s ability to affect and lead people.
This doesn’t have to be through formal manager–subordinate relationships; it can manifest itself in a number of ways. But it absolutely needs to be the central message that admissions committees see in your application:
- Led a team created to evaluate opportunities to increase downloads of company’s mobile app
Tip #3: Don’t confuse achievements and results.
Achievements describe what you did, while results tell the reader why they should care. Like our example above, bullet points so often leave the reader wondering, “So what?” What impact did you have? Every resume bullet must answer this question.
To check whether your resume clears this hurdle, try adding the words “resulting in” to every bullet point. If you can slide the phrase somewhere in the middle of the bullet, then you’re probably in good shape. If it fits best at the end and is left dangling there like an unanswered question, then you may need to think about how to answer it:
- Led a team created to evaluate opportunities to increase downloads of company’s mobile app; deployed recommendations resulted in an increase in downloads.
Tip #4: Always quantify what you can.
Being ambiguous about the context of your accomplishments by leaving out hard data will only serve to increase suspicions among admissions committees.
When there is no easily quantifiable figure that you can drop in, do your best to estimate (and be honest about how you came to that estimate). This skill — the ability to estimate impact — is one you should have if you are going to be successful in business and in B-school, so you might as well demonstrate it on your resume:
- Led a three-person team created to evaluate opportunities to increase downloads of company’s mobile app; deployed recommendations resulted in a 10% increase in downloads versus previous quarter.
Tip #5: Count your prepositions and conjunctions.
Candidates often want to jam a lot of qualifiers and information into a single bullet point on their resume. They get so wrapped up in the details that they lose sight of the bigger picture they are trying to convey. As a result, many are left with convoluted sentences that are difficult to follow.
Fortunately, this is easy to detect. One good measure of a sentence’s complexity is the number of prepositions and conjunctions it contains. If your sentence relies on four or more of these types of connecting words, then you might be in the danger zone:
- Led a three-person team created to evaluate opportunities to increase downloads of company’s mobile app; deployed recommendations resulted in a 10% increase in downloads versus previous quarter.
Yikes … that’s a lot. And, as you might notice from reading it, the sentence does start to become a little hard to follow. Keep your sentences tight and to the point:
- Led a three-person team created to accelerate company’s mobile app downloads; recommendations drove 10% growth versus previous quarter.
I like this bullet a lot. It focuses on people and leadership; it clearly states what results the applicant achieved in quantifiable terms; and it avoids unnecessarily long-winded phrasing.
But it’s also only one piece of your resume. There are still a lot of other factors to consider.
Tip #6: Curate your story.
You don’t need to provide admissions committees with your entire biography. Pick and choose the points from your professional background that you think are most important. Come up with creative, straightforward ways to group positions that require less explanation but still need to be listed.
Tip #7: Provide enough context.
Some applicants are applying from companies and positions that admissions officers may be very familiar with (for example, McKinsey or BCG). But oftentimes, our jobs require a little more explanation and context.
You should always provide that in the sentence directly under your job title. Include facts and figures about an organization’s size (revenue, headcount, etc.) and your specific job responsibilities there. Then use the bullets under that introductory sentence to describe your achievements and results. You might follow this format, for example:
[Job Title], [Company]
Responsible for doing [X] at [Company], an $Xbn company dedicated to [Y].
- Achieved [X], resulting in [Y].
- Achieved [X], resulting in [Y].
- Achieved [X], resulting in [Y].
Further, include details about times you took initiative with impressive results, worked closely with senior management, collaborated with team members across diverse backgrounds, and added value to high-stakes projects.
Tip #8: Make sure your resume supports the rest of your application.
Finally, even more so than when applying for a job, applying to an MBA program requires you to have a broader narrative — that is, an overarching reason the admissions committee should admit you. Essays are where you’ll spell out this narrative explicitly, but make sure your resume supports the argument. The two pieces don’t stand alone; rather, they should complement one another.
For example, if you want to draw attention away from a low GPA included in your education section, be sure to focus on providing examples of your impressive track record in your most recent position — in your MBA resume as well as in any relevant essays (and in the application form itself!).
Going forward
Hopefully, these tips provide some clarity for MBA admissions applicants who are in the process of writing a resume for their applications.
As you proceed with the application process, remember to invest as much time in your resume as you do in your essays, GMAT, and interview prep. It’s the foundation on which all winning MBA applications are built.