Welcome to MBA Podcaster, the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process.

I’m Heidi Pickman.

You’ve done your research and have a short list of schools. Now you’re working on your applications. You’ve slaved over your essays. Transcripts, recommendations and GMAT scores are on their way. All that’s left is to attach your resume. Make sure you’ve thought good and hard about it.

Today’s podcast is titled MBA Resumes: How to Build the Best Applicant Resume. In this podcast, admissions deans and a consultant give you solid advice on putting together your resume. Some of the issues they’ll address include writing style, format, what categories to include, and how to treat side projects.

The aspect of the resume that makes it the easy part of your application is that once it’s done, it’s done and you can use it for every application. The not so easy part is that as with the rest of your application, you want it to shine and highlight your experience and tell your story.

Christine Sneva is the Assistant Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Director at The Johnson School at Cornell University. Sneva says the resume is one of the most important parts of the application.

Sneva1 It tells a lot about you. So you need to be sure it is very clear, concise and highlights the most important pieces to your story. When you are looking at your resume if you only had one minute to introduce yourself what are some of the things that you would say?

Vicki Duran is the Associate Director of MBA Admissions at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Duran says the resume is an integral part of the application.

Duran1 “We like to see on paper, on the resume, through essays, through the whole application, what has this person accomplished and who are they.A lot of that comes through on the resume, whatever they believe is going to give us insight into what they’re going to bring to the program that’s going to enhance the experience of their peers in the classroom.And in many cases, because we only get to know applicants on paper – if we haven’t met them on the road or they haven’t been to campus for a class visit or to interview with us – that’s all we have to go by, what they have written on their resume or in their essays.”

Kellee Scott is the Senior Associate Director of MBA Admissions at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.She explains why clarity is so important.

Scott1 The longer it takes for us to figure out what you’re trying to say, that’s just more time we’re spending.The more concise you are, the more quickly we can get to the crux of what your experience is.Here’s the thing too.Think about the resume as your calling card to the interview.Because once we get to the interview, if we have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out your resume then it probably tells you that your resume is not written very well or is not written in a very clear format.And then once you get to the interview level then we can talk more about your aspirations more about other things versus trying to figure out what exactly you were doing when.

So a clear resume is important. Let’s get started and build your resume.Jeremy Shinewald, is the Founder/President mbaMission.

Jeremy1 I think the most import thing that the candidates consider when they create their resume is that less is more.The resume has to very, very easily scanable. Someone needs to be able to pick up on visual cues and get answers that they might not have even realized they’ve been seeking. Not having a cluttered resume where you put in every single detail of your entire professional, personal community life is actually important and is something that a lot of candidates resist unnecessarily.

A good place to begin whittling down information is with an outline says Christine Sneva.

Sneva2 My advice is to outline you believe is important to include in your resume on a separate document, create a format and then pull together the most important information on your list.When you see what is left over – is it necessary?You don’t need to say everything about you. Hopefully a lot of that extra additional information and more will come through in an interview depending on the school if they invite you for an interview.Really include what is necessary to convey professional experience, your affiliations, your qualifications in addition to your bio and education.If you’re able to add significant accomplishments or even your personal interests, I really do think it’s a really nice touch, especially a personal touch that you can add to your resume.But don’t feel like you have to add this kind of information, only do it if there’s space.

Sneva’s advice has an added benefit.

Sneva3 Once you do this, look at your outline and what you have not included is maybe something that you want to put somewhere else in your application.We’re always talking about this holistic view of looking at files and I think candidates get really confused on is how to use an optional essay, what do they need to include in another essay that maybe wasn’t touched on in another part of their application.This is a good way to start narrowing down how you want to really spread yourself out in that application.

But that’s a subject for another podcast.

One of the elements you might want to think about including in your outline is any international experience.It’s not necessary and if you don’t have it you shouldn’t feel at a disadvantage, but if you have it great. Shinewald has some great examples of how to include that information and where.

Shinewald2 If you’re in LA and working with the Tokyo team, even if you haven’t visited Tokyo, you’re still having an international experience because you’re working with them on a daily basis.So a lot of people have international experience and don’t even realize it.In terms of showing it on your resume, if you have it, certainly if it’s positive and you can offer specific bullets or if you were stationed somewhere, it can come across in information via your location. If it’s on the personal side, you can mention ‘traveled to 41 different countries, highlights include climbing Mount Kilimanjaro’.

Our consultant Jeremy Shinewald continues with how to structure your resume.

Shinewald3 Start with professional experience, obviously the most recent first. Go through all relevant positions.And try to break up your resume, even if you’ve been in the same firm – and again we’re talking about visual cues – try to break it up for each position.That way you can show progress from step to step.After your professional experience, you might want to include a brief section on community leadership and then you can put in your academic experience or you can flip flop those and put your academic experience first and then put your community and personal at the end.It really depends on the nature, the significance of your community leadership.If it’s quasi-professional – you’ve been a board member of a community organization – you can certainly put it after your work experience. Some people will after their community experience and professional experience will put a small personal section with a few quirky, potentially humorous hobbies, activities to give their resume some personality. And that’s really the main structure.

And there’s a standard preference for order of your experience that Kellee Scott explains.

Scott 2 The key is chronological order. I think what slips some candidates up is that sometimes there are industries where they need to put a skills-based resume together or they need to get long personal statements.And what they really need to do is look at the basic business format of resumes, which is chronological and not based on projects or skill sets. That’s really what can bring the attention of the admissions officer really quickly.

One way to give visual cues that Shinewald mentioned is to use bullet points. Vikki Duran says that a resume is easier to read with bullet points and she gives a writing tip on how to make those bullet points effective.

Duran2 We like to see results-oriented phrases. Led a five member team to develop an internal waste recycling project, resulting in and then giving the results of that. That’s why we like to see the bulleted items.And using action verbs at the start of those sentences.So whether it’s managed, designed, initiated, developed, led, supervised, words like that.

Shinewald says definitely don’t be passive and use words like ‘participated in’ or ‘joined’ and he gives an example of a good bullet point.

Jeremy4 You want to show your specific action followed by specific results. And so, I was a speech writer for an ambassador for a few years and if I were to say to you ‘wrote speeches for ambassador’, it would have no impact. You’d have no additional knowledge of what I’ve done. But if I were to say to you – I would choose a very deliberate action – ‘researched and wrote more than 50 speeches, greetings and toasts’, and then follow it up with a result ‘5 of which were published in The Washington Post,you would have a sense of my action, the consequent results of that action, which validates the action.The publications validate the speech writing.

A resume can include a lot of information, and guess what – it needs to fit on one page – yes one page.Just listen to our guests.

Sneva4 Typically a resume is really only one page or a business resume.

Scott3 It is a marketing tool and the candidate wants to get the attention of the admissions officers as fast as possible.So the best resumes are a one-page chronological summary of their professional and educational experience to date.

Jeremy5 I was at the AIGAC conference recently and someone asked the question about two page resumes and the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants and one of the panelists who was an admissions officer joked and said “All together now” and all 8 admissions officers said “One page” all in unison.Again the key here is scanability. You want the reader to get key facts and the reader will get bogged down in minutiae and just skip over it.In my opinion, you’d rather offer 75% and have that person get 75% than offer 100% and have that person skip over and get 25% or 50%.So less is definitely more.

But as Vicki Duran points out, there’s always the exception to the rule.

Duran3 The resumes would be more or less the same except with the executive MBA program, because those applicants typically have about 8-15 years of work experience, they’re not going to be able to do that very concisely on one page, so they’re probably going to have two pages.

If you’re applying for a part-time program, no such luck with the two pages. Here’s Marshall’s Scott.

Scott4 But for a full-time, part-time, the average age is still about 28, 5 years of experience, it should still be a one page chronological.

Readability, scanability are part of why admissions directors like a one-page, organized resume, but Sneva says that there’s another reason.

Sneva5 You know we see a lot of resumes that sort of look like what people would view as a C.V. or a resume that really catered to a specific industry that has some information that we don’t necessarily need.What we’re looking at is 3, 4, 5, sometimes even more pages of a resume where after page 1 you’re sitting there thinking ‘this is not what we need, this is not the information we need on a resume. ‘ If I’m going to go to an alumni or if I’m going to go to a current student or someone in their career management center, I can’t even bring this information to them, because I can’t even get through all of this information just to say ‘this X candidate, this is the experience they have, this is what they want to do.’ ‘Tell me more about that experience.’ When their being so in-depth and so specific about what they’re doing, that’s really not the goal in what you’re trying to do for a business resume and for a resume in your MBA application.

It bears repeating – one page. And just in case you’re having trouble getting your resume down to one page and are thinking about tiny fonts… Shinewald has a warning.

Jeremy6 Generally two pages is not okay and you shouldn’t make the font very small.You certainly can work with your fonts and work with your margins, but you have to use judgment in terms of editing yourself, so that you’re not getting to the point where someone is going to get bogged down, frustrated and move on.

So no small fonts, it’s recommended to use a minimum of a 10 or 12 point font.Are there other ways to save space? Shinewald says yes.

Jeremy7 You don’t need to put 3 or 4 lines of your address, your email address, your phone number, etc. on this resume because it’s not like you’re walking into a job interview where you’re going to hand someone your resume and hope that they hold onto that and use it to call you back and they could lose it forever.It’s part of your application, they’re not going to call you via your resume. They’ve got all your information in their database and that’s valuable space that you can save. Name and maybe a line and get right to your professional entries.

UT’s Duran confirmed the space saver.

Duran4 I think its fine as long as their name is listed on there because we have all of their contact information on their application, sometimes it’s easier for us to see their cell phone number on their resume as well, but it’s certainly not a critical factor and that would have no bearing on the decision one way or another.

One issue that might come up while you’re trying to make your one page, chronological business resume is what if you have a side project, what if you are doing some consulting for a friend after hours or starting your own business? Should you include that information – absolutely, but how? Duran gives a good rule of thumb.

Duran5 If they’ve been involved in helping someone with doing a start up or launching a website or something like that and they feel like that’s going to enhance their application or demonstrate to us another set of skills that will help them with their career goals – again based on what those career goals might be – then I would say to go ahead and include that information in the body of their work experience section.But if you feel that it’s just something that stands out for them or adds another dimension to who they are and they just want to share that information with us, and they feel it’s still applicable, then I would include that in that additional section that I mentioned that they put in the bottom of their resume’.

Sneva explains the value of including those significant, meaningful side projects .

Sneva6 So if you have a full-time job at a certain company that’s what you’re going to want to make sure you’re listing first. And then we’re going to continue to follow down that resume and say ‘oh look, this is something that they started a year ago and it looks like they’re still doing that, it looks like it’s something that they’re doing while they’re working full-time.’ And in my mind I’m thinking this is something that I’d want to ask the applicant in an interview. And that’s a good thing. That’s really showing you a really good resume, when I’m coming out with questions that make the applicant very interesting and I’m very intrigued by this applicant. Now all of a sudden I’m saying ‘This is somebody that has a little bit more depth to them. We really want to bring them in for some questions.’

If you want to include a side project in your professional experience, make sure to label it appropriately – for example, ‘external consulting project’.Also, take care not to confuse the reader by going all over the place chronologically.

And remember, the resume is part of the whole application, some things- like a side project or a gap in your resume might be better portrayed in another space, like the optional essay which can explain gaps or quirks or anticipate questions that admissions committees might have about your experience.

It’s really important to explain those gaps because they send a certain signal and lead the admissions officers, like Vicki Duran to form their own story about you.

Duran6 Gaps in employment and job hopping are things that send up red flags for us.We would hope that if someone was doing quite a bit of job hopping or they haven’t worked in a couple of years that they use their optional essay to explain that to us so that we’re not making up stories in our own minds about what happened with this applicant or why they moved around so much.

Gaps in your employment have already occurred – you can explain them, but you can’t change them now.What are some of the things that you can change or put another way – what are things that you shouldn’t do on your resume? And what should you do instead?

USC’s Scott.

Scott5 I’ve seen people who have used very flowery fonts.You kind of want a very basic font that’s very clear.

And Shinewald says that a laundry list of your responsibilities is a real problem and kind of meaningless. He offers a made-up example of what to not to do, why and how to fix it.

Jeremy9 ‘Responsible for all marketing presentations, all client interactions during a major period of client acquisition for firm.’ And we have no sense of exactly who the client was and what you achieved. Whereas if you could just deliberately write… ‘presented the Scheinwald proposal to the board of MBAmission, project accepted within four hours of presentation.’

UT’s Duran has a particular pet peeve that she’s seen on a few resumes.

Duran7 when an individual is speaking in the third person on a resume. So they’re writing their resume’ project experience or work experience in a paragraph format and they’re speaking about themselves using their name, like Mr. Smith has completed this project, so they’re speaking about themselves in the third person. So that is not good.

And Scott says be careful of creative formatting.

Scott6 For instance, I’ve seen an engineering resume where he decided to divide the page in half and it was two block halves of information that almost looked like a newspaper page. And it took some time to kind of weed through that creativity to figure out ‘wait a minute, he started here and this is where he went next and then he actually got a promotion here. I took us time to get that.

And Sneva says while a typo is a forgivable human mistake, it does send a signal.

Sneva7 They either are producing a very sloppy application; they don’t care about our school well enough to make sure that they have edited, edited and looked over every possible detail; and maybe they’re not very detail-oriented. The more positive things that you can put forward, then you’re leaving us to our own assumptions of who you are.

Kellee Scott says the MBA candidate pool seems to be getting younger and this brings up a specific problem that the millennial generation candidates should avoid.

Scott7 You have to think about their lives as it is right now.We read about in high school they’re booked up every minute.They’ve got soccer, they’ve got this, they’re in organizations.Parents are carting them all over the place and that’s just what this generation has learned and grown up with and for them, those are accomplishments, those are achievements and it’s great for getting into undergrad. But once they get to the level of MBA programs or at least the top MBA programs out there, it’s good that you’re active, but we’re hoping you’ve taken that activity into your college life and beyond, so you don’t have to talk about what you did in high school.

So Scott recommends

Scott8 trying to remain current in what they’re doing.Because what I’ve seen lately is candidates who tend to put a lot of high school information, which is not necessary unless you’ve gone to some high visibility high school like a Bronx Science or Exeter and you were a valedictorian or a National Merit finalist.

So write about your most recent jobs, what you did and what you accomplished, but don’t list your stint flipping burgers between your sophomore and junior year in high school

That’s what not to do… let’s go to the other extreme and talk about how to make your resume stand out.

The most obvious is result-oriented experience.

Vicki Duran says unique experiences that show leadership and results stand out.

Duran8 We’ve had astronauts or rocket scientists in the program. That’s different, that’s interesting.We like to see a progression in the scope of their job and their responsibilities over a number of years.Certainly that demonstrated leadership and that can come out in the form of being on a board of a non-profit, leading a project on volunteer work. Certainly our military applicants have quite a few examples of leadership.If someone’s pursuing the entrepreneurial concentration, the fact that they’ve already been involved in a start up; and even people that are working in an engineering job, but on the side we’ve seen applications for people who have started a restaurant on the side while they’re working another regular full-time job. Just something interesting about that person that’s going to stand out and make them a little bit different than other applicants.

And Sneva has a not so obvious example.

Sneva8 We see so many resumes that don’t follow simple rules that when you do have one that’s very clear and simple, that’s actually the one that does stand out. (Laughs.) That’s actually the one that does look very special.In the past I have seen resumes that gave me exactly what I needed to know about the candidate and I could tell you what they wanted to do just by looking at that resume. Interestingly they also left me with questions about certain instances that made me very curious about this individual. That is someone I really want to meet, that is someone I really want to interview if I haven’t met them already, which makes them stand out in a way. After all, that’s really the goal of a resume is getting to the interview to showcase and articulate what that resume says and come to life over a conversation.

And the goal of this podcast was to give you plenty of information to assemble the best resume that you can.And I do believe we’ve succeeded.

For an example of a resume (on the website use this link: mbamission.com/docs/mbamission_resume_guide_ps.pdf)

or more MBA information, to find a transcript of this show or to register for your bi-weekly MBA podcast visit MBAPodcaster.com.

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This is MBA Podcaster, I am Heidi Pickman.

Thanks for listening and be sure to tune in next time when we explore another topic of interest in your quest for an MBA.

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