Diving into the art of crafting a standout MBA application resume, John Byrne, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards explore the nuances that distinguish it from a typical job resume. In this insightful discussion, they emphasize the unique role an MBA resume plays in making a first impression on admissions committees and how it serves as a snapshot of a candidate’s professional and personal journey. Caroline highlights the importance of keeping the resume concise, sticking to a one-page format, and avoiding overly creative designs that might distract from its substance.

One key insight Caroline shares is the significance of the extracurricular and interests section. Many admissions officers might start reading from the bottom, eyeing candidates’ personal stories and unique engagements. She advises specificity, encouraging applicants to enliven their narratives with details about how their passions have led to impactful actions or achievements, rather than listing generic interests.

Maria further distinguishes the MBA resume by explaining that it’s not just about demonstrating current skills but also about projecting a candidate’s future potential. Admissions readers are interested in envisioning where applicants might be decades from now. This forward-looking perspective requires candidates to present their accomplishments in a way that hints at their long-term promise and leadership potential. For MBA hopefuls, mastering this balance is crucial for standing out in a competitive applicant pool.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:06] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets & Quants. Welcome to business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Maria Wendt-Filla and Caroline Diarte Edwards. We’re going to talk about something that you may have taken for granted in an MBA application. It’s your resume. An MBA application resume isn’t just like any other resume you might do to get job. You’re trying to get into a highly selected business school, so the resume has to work on a different level. We’re going to talk about what are the do’s and what are the don’ts of crafting the perfect essay for a highly selected MBA program. Caroline, what’s your thoughts about this, having looked at tons of resumes as a managing director of admissions at NCI over many years?

[00:00:55] – Caroline

Yes, so the the resume should be a wonderful snapshot of your profile. So it should be a one-pager. It’s very rare that there would be any reason to go over one page. And it should present a highlights reel of your professional achievements, your academic achievements, and then some snippets of insights into the other things that you’ve got involved in, in your extracurriculars or your interests outside of work and study. And it’s often the first place that a far reader will when they open your application, they may look first at your resume or they may look first at the application form. But either way, it’s going to be one of the, typically one of the first two elements that they’re going to be looking at. It’s a very important introduction. I think that there are some great templates out there. Sometimes candidates use formatting that’s a bit too funky or they try to get very creative and it doesn’t always work. I think it’s good to stick to a standard business school template. The creativity in your resume, that’s not necessarily the best place to get your creative skills across in your application. So I would stick to a standard format.

[00:02:11] – Caroline

And then it’s really about getting those key messages across and also keeping those bullet points fairly brief and not getting bogged down in jargon or too much technical language, because that can be off-putting for a file reader. Something else to keep in mind is that often the file reader will start from the bottom and read up, and I’ve heard that from readers from other schools as well, that often they will look at the other interests and leadership in extracurriculars section, because often that’s the most interesting part of the resume, right? It’s the more human part of the resume. And so I think that people are naturally drawn to that section. So you want to have some interesting nuggets in there and not just talking about your interest. So a common mistake is to perhaps put you’re interested in travel, you’re interested in cooking, you’re interested in a particular sport. Those interests are probably extremely common, so you should get more specific about your interest and how you’ve perhaps engaged in that interest and perhaps some impact that you’ve had along the way. So try to bring it to life in that section, because that’ll often be the first impression that you’re making as a candidate.

[00:03:34] – John

I would bet it’s pretty hard to boil all this down in one page.

[00:03:39] – Caroline

Yes, it is. And applicants will often send us reams and reams in their first draft.

[00:03:45] – John

Of course they would.

[00:03:48] – Caroline

Because everything is important, right? And that’s often the biggest challenge. It’s a similar challenge with essay writing. It would be easier to tell your story in 2,000 words than 500 words. And it’s the same challenge with the resume. I think that’s often where some external feedback can help to bring an outside perspective and help you figure out what are the key elements that you should include and what is not so essential that you can take out.

[00:04:17] – John

Now, Maria, I know that every year you do a seminar of sorts for the Forte Foundation on Resume Writing for MBA applications. What do you tell those folks? Books?

[00:04:30] – Maria

Well, I cover a lot of what Caroline was just talking about. But I think if I had to distill all of my advice into one piece, it would be to keep in mind that the admissions reader has a limited amount of time, and also that what they are looking for is they’re trying to predict who you are going to be in 20 or 30 years based on the resume that you’re submitting today. So the fundamental difference between the resume you use to apply for a job and And the resume that you use to apply for a business school is that when you’re applying for a job, you are trying to prove to this reader on the other side that you have the skills and abilities to do a opening that is open right now, a role that is open right now. And usually that role might be a step or two above where you are today, and therefore proving competence at certain skills that you have in your career right now. That is the goal for the job resume. So that technical jargon, for example, that Caroline mentioned, right? So if you’re a software engineer proving that you can write in Java and PHP and whatever the different languages are, that is very important to become a slightly more senior software engineer.

[00:05:38] – Maria

But if you’re a software engineer applying to business school, the job that you’re applying for, the job, the position in the class that you’re applying for is not to prove to me that you’re a very, very good engineer. It’s to prove to me that you have the capacity to become an excellent leader of technical people or perhaps a technical company in the future. The skills that you would highlight It would be completely different to the point where I actually advocate, for example, that software engineers do not even have on their resume here the 15 different computer languages that I can write in, that I can code in. Because to me, that’s not relevant. That’s not the job I’m hiring you for. I’m hiring you to become an alumnus or alumna of my program that’s going to really make the program proud. And that’s why when you are distilling your life down onto one sheet of paper, think about highlighting and emphasizing your skills in working with other people, persuading other people, being creative. What are the skills that you would need, not today, but the skills that you would need 20 years from now as, say, the CEO of a tech company?

[00:06:41] – Maria

And then highlight as much as you can showing me that you have at least the inklings, the beginnings of those skills.

[00:06:48] – John

That sounds like a much more difficult task than simply saying, I know cobalt.

[00:06:57] – Maria

Yeah, indeed.

[00:06:58] – John

Or any other The acronym, which I do not know the meaning of in software languages.

[00:07:05] – Maria

Well, yeah, the acronyms are problematic because, first of all, the reader probably may not even know what the acronym means to begin with. But even if they did, you’re barking up the wrong tree. You’re spending a lot of effort proving something that isn’t actually all that relevant to me.

[00:07:21] – John

Right, exactly. How do you know when you have the right resume? In other words, who would you show it to? I mean, if you don’t have a consultant, for example, who’s done hundreds, if not thousands of these for other applicants, how do you know you’re on the right track?

[00:07:36] – Maria

I would show it to somebody who is a well-educated professional, but who does not work in your company and ideally does not even work in your field. Because if they work in your field, if we stay with the technology example, even little things that might not be clear to an admissions reader may be clear to them. So they might not pick up on things that might be confusing to somebody else. You You want someone who has a certain foundation of education, of course. You don’t have to find just a random person on the street. But ideally, someone who doesn’t work in what you do. If I had to pick the ideal person, it would be someone who works in recruiting for maybe perhaps a different type of company, because a lot of times, admissions readers, sometimes they used to work in recruiting, say for consulting firms or banks. And so many of them are bringing that recruiter’s lens to things. But yeah, maybe somebody who doesn’t quite know the ins and outs of what you’re doing. So that way any of those inside jokes, inside baseball types of references will get caught.

[00:08:38] – John

Now, I remember when I did my first resume many years ago, and I haven’t done a resume in quite some time, I It would be a very… How would I put it? It wouldn’t be colloquially. It wouldn’t be informal. It was a very formal document. I wonder if today’s times suggests that we should be a little more informal about how we present ourselves, even in resume form, or should you still be quite formal? Caroline, what do you think?

[00:09:09] – Caroline

I would keep this very formal. I think that you’ve got more scope in the essays to show your personality, but with a resume, it should really be in a formal style, standard format. You want to make it easy for the reader to get the information that they want, and they have an expectation about what they’re going to see and how they’re going to see the information structured. If you start playing around with that, then it’s just going to take them harder to try and grasp what they want to grasp, and that will frustrate them. That’s not what you want to do. You want to make the life of the admissions for our reader as easy as possible. So it’s fine to let your personality show through, and you should let your personality show through in other parts of the application, especially the essays. But you don’t want too much personality coming through in the resume, because if it is, then it might not be the right impression that you want to make. So definitely keep it formal. And because you need to be so brief, you just don’t have a lot of scope for conveying anything beyond the bare facts.

[00:10:15] – Caroline

Because there are very few words that you could fit on that page, and you don’t want to cram it in. And I’ve seen resumes where the font has been squeezed down and the line spacing, squeezed down, so they’ve crammed as much as possible onto one page. You don’t want to do that. You want there to be a bit of space and air on the page. So it is easy on the eye. But when you’re doing that, necessarily, you have to get to the point extremely quickly. So you have to be very specific. You have to be very specific, you have to quantify things. You need to give a few examples here and there, and that is difficult to do. And so you just have to keep your language extremely tight.

[00:11:01] – John

Other than actually saying what you did, where you worked, how long you worked there, how important is it to say what results you got? Maria?

[00:11:11] – Maria

I think it’s one of the most important things to the extent that you can convey it, because if you are able to quantify or describe the results in some way, then you’re conveying that your efforts were not simply in vain or that you’re not just wasting your time with a lot of busy work. If you together this enormous analysis that took you six months, and then nobody actually used the analysis to do anything, and they filed it away somewhere, and no one ever opened it again, you still did the effort. You still put in the work, and you still learned from that. But If you instead gave someone that report and then they’re like, Okay, great, we’re going to acquire one of our competitors, now it’s not just that you did the work, but that you were actually able to influence others. I think one of the core leadership traits that anyone should convey throughout the application is the ability to influence others. To the extent that oftentimes the results are evidence that somebody somewhere took us seriously and that something was actually executed in a positive way, I definitely think that that should be a key thing that you express.

[00:12:14] – John

You go to a business school’s website and you go to the admissions section, and inevitably, they’ll give you some vague terms about how they evaluate candidates. I wonder if someone applying to a given school should look at that and then follow that advice as a template for creating the resume, or if that is a bad idea. Caroline, what do you think?

[00:12:39] – Caroline

Well, some schools do offer templates that you can use, and that’s absolutely a good idea to follow that. You don’t have to use the school’s templates because they’re often very similar. So don’t feel that you have to change your format or template for different schools, but just pick one of the school’s templates and use that. I think that’s a great plan.

[00:13:02] – John

Right. And what about coming off like you’re bragging about your accomplishments in a resume? I mean, you could come off cocky or arrogant, couldn’t you?

[00:13:12] – Caroline

Yes, you could. I think that what is important is to show rather than tell. Rather than say that there was an outstanding outcome or describe it with adjectives, you should be more specific. As Maria said, showing those results is very important and trying to quantify that. Let the facts speak for themselves rather than using language that sounds a bit overblown and descriptive.

[00:13:41] – John

How many times do you work with a candidate who actually submits a perfect resume to you. Maria?

[00:13:48] – Maria

If they haven’t gone through any lessons first, it’s very rare. I think a lot of people… The average person applying to business school is maybe four, six years post-college. They’ve probably had one to two promotions so far in their careers, and they have a very particular set of skills that has gotten them to where they are today. But what makes you successful in your early career is not what makes you successful in your later career. And so I think shifting that mindset away from the job hunting, again, to that longer term leadership view is very difficult. And I think also folks tend to mistakenly think that the resume is meant to be a warehouse of literally everything I’ve ever done and literally every responsibility I have ever had said, when that’s simply not the case. I think Caroline might have called it the greatest hits, or she alluded to this earlier, that it should be a summary, but it’s the summary of the things you most want them to know about you. It is not meant to be an inventory of an accounting of every five minutes that you’ve spent, every task that you’ve done ever.

[00:14:50] – Maria

So you need to be very selective in choosing those examples that really highlight those skills, even if it means cutting out entire taking a machete to other parts of it and cutting out a lot of things that you might otherwise put.

[00:15:05] – John

I know as a writer, the most difficult thing to do is to edit yourself and to basically lose stuff that doesn’t really add to the article, but that you really spend a lot of time crafting. It’s really painful to do that, but it’s a necessary step in crafting something that’s worthwhile. What What are some of the other don’ts? Maria, what do you tell these folks about what not to do?

[00:15:35] – Maria

I think Caroline alluded to earlier to this idea of white space, not putting everything in a four-point font with 0. 75 pixels of space between each line. I don’t think any admissions reader is like, Woohoo, squinting. Squinting is my favorite hobby. I can’t wait to really just scrunch my face up to try to read this. I also tell people, you want it to be inviting because if we keep in mind the fact that it is probably going to be either the first or the second thing that is looked at, you don’t want them to open it up and just be overwhelmed by a mountain of text and you go, Oh, boy. Even if the person is amazing, you’re going to be a little grumpy, even subconsciously of like, What is all of this? Versus if you open up the resume file and it’s clean and inviting and my eye knows where to rest. There’s resting spaces between each of the bullets, for example. A lot of times I tell people, think about how when diamonds have the Cs, like carrot and cut, the Cs for resumes are to cut, condense, and to combine. For example, a common example, let’s say someone works in management consulting and they’re, let’s say, a supply chain consultant.

[00:16:50] – Maria

They could have five separate bullets that it’s like, I optimize a supply chain for this client. I optimize another supply chain for another client. I optimize a third supply chain for a third client. If you have If you’re running out of space, and if those are really terrific examples that highlight your leadership, great, go for it. But if you’re running out of space, why not just say, I did three optimization projects for three different clients. That can be a way, for example, to free things up where you’re still conveying information about yourself, but maybe you’re not wasting a ton of space on more superfluous pieces.

[00:17:21] – John

Okay, so Maria has her three Cs. Caroline, what do you have?

[00:17:27] – Caroline

Well, some of the things that are important to keep in mind, you are looking to differentiate yourself in a competitive pool. So as Maria said, if you’re a management consultant who’s applying, in that case, you probably have a bunch of other peers who are applying from your industry and almost certainly your own company. It’s different, as Maria said, from putting your accomplishments in a job resume because you are looking to differentiate yourself, for example, from other McKinsey, Bain, or BCG, or Deloitte, Accenture, et cetera consultants. In that case, you don’t want to spend too much time highlighting the obvious things that the file reader will know that you will do as part of your job, and everyone else with that background is also doing. Try to highlight accomplishments that will differentiate you, that may be a bit unusual for someone of your position or in your particular team or group, perhaps a responsibility that you’ve taken on that was not expected of you, or a project that’s particularly interesting and unusual. So I think that differentiation can help Related to that, you don’t need to explain what a McKinsey consultant or what a Goldman Sachs investment banker does in your resume.

[00:18:55] – Caroline

The final reader will be familiar with the typical tasks and responsibilities of applicants coming from big feeder firms. On the other hand, if you’re coming from a firm that is less well known, perhaps you’re working in a startup, then you perhaps should spend a little bit more time in your resume explaining, I’m just saying a few words about what the company is and spelling out in a bit more detail what your role has been, because they won’t necessarily have that background. And then another thing to keep in mind is that if you have a resume that you’ve prepared for a job application, as Maria said, it is quite a different exercise. And another difference is that an employer will care most of all about your professional experience of accomplishments. And that’s, of course, critical for business school, but they have a more rounded perspective, right? So they’re also very keen on understanding your academic accomplishments and what else it is that you bring to the table beyond your professional accomplishments and your academic background. All those other extracurriculars that perhaps give a sense of what student you’ll be on campus, what is it that you’re going to get involved in, will you be an active member of the alumni community?

[00:20:11] – Caroline

That’s also really important to the school. And so those additional information sections are more important in the eyes of business school than they will be in the eyes of an employer.

[00:20:23] – John

This discussion makes me think that we’ve lost the art of the resume. In the same way that the iPhone and the computer have diminished cursive writing, LinkedIn has diminished the writing of a resume. When we did our first resume, there was no LinkedIn. Today, everyone refers to LinkedIn almost as a default to look at someone’s career and what they’ve accomplished in their life as opposed to a resume. I wonder, Maria, do you think we’ve lost the skill of resume writing in the same way that we’ve lost the skill of cursive writing?

[00:21:05] – Maria

Yeah. I think a lot of these digital platforms and advances are replacing some of what used to be a human element. I would not advise that anyone use ChatGPT, for example, for their resume, because I think it would become a little too mechanical. But yeah, I think the benefit of you, the art of writing the resume or the act and process of writing the resume is actually beneficial for you as an applicant because it forces you to slow down and really evaluate, where have I been so far? When have I been most effective? When have I maybe not been so effective? From that, you start to glean What sorts of environments you do well in? Where do you perform at your best, and so where do I want to go in the future? This helps you craft your why MBA argument. Then once you get to the MBA, it helps you start to narrow down which sorts of opportunities to pursue because there’s It’s going to be this drinking from a fire hose of 5 million companies that are recruiting on campus, and each job sounds better than the last. Even the act of sitting down and really just starting with a blank page and writing that resume, I think it actually also helps as a self-reflection exercise as well, which is vital for this process, too.

[00:22:20] – John

Yeah. So just as everyone counsel someone before they tackle their essays to go through a period of introspection, you’re saying resume creation also requires that same level of thinking over what you’ve done, how you’ve done it, and what you should highlight. It’s an introspective exercise, just as writing an effective and compelling essay would be. Yes. There you have it. Now, any last words of wisdom on the resume?

[00:22:50] – Caroline

Well, something I would add is you mentioned LinkedIn, and it is important to check that you align things. You may need to update your LinkedIn profile when you’ve done on your resume. You want to make sure that if they check your LinkedIn profile, that there are no inconsistencies between your resume and your LinkedIn profile, and also with the application form, because you’ll be entering data in the application form itself that is repeated to a certain extent in the resume. It’s important to be very careful that all of those elements cross-check, and you’d be surprised how often people make mistakes with that. Just incorrect data entry on a year or a month or just missing something out that is key, seems to be key on one part of the application and then isn’t reflected in one of those other elements. So that’s important. And then just think about your key messages and what it is that you want the far reader to remember about you. As Maria said, you really need to reflect on how you want to convey your candidacy and what are the key elements you want to get across. And there should be consistency in the key messaging and the strengths that come across, not just from your resume, but how is that backed up from other elements?

[00:24:08] – Caroline

So your recommendations, your essays, and so on, so that there is a consistent picture that’s being built overall.

[00:24:15] – Maria

I have a question for you, Caroline. In your time as an admissions reader or in the job that you’ve had, when you mentioned some of these careless mistakes that happen, are there any in particular that you remember that have been particularly either memorable or cringeworthy or perhaps even humorous?

[00:24:34] – Caroline

I like that. Dates are very easy to get wrong. I’ve seen people have put today’s date for their date of birth or an application for. They were quite literally born yesterday. Right.

[00:24:49] – Maria

I wasn’t born yesterday.

[00:24:51] – Caroline

Or just mistakes in job titles, for example, where they put something on their resume, but that doesn’t match up with the job title that they have on their LinkedIn profile. So then you start wondering, are they exaggerating their accomplishments for the purpose of their application? Are they trying to amp up their title? I think that cross-checking is really important because five readers won’t always have time to Google you and to check out your LinkedIn profile, but they might do. So you need to be prepared for that.

[00:25:23] – Maria

I think because the LinkedIn profile is public facing, I think it does tend to be a little bit more modest because you know your boss and your coworkers can easily see it. I think it’s a good litmus test sometimes. Just make sure, as you said, if your title is really associate consultant, don’t put in the resume that you’re a VP or something like that, because Because if it’s on your LinkedIn, it’s a little bit… It usually tends to be a little bit more modest because it keeps you honest.

[00:25:50] – Caroline

Exactly. That’s right.

[00:25:52] – John

And inconsistencies are real red flags to admission officials, and they can crop up anywhere. In the recommendation letter, against what you say you’ve done in the resume, against a LinkedIn profile, in one of the essays and how it may not line up with other parts of the application. That is a real quick way to be thrown into the reject pile, I think. Okay, well, we’ve heard that Michael Porter, of course, at Harvard, has his Five Forces model. Maria has her Three Cs model. Cut, Condense, and combine. We’re wishing that you composed that perfect resume to help your candidacy at the School of Your Choice. This is John Byrne with Poets & Quats. Thanks for listening.