With the end of core terms and the electives on offer, the Consulting Club kick started preparations for the placement season. Preparations are mainly targeted on two fronts:
CV / Resume preparation; and
Interview / case studies preparation
The first effort in this direction started off with a video conference with Rohit Kapoor and Shankar Prasad (both McKinsey and ISB Class of 2006) on CV Tips. The main takeaways from the session were:
-Identify your spike – it will either be education, work experience or extra curricular. Once identified, allocate the maximum page space to that spike.
-Work experience:
Emphasis on skills vs. content – you will be taking your skills to the new job, not the content of your work experience
-State results, not activities. For every activity there would be some result – emphasize that
-Prioritize achievements to state: Any bullet point, even if it appears to be remotely meaningless-delete it
-Use the situation – complication – resolution format. Identify the complexity in the job and then state the achievement
-No need to mention all projects done – just state the important ones
-Mention client names only if your previous employer did not have a policy of not disclosing client names
-Try and quantify achievements in numerical terms (increased revenues by XX%, improved efficiency by XX% etc.)
For other activities – if they are your lifetime passion and you have been perusing them since childhood then mention them in the extra-curricular section. Things done in educational institutes that do not fall in the above category – mention in the education section
Stress on value created by you at ISB – even if it is in a very small capacity
Keep font size consistent and leave enough white space on the CV
And most important – do not lie on your CV
Apart from this, some alumni have volunteered to review student CVs as a part of the interview preparations. The interview preparation efforts will start from this weekend and more posts on the progress will follow.
Nnumerous individual specific queries raised by students were also cleared. All in all it was a wonderful session and the student body went away with some important takeaways. This session was very useful to the entire student body and not just the Consulting aspirants.
Continuing with the series of Consulting firms visiting ISB, Diamond is visiting ISB on Friday. A post on that session will follow shortly.
