🤨 5 Things We Hate About Most of Your MBA Application Resumes

“Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”

This age old advice applies to sartorial decisions in your professional life, for sure. But it’s equally applicable to your decisions on how to dress up your resume for your MBA application, as well. You wouldn’t head into a job interview without clothing yourself appropriately — don’t make a similar mistake by not tuning your resume for this specific occasion. Here’s some major ways you’ll want to dress your resume for MBA applications that differ vs. recruiting for a new job:

1. Goals: Human resources departments are looking for the best candidate for a specific role. MBA admissions committees are sorting through a range of applicants from unbelievably diverse backgrounds. Here, your competitive set is not just the other applicants like you, but top tier candidates with broad professional experiences. Your resume is thus seeking to demonstrate not just your excellence in your industry, but your edges across leadership, teamwork, managerial and other multi-faceted dimensions. Anything not contributing towards that should be evaluated, adjusted, or removed.
2. Accessibility of Language: In other words, dumb down the jargon. The technical speak is so familiar to people in your industry does you no favors in your MBA resume. Admission committees are rarely going to be impressed by fancy terms or big words. If you’re considering including a technical term, consider (a) why it’s important, and (b) if the term is necessary to convey that. A semi-joking comparison we sometimes use: imagine you are trying to explain and impress an uninformed relative with your accomplishments. How would you do it?
3. Quality vs. Quantity: This is a common one. Most professional resumes include everything the applicant can think of. Why not? Maybe something on there will stick out and catch a human resource employee’s eye. But application resumes should strive to be efficient — every inclusion should help paint the picture of you as an accomplished individual choosing business school at an inflection point in your pursuit of big goals.
4. Familiar Formatting: Your application resume is not the place to get overly creative. Whereas a unique resume with your photo or a QR code might help you stand out against a pile of competing job seekers, this isn’t how admissions committees are looking for you to differentiate yourself. Instead, check out our resume template as a starting point, clean up any careless mistakes, and make your bullets active and punchy to stand out via what you say vs. how it looks.
5. Personality Forward: If you’re looking for other ways to distinguish yourself, see how you might bring your personality forward in your resume. Your professional accomplishments are still your resume’s primary focus. But adding in vibrant personal interests and hobbies can show new sides that don’t come up elsewhere in the app, while expanding the detail on your passion for your current non-profit can demonstrate your well-roundedness.

Reminder: while essays are where you can speak the most on your history and goals, your resume is the “backbone” of your application. It’s the fact sheet that holds your application together. Just like wearing shorts to your job interview, dressing your resume incorrectly for MBA apps could crush your dreams before you even have a chance.

This article was originally published in BeenThere’s newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

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