Making Resume For MBA Admission Interview

Making a resume for you MBA Admission Interviews

Once the written test is over, the next stage of the admission process for most B-schools invariably contains a personal interview.  For the PI, along with taking the usual prerequisites like the academic certificates, call letter etc, it is advisable to take a resume so as to provide a quick overview of what you have achieved. This is usually not mandated by the school or process but is a good idea for several reasons like

•    Most of the times, there is a good chance that the interviewers will not go through your certificates with any level of interest as there might be just too many certificates and also because it is too inefficient a way asses you. In such cases having a resume will help the interviewers get the same information without much effort and the more they come to know of your achievements, the better it is for you.

•    Another point is that however carefully you order your certificates, there is no control over which order the interviewer will adopt to go through your certificates folder. He/she can start from the beginning, middle or even the end. And since there is a chance that he/she will not go beyond the initial few certificates from where he/she starts, you will have no control over what things you can highlight. Of course you can always try to steer the conversation in the direction you want, but that is easier said than done. Here having a resume helps you highlight your achievements in the order that you want or at least makes sure that the interviewer does not miss out on the important ones.

•    There might be things that you do not have certificates for, but want to bring into the conversation like having organized an event or some hobbies. Again as part of your strategy to drive the conversation to these points, the resume can be the perfect trigger to go into these areas during your interview.

After appreciating the usefulness of resumes during interview, the next obvious question is how to go about building the same. Most aspirants have already had some exposure to resume building during the final year of their graduation or when they were switching jobs and the basics remain the same. Hence some pointers given below might sound obvious, but they are nevertheless important -:

•    Adopt a “customer centric” view and not a “product centric” view. This essentially means that you need to understand what the interviewers are looking for in an aspirant and try to match some of your strengths to that and then try highlighting them in your resume rather than blindly highlighting your strength. This will also help give some direction in wording the same points more potently.

•    A major mistake that a lot of aspirants do is to reuse the same resume that they used/ are using for their job applications. This is not a good idea since they are not looking to assess your prowess in your chosen domain but rather other skills that are important for a manager like leadership and organisational abilities. The remedy is to try and highlight those aspects that would make sense to the MBA that you are trying to do.

•    Chances are that you are reading this article 2 days before actually having to make a resume. Hopefully this is not the case as resume building is not a one day process. The idea is to have the resume building process in the back of your mind throughout the year. This is not an advice to live your life just to build your resume, but just that when opportunities come up that’s when you need to grab them and not to think about retrospectively.

•    Do not lie on your resume. Other than being the moral thing to do, understand that the people who are interviewing you have years of experience interviewing people just like you and will understand when you are being honest and when you’re not .

•     Don’t shy away from mentioning your hobbies and passions in the resume. MBA schools are looking for well rounded people and a lot of times most interviews end up being around hobbies and passions once the topic is effectively injected into the discussion.

•    As a corollary of the last point make sure that you write only about things that are  really your hobbies and passions. Imagine writing cricket as your hobby just for fun and ending up with an interviewer who shares your passion. Avoidable bad luck!

•    Another common mistake is with social service. Lots of people do it just for the sake of a resume point. Though it’s a great point to have on your resume, rest assured that if a discussion on this ensues, you will get grilled on your motives.

•    Make sure that you are thorough with each and every point in the resume as you could be grilled on any point.

•    While thinking of whether to remove or keep a point apply this logic. Is it projecting a relevant attribute of mine for the MBA seat I am vying for? If so am I OK with being grilled on it? If answer to anyone of these question is no, it’s better to remove the point.

A lot of colleges today give an application form to fill with plays the part of a resume with added questions where you will have to write SOP’s or answer some generic questions etc. In such cases also same rules apply. In the end the Resume/Bio Data is a power tool that can be used to enhance your chances to get that coveted seat in top notch b-school and should be given its due to help it help you.