The Secret That Will Help You Select the Right Bullets for Your CV
Consulting is the greatest career on earth. Most of you are qualified for this career, but you don’t believe it, so you don’t invest the time to actually understand the game of applying there. That’s also why you won’t get a job there. It’s not because you lack the smarts, it’s because you don’t understand how to play the game. It’s like playing soccer. The way you approach it is you’re going to go onto the field, and you’re going to kick the ball as hard as you can in any direction. You don’t spend the time to understand that there’s a goal, and you need to kick the ball into the net.
That’s the game — understanding where the goal is. It’s not about your intelligence. I’ve seen people who are not that outstanding — not that “smart” — but they do understand the game. Starting to understand the game is what this chapter is about. In the previous chapters we talked about how to set up your CV. But more than that we talked about how you set up your mind so that you can write a kick-ass CV, because success is 80% psychology. You’ve got to get your mind into the right place, and then you will succeed, you’ll be able to do the right things.
If you were doing your homework, you will have already written down the areas of experience where you were outstanding and brave, what were the highlights, what it is that makes you, and occasions where you moved the needle. Then you set out to rearrange this into a CV. As you looked at all this, you pulled out the great stuff and you prioritize them, but you also asked yourself, “Which of these examples should I put on there? How do I filter these?” There’s a simple answer to that. You filter it by what these people need in the consultancies, of course. You pull out the examples that make the reader believe, “Oh my word, this person has done it all. He’s got all the talents we need. Without even knowing it, he’s just been applying it. He or she’s a natural at doing this.”
I am going to tell you what the work of a consultant is like, and then you can look for examples in your life, where you’ve done stuff like that. This is the stuff that you put into your CV. Today I’m going to give you a filter to help you find the right things you want to put in there, and the stuff you want to prioritize. Remember, a CV is always individualized for each company — or kind of company — you apply to. If you’re applying to the big consultancies, it’s probably going to be all the same. But if you apply to a venture capital firm, it’s going to be different. Or if you want to go into private equity, or if you want to go for an engineering firm, it’s always different.
Let’s examine the tasks of a consultant; you need to filter out the ones you’re looking for. The consulting process consists of five steps: issue identification, problem structuring, data gathering, analysis, and synthesis. I’ll quickly explain these. Issue identification is the question, what is the real problem at hand here? Are we tackling the REAL problem or are we tackling some superficial problem? What is it we’re trying to solve? It’s a really crucial question. If you run for three months and you’re answering the wrong question that’s not relevant, you have a problem. That’s the first step: issue identification.
The second step — problem structuring — is how we break down the problem into manageable pieces, manageable analytical questions. For example, if you have a cost problem, you break down all the cost positions and ask the question: how can we improve each individual cost position? That’s how you structure the problem. Next, data gathering is self-explanatory — collecting information about the problem. Analysis is deciding what kind of analysis we subject our data to. Part of this is also handling data and cleaning data and coming up with numbers.
Synthesis is the question: what does this mean now? Part of synthesis is, of course, presentation. Along these lines, if you have done anything like that, put this stuff in your CV because that’s what they are looking for.
So ask yourself, what are the areas where you have done the thinking work, where you identified a problem or sharpened the thinking on a problem, or you initiated something because you saw a problem? This is all about issue identification. This is where you say, “I found — I identified a problem in the claims management”, and you talk a bit about what the problem was.
Next, problem structuring is where you break down a bigger problem and you organize it into smaller pieces. This could be sorting out a problem set-up — you made a plan — or you set up a team and assigned their tasks, or you created an analytical framework for something.
In data gathering you assembled 60,000 complaints and geocoded them and built a dashboard out of it — although building a dashboard is already the next thing, that’s analysis. Did you do any analysis? What sort of analysis did you do? What was the outcome? Then synthesis: answer the “so-what”? Did you come up with a report? Did you come up with recommendations? Did you present these recommendations somewhere?
So, these are the five categories of the consulting process. That’s what you’re going to be taught at McKinsey in the first week about how consulting works. Look for these five things and put them in there so that in every area of your work you can highlight that you did some of this. This is the stuff they’re looking for, and they’re saying, “Oh, this is very relevant information for us. This is relevant experience for the job.”
Nevertheless, I always say that McKinsey doesn’t hire experience — they hire talent, so it doesn’t mean you have to have done this in a consulting setting, but it would be nice if it’s showing through in other areas.
Go back to your CV, because I know that your CV is not yet perfect, and you can still improve on it. If you join the Facebook group, you get a chance to post your CV and get feedback on it. Any CV that is posted, I will reply to. We can totally turn around your CV and help you make it into a piece of art. Also, there’s a ton of videos in there where we discuss previous sessions with other people where you can get inspiration and you start to understand more in depth how this game works.
Do it. Don’t let yourself be stopped by yourself. There is an amazing career waiting for you.
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