The Consulting CV and Cover Letter

The four things being looked for

A screener is answering four questions in under a minute. Everything on the page should help with one of them.

• Can this person think? Academic record, quantitative coursework, competitions, anything that demonstrates analytical capability.
• Have they achieved something? Evidence of results rather than participation, in whatever domain.
• Can they work with people? Leadership, teams, and situations where the outcome depended on others.
• Will a client take them seriously? Communication, presence, and the absence of anything that reads as careless.

Structure and length

One page for a student or a recent graduate, without exception. Reverse chronological within each section. Education first while you are a student, experience first once you have two or more years of it.

Sections in this order: education, work experience, leadership and activities, additional skills. Keep formatting plain, keep it readable when printed in black and white, and use a normal typeface. There are no marks for design, and a page that looks unusual only draws attention to the content.

Writing a bullet that earns its line

The standard shape is action, method, result, with a number in it. Most candidate bullets describe a responsibility and stop, which tells a reader what you were assigned rather than what you did.

Compare: "Responsible for social media for the society" against "Grew society membership 40 per cent to 280 by rebuilding the recruitment campaign around three target courses". The second names the action, the method and the outcome, and it is not a grander achievement. It is the same achievement, described.

• Lead with a verb that carries meaning. Analysed, built, negotiated, led, launched. Not assisted, supported or was involved in.
• Quantify wherever an honest number exists: money, people, percentage, time saved, rank out of a field.
• Where no number exists, name the outcome anyway. Not everything is measurable and everything has a result.
• Two to four bullets per role, weighted towards the most recent and most relevant.
• Cut anything from before university unless it is genuinely exceptional.

The things that get a consulting CV rejected

• Typos and inconsistent formatting. In a role where a client reads your documents, this is read as evidence rather than as a slip.
• Duty lists with no outcomes, which is the most common failure by a wide margin.
• A skills section claiming fluency in software everyone uses. Delete it and use the space.
• Unexplained gaps. A line stating what you were doing is fine; a gap invites a worse assumption.
• A second page containing nothing that could not have been cut.
• Grades omitted. If a required grade is missing, a screener assumes the worst rather than asking.

What a cover letter is for

Where a letter is requested, it has exactly one job the CV cannot do: explain the connection between this person and this firm. It is not a prose version of your CV, and a paragraph summarising your own document is the fastest way to lose the reader.

Three short paragraphs is enough. Why consulting, in terms of something you have actually done rather than a quality you claim to admire. Why this firm, naming a practice, a client type or a conversation. And why you, pointing at one or two pieces of evidence from the CV and saying what they demonstrate. Under 350 words. Nobody has ever been rejected for brevity.

Short-answer boxes, which matter more than the letter

Many firms have replaced the letter with two or three short questions of 150 to 300 words each: describe a time you solved a difficult problem, why this firm, what would you change about an organisation you know. These are read properly, because they are short.

Treat each as a miniature behavioural answer with a structure: situation in one sentence, what you did in three or four, outcome in one, and what you took from it in one. Answer the question that was asked rather than the one you prepared. The most common failure here is a beautifully written response to a slightly different prompt.

If your background is unusual

Consulting hires more varied backgrounds than most graduate careers, including humanities students, scientists, lawyers and people changing career entirely. The screener is not looking for a business degree; they are looking for the four signals above, which any subject can provide.

Where a background is genuinely unusual, name the transferable evidence explicitly rather than hoping it is inferred. A history finalist who researched, structured and defended an argument under supervision has done something closer to consulting than a business student who has not. Say so in a line, and let the rest of the page carry it.