These Three Bullets Should Be On Your MBA Resume

Updated 10.1.20

These three bullets should be on your MBA resume if you want to stand out. When crafting your application, your resume deserves special attention. The right MBA resume bullets can make the difference between acceptance and rejection. Round 2 deadlines are three months away. If you haven’t started your MBA resume, now is the time. As an MBA admissions consultant, I see one mistake repeatedly. Candidates underestimate the resume portion. Most clients need ten or more iterations to get it right. Your resume serves as your executive summary. It tells the concise story of your career growth. It also highlights your focus areas and motivations. However, not all resume bullets are created equal!

Simply describing what you did doesn’t paint a complete picture. The admissions committee wants to know how and why you will succeed in the future. That is what they are truly assessing. Below are three types of bullets for your resume. They demonstrate career progression. They also show leadership potential. You can pick from experiences in college, work, or community. But before you hit submit, include all three story types. Embed them in your resume in some way.

1. A Time When You Created: Creators take it upon themselves to innovate. They hope to produce ‘lasting value,’ as Kellogg would say. They conceptualize solutions and execute them. They sell the idea. They solve problems along the way. They often motivate teams to help them succeed. These are requisite skills for success in virtually any post-MBA career path! So, whether you developed a new logistics plan for your team (like one of my clients right now) or established a fundraiser for a cause that you care about, make sure you are able to provide evidence that you are someone who can create and innovate.
2. A Time When You Fixed: When you fix something broken or suboptimal, you signal strong work ethic, that you care, and that you are a team player. So often things remain broken because people find solutions daunting. Others tried before and failed, or simply isn’t ‘fun’ work. Many people walk around problems. Leaders stop. They make things better because they know it’ll help everyone in the long run. Perhaps you took the time to go back and adjust the data in your company’s CRM so that you could make better data driven decisions or rewrote the onboarding program for your company so that it was brought up to current times. Whatever the case, providing evidence that you “fix what’s broken” can go a long way in demonstrating your character and leadership potential.
3. A Time When You Enhanced: Some of the best business leaders are those who subscribe to the notion of continuous improvement. Even if something isn’t ‘broken’, it can often be done better. Leaders keep asking questions and making improvements.  Perhaps you questioned whether the algorithm your company was using was the best option or maybe you pushed back when senior leadership wanted to delay the launch of a new service. Whatever the case, and whatever the action, telling a story about a time when you enhanced or improved a process, project, or even product can signal that you are the type of person who believes in pushing the boundaries and working towards excellence (e.g. you don’t just take orders and not care whether it’s the best it could be).

If you have multiple stories for each of these categories, great! But at a minimum, try to weave at least one of each of these categories into your resume to ensure that your leadership potential shines through!

 

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