Build a strong resume

Step-by-step guidance on how to draft a strong resume to apply to top universities

What they want to see?

Ten seconds is a pretty short time. That´s the time a recruiter spends on average scanning your resume. Today, most universities, unlike tech or consulting companies, rely on recruiters (real humans) rather than automatic applicant systems.

Resumes won´t get you into a program, but they are the first entry point to the recruitment process. For the initial screening, it´s important to have a top-notch resume.

What they want to see?

• You have strong grades

• You achieved high standardized test scores(IELTS, GRE and others)

• You have relevant past experience and skills transferable to the classroom and your future jobs. You achieved significant impact and are able to quantify it

• You make the resume easy to scan to find all these things (above)

• You are structured and have attention to detail

Most of the recommendations below are relevant regardless of which university or program you are targeting. This is because they are focused on how to write in a structured, clean, and straightforward way. That said, we always recommend spending some time doing your own research and networking to ensure the the resume translates you in the recruitment process and answers the specifics.

Where to start?

Writing a good resume takes time, and it´s an iterative process. Most of the points below are critical, regardless of whether you already have a draft resume or not.

• Take time to reflect on your career and what universities and programs you want to target. This is important because having a clear target makes your resume more focused and convincing.

• Begin by writing an unedited full list detailing your complete history (work, education, extracurricular, etc.). Be exhaustive. Detailing all your experiences will help you not to forget anything relevant and also gain clarity on your unique value — your skills, experiences, knowledge areas, accomplishments, values, passions, and interests.

• Write a master resume for your ideal university or program and use it as a base. Then, for each application, make the necessary customizations (more in "Resume customization" below). Think about which past experience, skills, and expertise are most relevant to what you want to do next.

• Customize your resume to the programs you are applying to. Do not forget to keep track of resume versions. A simple Excel file can do. It is important that you know which resume you submitted to which university, so you have it at hand before the interviews.

• Ask for feedback about your master resume within your network or to new people, as well as the different versions you use for different applications. Ideally, pick people who have experience in the industry or role you are aiming for.

There is a trade-off between breadth and depth - this is, how many applications you submit and the quality of these. Our recommendation is to focus on depth: fewer, strong applications for as much time as needed.

Structure

The general structure of a resume is very simple:

Contact info/ personal details

Name and last name, email, phone (w/ prefix), LinkedIn link

Education

Bachelor, specializations, grades or cut offs (e.g. top 5%), trainings,

courses, and certifications

Work experience

List of all the companies/ positions (from latest to earliest), with two to four bullet points for each position

Additional info

Other skills, languages, and volunteering

Content & Style

Personal Info

• Use a larger font for your name to make it stand out

• Don't insert your headshot, age or date of birth, marital status, or gender unless specifically requested by the university

• Use a neutral/professional email address

• Don´t include your home address. This may cause data privacy issues; your general region/ country is enough

• No need to label each item, e.g “email:”, “tel:”, etc. since these are obvious

Education

This section is more relevant when applying for studies to universities than for jobs to companies. Do not include just the degree and university names. It gives a bad impression that you only have that to say about four to five years of your life.

These are recommendations to improve this section:

• If you have multiple degrees (e.g.: a BA and an MBA), you should write a subsection for each degree, starting with your highest level of education first

• For each degree, include the name of the degree, university, and dates in the headline (full names). You should also describe relevant course content briefly, ideally relevant for the MBA or Master´s you are applying to (no more than one line). For example, if you studied Engineering, you may want to mention "Specialization: Computer Sciences and Cybersecurity"

• If you have written a thesis or a dissertation, you should also summarize the topic (one to two lines) in a way that is very easy to understand

• List your grades and ranking position if good (e.g. GPA; top 5%) as well as results on other standardized tests you have taken (e.g. SAT, GMAT, etc.)

• Detail all the awards and scholarships you have received, and most importantly how competitive they were (e.g. Name scholarship; two awardees for 1,000 students)

• List all the relevant courses and trainings with year and a short description, even if they were given by your employer and you have no diploma/ certificate. If your list is too long, select the ones that are most important for the job or the company you want. If they are not recent, consider removing the years

• Self-education is particularly helpful if you’re switching sectors and want to share what you’re learning and how, whether it’s a summary of your reading list or an in-depth mentorship relationship you’ve had with someone in the field

Work experience

This is an important part of the resume. Generally, list all the jobs and companies that are relevant for your application. There is no need to tell that you were a summer camp teacher 10 years ago. Place in reverse chronological order, putting most recent employment at the top of the order.

Other important considerations are:

• When allocating resume space to each job or role, you should proportion them roughly by how long you had that job or role. Also, you may want to expand on the details of your latest job a bit more if it is the most relevant for your application

• If you only had one employer, but worked there for a long period of time, it may be helpful to separate the roles/ projects. This way it is more structured and shows that you had different experiences (even within the same organization)

• Include the name of the position you held and the employer as well as the location (city or state; country) and dates in the headline (ideally in bold/larger size, so it is easier for the reader to find)

• If you have some time gaps in your resume, consider including years and not months (regardless of this, be prepared to explain the gaps to the recruitment team)

• Unless your company is very recognizable by name, you may want to include a little blurb about what they do (e.g. "Premier professional development association for engineers") (optional)

How to describe past experience

Writing a resume is not about listing everything you did and enumerating many important tasks. Strive to show quantified impact. Readers want to see evidence of how your work has made an impact, so keep bullets tight and focused on data-driven results as much as possible.

Some important considerations:

• First think about what expertise and skills you want to highlight and how you want to portray yourself, zooming in on a few that you think are most important - then write the bullet points. Without having a clear understanding of these aspects, it is easy to end up just listing random things

• For each job, try to use three to four bullet points; each bullet point is approx. three lines long. This isn´t a science but a rule-of-thumb.

• Show you have the skills and knowledge, don't just include adjectives such as “Critical thinker” or “Good communicator”. They sound cliché and give no context or details

• Balance the skills and expertise; You should demonstrate as much as possible to cover all the aspects that are relevant to your application. For instance, avoid writing three bullet points that focus on the same expertise (team management) within the same job

• Be specific about your contribution, not what your team was doing. It’s great that your team created a full-stack application with Vue.js, but if you didn’t touch any of that code, it’s going to come out in your interview

• Focus on the results of what you did and quantify them as much as possible to highlight the tangible contributions you have made (ideally all bullet points should include quantified impact). This is an example of how to be specific:

  • Bad: Responsible for organizing events and panels

  • Good: Planned and coordinated panels on public health for audiences of 25–50 undergraduates on a bimonthly basis

  
  

• Start each bullet point with an action verb that matches the skills a university is looking for. "Led", "Designed" or "Presented" are good examples of such verbs (here you have more examples). They should be in past tense for previous positions and in present tense for your current position

• Order bullet points by priority since recruiters do not always read all the content

• Avoid the use of first-person pronouns, i.e., I, me, mine, myself

• Ensure your resume bullets are simple, non-technical and exclude acronyms that are only known by people in your company. It is better to write "Engagement manager" than "EM", and "North America" than "NAM".

How to write strong bullet points

You can use the START Method to give structure and content to your bullet points (this methodology is also used in behavioral questions; for more detail read here).

Here is an example:

First, think about the pieces (no need to write down)

Skill/expertise you want to show: initiative + problem solving / operational efficiency

Situation: The trainees were learning too slowly and could not navigate the company’s data tracking system by the end of the two-week training period. Instead, they were not ready for another two weeks.

Task: Help trainees learn the system faster.

Action-Flow: Initiated, wrote, and edited the first training manual for the company’s data tracking system. Successfully presented proposal to use manual to management. Revised training program curriculum to implement new manual. Trainees worked through the manual during the two-week training period.

Results: At the end of the training period, trainees were ready to use the data tracking system two weeks earlier than expected; the training manual was adopted across the company and is still in use.

Finally, put the pieces together (write down)

FINAL STATEMENT FOR RESUME: Proactively developed the first training manual for company’s data tracking system, which cut entry-level training time by half; it was adopted across the company (X offices) and is still in use today.

Additional Information

This section is a bit more open. Keep it short, include things that are relevant to your application, and emphasize depth over breadth (e.g. better to include one leadership role in an ONG than being a member of three).

Here are a few examples of things you could include:

• Side businesses - do not mention only the business type; include things you have achieved (MVP, sales, customers, etc.)

• Tech skills (read more below)

• Personal projects - e.g. your own website or blog about industry trends or, in the case of early-career tech profiles, GitHub repositories, open-source contributions, or freelance work

• Volunteering - e.g, student mentor on Y topic

• Writing awards - e.g. published a poem in Medium

• Sports achievements - e.g. part of college football team

• Interests (optional)

Including tech skills?

Make sure you group skills by category such as:

• Languages - be specific about your knowledge level and do not lie

• Project management (PMI, Scrum, etc.)

• Product management (product roadmap, UX design, product life cycle management, etc.,)

• Programming and coding (C/C++, Phyton, etc.)

• Software development (algorithms, coding, data science, etc.)

• Design softwares (HTMP, Photoshop, color theory, etc.)

• Marketing (social media management, copywriting, google analytics, SEO, etc.)

• Information technology (Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), System & server administration)

• Big data (data mining/ analysis, ETL processes, NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra), etc.)

For each language, you should specify your level of proficiency. For the technical skills, you can also specify your level (e.g. experienced or expert).

Avoid including productivity software such as Salesforce, Google Suit or Teams since most people know them.

Read a more detailed list of skills here.

Including interests?

There are mixed feelings about this.

The positive side of including them is to help the recruiter remember you, hopefully because the interests were relevant and interesting. Interests can be useful because they give the interviewer something to connect with you on, and it makes you more than just a faceless resume. Cool samples include, for example, writing a novel, 10 years of experience in rock climbing, a track of 15 marathons in 5 cities or experience travelling across five continents.

The risk is that human beings are prejudiced, and it is difficult to anticipate what they will read between lines. For example, think about including "Reggaeton band member" in your resume. One recruiter may be excited about it because they think it´s cool and enjoy this genre; another recruiter may associate it with lack of professionalism, leaving them unimpressed. Be careful to not include polemic interests (it is subjective but try using your common sense). Also, avoid including generic interests such as sports, book reading, and nature because they do not add much.

Design & last details

How nice should a resume look like?

There isn´t a straightforward answer. Generally, a nice-looking resume that uses certain templates (check here for some samples) can help stand out and reinforce the idea that you have attention-to-detail and are willing to give the extra mile. Said that, nice-looking is subjective and sometimes, resumes become more superficial in their content to fit these templates. Ensure you do not sacrifice content for format.

Regarding style, below is some general guidance to follow:

• Make the content concise to fit into one page. If you have more than 10-15 years of experience, you may want to use two pages

• Use action-driven bullet points rather than paragraphs in the resume; avoid using full sentences and narrative style

• Remove industry jargon that are likely to not be known by the recruiter

• Avoid contractions, abbreviations, and slang

• Use action verbs rather than passive language

• Avoid making it visually cluttered: be aware of white space, and make it concise and quickly readable

• Choose a professional-looking font: Size 10-12, black and white. Arial, Calibri, and other plain sans serif or serif fonts are fine

• Use clear headings and subheadings, bold headings. Include relevant section dividers or lines to make it more visual

• Use margins of 0.5 to 1 inches

• Use bold, italics, bullets in moderation; if everything is bold, nothing stands out

• Try scanning your resume in 10 seconds. What are the parts that stand out? You may want to ask someone else to do the same exercise. If the answer isn't the right one, you need to keep working on your resume

• Read aloud and review for clarity and conciseness; it will help you realize when sentences are too long or use unnecessary words

• Include your name and date in your resume file name

  
  

Resume customization

Successful applicants are those that take the time to understand the university, the program and if needed, are able to customize the resume to the specific application. Although it may sound like a lot of work, it´s actually not that time consuming. The most time-consuming part is developing the master resume for the first time.

Master version

• Think about your ideal university/ program when developing the resume, so it has a clear target

• Write unlimited bullet points (in order of priority) covering all relevant accomplishments under a job. This will help you with customization later since you can select the bullet points that are most relevant to the program you are applying to.

  
  

  Take this as an example. If you prioritize your experience on project management, you want to include (or rank first) the bullet point #1 below; if you want to focus more on your product management experience, you focus on bullet point #2.

  
  

  Position X, company Y

  Bullet 1: Proactively designed and implemented a new automatic data tracking system using Y tool which led to a 20% reduction in sales review pre-work of the Sales team (12 people).

  Bullet 2: Led and supervised the team (6) in charge of developing the product roadmap for all the Latin American region; achieved 80% ....

  
  

Customization (for each application)

The recruiter will not connect the dots between your skills and experiences and the profile they are seeking if you don´t customize your resume. You have to do the work for them.

• Do research on the university, the program, the professors, as well as the application description keywords. Recruiters know when a resume is generic vs when it is targeting the program they offer

• Give priority to accomplishments that align with the program focus and the candidates´ requirements

• For all the sections, and especially for the work experience, review your master version to see if there is any other relevant accomplishment that should be in that version

Resume sample

Artificial Intelligence

AI and tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini can be helpful. But they are just tools. You need to be the writer and owner of your resume. AI-generated files usually look and sound the same, so isn't unlikely that you will stand out from the rest.

Some ways in which you can leverage them include:

Master version

• Proof-reading

• Optimizing working and keywords

• Suggesting format improvements

Customized version

• Suggesting how to tailor your resume to the candidate profile sought (you need to do the critical thinking and ideally the writing)

• Finding gaps for a role (ask it to act as a recruiter for the following program (past description) and compare your resume against the one AI gave you. Note any info that is missing from your resume for the particular job and if applicable, address it before submitting).

LinkedIn

You may wonder...

"What am I supposed to do if I have different resume versions, but one single LinkedIn profile"?

The answer is simple. Resumes and LinkedIn profiles are complementary and have different purposes.

Resumes speak directly to recruiters; you want to be as specific as possible about your accomplishments

LinkedIn is more generic, has a more flexible structure and helps build your personal brand (if used correctly). It should be generic enough to avoid any inconsistency with the different resume versions you will submit to different universities and companies. For example, for work experience, we don´t recommend using the STAR method because it creates very specific, detailed statements. Rather, keep your profile as general as possible to appeal to a broad audience.

It is important that you keep consistency between your LinkedIn and your resumes by:

• Avoiding writing a LinkedIn profile summary unless you find a good balance between not being very specific (it won't match all your applications) or too generic (it ends up sounding dull)

• Including the same job titles and dates

• Having consistent job descriptions to ensure the same high-level message (you don´t want to position yourself as having a lot of expertise in operations in your resume and in product design in your LinkedIn)

• Having consistent skills; In LinkedIn add a broader (more generic) range of skills that reflect your overall professional experience, and make sure these skills match the ones on your resume

• Reviewing both regularly and ensuring they are consistent and up-to-date

Networking

Now that you have put together the first version of your resume, your next step is to ask for feedback to improve it. If you know any person (or a person who knows someone) who studied in the universities you are targeting, Don’t hesitate to reach out to them to get their thoughts. If not, you can also reach out to people on LinkedIn. Read here for guidance on how to network with people.

Asking for feedback from peers is also helpful. They'll be able to cast a fresh eye on your resume and flag typos, inconsistencies, or sentences that they find difficult to understand. You’re always a biased judge when it comes to yourself :)

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