The Perfect Cover Letter for Consulting Jobs

Question:

I am a PhD candidate at XXXXXXXX. I had applied to many big and small consulting firms throughout Fall 2009, but without any success. I was not able to land any interview with ANY of the consulting firms.

I feel I deserved atleast interviews at some of the firms, but I think I am either messing up my resume very bad or there is some big that I am totally missing.

I am preparing to apply to some more consulting firms which are still hiring and I was wondering if you could just take a look at my resume and give me some comments. I am kind of very desperate at this point as I have applied to more than 20 firms without any luck whatsoever so far.

My Reply:

In general, I don't respond to "what are my chances" and "will you critique my resume" questions. BUT, I decided to in this case because the mistake this person is making in his application is very common… and it's also easy to fix.

For background, this person's resume was reasonably strong. Perfect math scores. Top 5 overseas college, Top 10 PhD program in hard science.

But his cover letter was pretty blah.

The perfect cover letter for a consulting job (or any job for that matter) is NOT A FORM LETTER!

Trust me on this one.

Every cover letter for EACH firm should be UNIQUE and different than the letters you write to other firms.

I remember reading a stack of 400 resumes from Stanford undergrads. OMG it is so freaking boring. Everybody sounds the same. You could just tell it was a copy and paste / mail merge form letter.

I've read thousands of cover letters in my career. It is torture to read them.

You must stand out.

There are a few things you can do to stand out, listed in no particular order:

1) Get your brand names into the first sentence or paragraph (You know… Harvard, your Olympic Medals, etc…:)

2) Show you did your homework about the firm (very important). Why do you want to work for THAT particular firm? What's your unique reason? How sure are you of your preferences? Why?

3) Talk to people at the firm (google: informational interviews) to see what the firm is about. Do your homework. Then in the cover letter, name names… mention the names of people in the firm you've spoken to, what they said about the firm, and why what they said got you interested in the firm.

4) Explain why you'd bit a good FIT for the firm. It's NOT good enough to be qualified. There are lots of qualified people out there. Consulting firms and employers in general like to here people who are both qualified and MOTIVATED by legitimate and sincere reasons.

This is especially true if you come from a non-traditional or non-business background. If going to consulting would be a big career shift for you, you'd better do a darn good job explaining why the shift makes sense.

Otherwise the assumption is a little bit, he/she's apply just for the heck of it. And if your background is amazing, it's possible you'll get an interview with a lousy cover letter.

Personally, I had networked like crazy to meet people in consulting before I ever applied for real. I knew them. They knew me. I KNEW I wanted to do consulting… and I think it came across.

My resume wasn't amazing. It was a B+.

Every cover letter I wrote was different from the other ones I wrote. I regularly quoted memorable things from specific people I spoke to from those firms and explained why I was impressed by them.

Even to this day, I still remember what impressed me about certain people are each firm… and what I thought it showed about the firm.

In short, I most definitely had my reasons for why I was applying and I was very deliberate in sharing those reasons. And, most importantly, my cover letters didn't look like any of the other ones.

After consulting, for every job I got after consulting, I probably averaged applying to only 2 or 3 companies for each job offer I received. I was very selective in who I wanted to work for. I did my home work. I explained my reasons in a good cover letter and more often than not got a meeting with the CEO.

Is this a lot of work?

YES!

Do most people take this much effort?

Heck no!

Why does it work?

Precisely because most people aren't willing to do the extra work to stand out.