How to answer "walk me through your resume"

hello everyone my name is Kenton kvass - I'm an ex BCG consultant an ex-googler and the founder of Raqqa blocks which is an online platform that helps students prepare for case interviews in today's Raqqa blocks mini-lesson we're going to be talking about an incredibly common problem question rather that will come up in the consulting the interview process probably repeatedly throughout it and it comes up in all sorts of interviews outside the consulting interview process as well so whether you're interviewing for McKinsey or a PM position at Google this question it's gonna be something that you will face at some point and that question is walk me through your resume now it seems like it should be such a simple question to answer after all a resume is a document that you wrote about things that you've done in your life I mean what could be easier than simply just walking someone through that well the challenge comes in the fact that it's really tough actually to concisely articulate what you've accomplished in your career today and do it in a way that kind of augments the written material on your resume and shows the interview or how you're really going to bring your unique value to this company so what we're gonna do in this mini lesson is actually talk about what is kind of the meaning of this question what's the the question behind the question if you will when someone says walk me through your resume and then we're going to talk about three concrete tips that are gonna help you answer this question with confidence and in a way that's really going to make a positive impact on your interviewer so let's go ahead and jump it okay so the number one mistake that candidates make when someone says walk me through your resume is they translate that question into something akin to tell me everything about your career today in reverse chronological order now if you've had a super interesting career and you've done in ton of interesting things and you have a very succinct way to explain that that might work but for 99 98 percent of candidates if you translate the question that way your answer ends up you know can being a bloated rambling and kind of unfocused answer that just summarizes everything you've done today and even if you've done a lot of impressive things that delivery of that content is typically gonna fall flat and so what you want to do is you really want to understand the question behind the question and that is if someone asks you walk me through your resume what they really want to understand is tell me about how your experiences skills and accomplishments make you the ideal candidate for the role that we're currently hiring for the question is really about the company and about the interviewer it's about how do you fit into what that company needs and so that's really what you want to focus on when you're answering this question and once you see the question in that light you now start to understand what consultants call that so what implication of the question walk me through your resume isn't really about a chronological history of your career today it's about your key skills and key accomplishments and why those make you the ideal candidate for the company so now that we know the question behind the question we're gonna dive into our three tips for answering that and really doing it in a way that's gonna make a real positive impact on the interview tip number one focus on your career arc so as we talked about earlier this question is not about a strict chronological answer if you find yourself doing first I did this I did this I did that that not only are you gonna bore yourself but even worse you're gonna bore your interviewer and that is definitely something you don't want to do so instead what you want to do is you really want to curate the experiences that you're sharing and you want to find experiences that have certain skills that are relevant for the job that you're currently interviewing for and that you can nicely kind of connect together so you get something that looks like a career arc as opposed to just a random chronological progression so to illustrate this I'm gonna talk about two disparate career experiences from my own resume and show how you connect them together in the beginnings of a career arc as opposed to just chronological or and those experiences our knife salesman and marketing intern at a gaming company so let's look at that okay so early my college experience I took a summer job as a knife salesman selling knives door-to-door for a company called taco and really what I learned in this experience is two key mix but the first is that direct sales as a career path for me was going to be really tough because it required this always on sales mentality and maybe you know someone that's extremely extroverted that that just wasn't me the second thing that I learned was that you know in the sales pitches themselves if you could weave in the emotional value and the emotional connection to a product as opposed to just focusing focusing on the utilitarian you know product features and the functionality it made pitches that much more kind of colorful and compelling and it really made an impact on purchasing decisions for consumers and so you know with selling knives this was things like weaving in the experience of cooking and cooking meals and that often involves cooking for friends and family and especially if someone loves cooking there's a lot of good memories that get created there so think of weave that in that was super effective and I found that really really and those few things actually led me to an internship later in my college career at Electronic Arts in the marketing department and the reason for that was I knew that I didn't want to be on the direct sales side that I was really interested in this emotional connection and how that drove purchasing decisions and Electronic Arts was a company whose games I had grown up play I've been playing you know the NHL series you know since 1994 growing up and probably had played every single year throughout the rest of my high school middle school career and so for me I had a strong emotional connection to those games and you know that's what chance to apply those learnings at a marketing role at EA it was a really really fun experience okay so taking a step back and now see how two disparate experiences selling knives and a marketing internship at the gaming company Electronic Arts can actually be connected in a much more meaningful way than just kind of chronological order you can kind of fuse them together by showing this bridge of how learnings from one role translated to how you sought out and proceed to another role and why that actually made sense tip number two distill your experiences so now that you've established the narrative arc the thing you want to think about is for each of the experiences within within the arc what are you actually gonna share about them and I think really what you want to remember here is you don't want to go overboard this is not a deep dive on every single experience in your career progression remember that the question is about your career arc and how it naturally led you to the position you're interviewing for so you want to give a little bit of a summary of each but you don't want to go into all the detail and find yourself a rambling going down into a rat hole on a particular item so the three questions that I would recommend you answer for each experience in the career arc is one what led you to that role - what did you learn from that role and three how did it influence your next steps so if you think about the iya example that we we started walking through we actually have already answered the first question which is we know why I pursued that role it was due to the learnings from my prior role as a knife salesman and so that's that's the first step but we haven't covered parts two and three yet so let's revisit that example and I'm gonna walk through part questions 2 & 3 for the EEA exam okay so when I was a TA I really learned two things the first was that it was my first exposure to the Silicon Valley tech scene that ei was part of and I found that scene really really exciting and it's Rawling there was just so many new products being launched and the people that were working on them we're so enthusiastic about the impact they were gonna have and it was just a really great positive scene and so the first thing I learned is that you know regardless of what happened with this internship when I was looking for a job a year later I knew I wanted to come work in the Silicon Valley taxi so that was the first thing the second thing I learned was that ei I did get a chance to build on how that emotional value of connection to a product can really influence and make marketing work and make it really powerful but the other thing I noticed was that my interest in video games itself that connection you know had actually waned over time like it was something that I grew up playing about a video games the child and middle school but throughout high school college and it wait so the second learning for me there was that I liked that style of work but I wanted to find a place where I could put those skills and leverage those insights and put them to use on a product that I really cared about and they I use daily and at the time for me that was actually Google because their search engine was relatively new on the market and I thought it was just personally better than all the other competition out there and I was recommending it to my friends and family so it was kind of a natural place to look for a job and so Google went from not being on my radar at all as a place to work to the top of my list okay so taking a step back you see how points two and three for the EA experience communicate a few key learnings and then also how it influenced what I look for in my next girl so it continues that narrative arc very nicely September 3rd connect-the-dots so we first talked about established in your narrative arc and then we also talked about for each item within the narrative art and what are the key pieces of information to share about that so you paint a good picture and you'll notice that as we were talking about that one of the critical components was the last bit for each experience is how it connects to the next one what is kind of the item in or that you know the glue that holds those two things together it helps create that narrative arc so the critical point here is when you are finishing and you're discussing the last experience in your narrative art that you want to highlight you don't want to just stop there you want to connect that experience directly to the role that you're applying for current this has two really nice paths one is just a great capstone and end to the question of walk me through your resume it's a really natural place to end the second thing is that it shows that you've really thought about how this role at the Kinsey Bain or be CG or wherever it might be really fits into your career story and then it's not some job that you just threw your resume in the pile for at the last minute but that you really thought about how this is the clear kind of next step in your career progression so it's a really great way to just kind of tie a bow on the whole answer okay so in conclusion walk me through your resume is one of those questions that seems like it should be super simple but it's really easy to go off the rails quite quickly and end up doing some sort of kind of boring stilted strict chronological order answer so you don't want to do that and I think the key thing that will help you remember it kind of get your answer to this question right is think about the question behind the question well you know what the consultants call the so what implication and that is they want to see if how your experiences and skills and accomplishments - they really kind of naturally flow together and are the natural lead-in to the role that you're currently applying for so if you can remember that insight and use the tips we talked about you're going to be able to craft a really great answer to this question so thank you so much for watching if you haven't subscribed already please do you can hit the red button below we've got great videos on the interview process coming out weekly and we look forward to seeing you soon you

Channel: rocketblocks

Views: 120,385

Rating: 4.9240379 out of 5

Keywords: consulting interviews, fit interviews, resume walk through, interview prep, bcg, bain, mckinsey, case interview prep, google

Id: 3z6LVDygmdk

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2017