In today’s MBA Resume tips, I will share a common challenge I had while explaining Metrics Overload to Finance clients.
Applicants from Finance feel passionate about numbers. Every deal size is benchmarked against competitors. Every cost saving is mapped against the size of the project and the company. Leadership is often measured by team size. Innovative solutions are measured by the money and the person-hours saved. So it is no wonder that any phrases dedicated to explaining the context of the achievement are often looked at with skepticism. But you must understand that the admissions team is unlikely to be from a Finance background.
Here are three rules of thumb to overcome Number Overload in a resume:
1) Keep the Numbers in Each Entry to 3 at the most
This is a common problem I see with Venture Capital, Private Equity, and traditional Investment Banking candidates. Each impact an applicant had on the deal will have the size of the fund, the team that is working on the fund, the countries that the portfolio company is impacting, the size of the market, the reach of the product/service of the portfolio company, and the cashflow that the deal is generating for the employer. When you have so many metrics in each deal, applicants get carried away and try to include all of them. Limit the number of metrics to three.
2) Use Conservative Estimates for Money Saved Metrics
If you start your resume with a solution or a data model that helped the company capture an insight that facilitated a deal, then you must include some money-saved metric for the in-house solution. Estimating such a cost-saved impact is often challenging. And applicants are worried that anything that is not in millions of dollars is not competitive for M7 and Top 10 MBA programs. This is not the case. There are deals with cost savings in hundreds of thousands of dollars that had a strategic impact in building partnerships that allowed a firm to enter a new market. Gain insight by seeing deal details that changed the thesis of their investment and many strategic impact metrics that could run in millions and even billions of dollars. The connection that you make for the IMPACT metrics should be conservative, even if it is strategic in nature.
3) Categorize Metrics to Themes
One way to balance your IMPACT metrics and not use the same metrics in each entry is to categorize metrics into themes on building partnerships, crunching complex deal details, managing teams, saving costs, adding new revenue streams, closing down loss-making entities, and expanding reach to new countries. Once you figure out your themes, you will find a balance between IMPACT metrics and context.
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