The resume gets you in the room. The case keeps you there. Most candidates invert that and polish cases while the page still says "responsible for various analyses".
One page. One story per bullet. Numbers that would survive a challenge.
The page
Header. Name, email, mobile, city. LinkedIn if it is not a mess. No photo, no "objective", no skill bars.
Education. School, degree, date, GPA if it helps in that market. One line of relevant coursework max. Do not list every society.
Experience. Reverse chronological. 3–5 bullets on the recent role, 2–3 on the one before. Internships count.
Leadership / additional. One real ownership story. Languages with a real level. Nothing about "Microsoft Office".
Bullet formula
Verb + what you owned + scale + number + so-what
Example:
Rebuilt the contribution tree for a 40-store grocer, isolated £1.8m in a private-label SKU the client was about to delist, and presented the keep-recommendation to the CFO.
That bullet has a verb, a tree, a number, and a decision. The next bullet should not repeat "presented".
A one-page example
Fictional candidate. Steal the shape, not the biography.
Amira Chen · London · amira@email · +44 7xxx
Education London School of Economics · BSc Economics, 2026 · First Relevant: industrial organisation, applied micro. Consulting society case lead.
Experience
Summer analyst, Northstar Retail (London), 2025
- Built a banner-level contribution model for 40 stores; found £1.8m in a private-label line slated for delist; CFO kept the SKU.
- Ran a 6-week promo test in 12 stores; lift was 4% with a 90bp margin hit, so we killed the national rollout.
- Wrote the Monday pack for the steering committee (8 slides, one decision a week).
Research assistant, LSE, 2024–25
- Cleaned a 120k-row scanner dataset and estimated own-price elasticity for 30 SKUs; used it in a working paper, not a class problem set.
Leadership
- Case lead, consulting society: 16 first-years through a 6-week drill plan. 9 got first-round interviews.
Additional English, Mandarin (home). French B2. UK driving licence. Nothing else.
Before and after
Before: "Responsible for analysing sales data and presenting insights to senior stakeholders."
After: "Cut the weekly sales pack from 22 slides to 8 and put the £0.4m miss on page 1, so the commercial director stopped hunting in the appendix."
Before: "Helped the team with market research for a new product launch."
After: "Sized TAM for a battery add-on at 1.2m UK households and killed the launch when SAM could not clear £8m at a defensible price."
Before: "Led a diverse team to deliver a successful project."
After: "Ran a four-person analysis under a 10-day clock; two people had never opened Excel. We still hit the steering date."
Formatting, without the decoration
Follow the boring career-centre look: MIT, Penn, Yale, Harvard. One font. Consistent dates on the right. Margins that print. No columns, no icons, no colour bars.
If your school has a consulting resume clinic, use their template and put better bullets in it. The grader will still tell you which lines are empty.
What the grader will punish
- Adverbs instead of numbers
- "Various", "multiple", "several"
- Team achievements with no "I"
- GPA theatre when the rest of the page is soft
- A second page "because I had a lot of internships"
When the page is tight, grade it. One free review. Then write the cover letter.