Polishing my resume

Hi Anonymous,

a two-year black list period is pretty common for most consulting companies; you can definitely contact the consulting companies who rejected you though, to verify the exact period with them. I don’t think it makes sense instead to reapply immediately after a rejection with just an improved version of your CV.

As for unanswered and future applications, quoting a previous post I wrote, besides polishing your CV I would recommend two things:

1. As also mentioned by Tobias, you may call the recruiter at the office and ask for the status of your application if they do not provide feedback after one month (in my experience that should be a sufficient time). This will not give you any negative result, while could be beneficial in some cases. As an example, after my application at Oliver Wyman initially I did not receive any feedback. After approximately one month I called the recruiter and asked which was the status of my application. She looked at my CV while we were talking over the phone, she liked it (it sounded she actually never saw it before) and invited me on the spot for an interview. In the end I received an offer from Oliver Wyman, and I am pretty sure that if I would have not called them that day I would still be waiting for a reply.
2. You can try to find a referral for your future applications to help you in the process. This will allow you to increase the chances to receive an invitation for an interview and also to have someone in the company that may follow up HR asking for news in case they do not provide feedback on the application process. There is a specific method to receive a referral, even when you do not have any current contacts in a firm. The steps are:

• Identify who are the people who could more easily help you
• Write them a customized cold email
• Have a call with the consultant, and indirectly ask for a referral

Each of the previous steps should be structured in a proper way to maximize your chances of moving to the next one; I applied this method, and managed to get six invitations out of six applications from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Oliver Wyman, Roland Berger and Strategy&.

Hope this helps.

Francesco

For those cases in which you have not yet gotten an response there is nothing wrong to friendly ask for the status of your application. This way you show interest in your application on the one hand and make sure that they did not forget about you or that something went wrong along the process on the other. 
However, bear in mind that you should always give the companies enough time for the review. Based on my personal experience, some companies take up to 4 weeks with the process. 
Good luck :) 

It's difficult to say without any further context - it usually depends on the firm and your past performance with the interviews.

If you'd like, I'd be happy to chat via message and help you look over your resume.

Best,

Carlos

Hi,

I specialise in this and I can help you restructure your CV, get more success in getting to next stage. There is probably something very simple you are missing and this is all part of knowing the process, what recruiters are looking for and how to 'sell' your skills in consulting language.

Let me know if you want help!

Victoria

I found this example of a management consulting resume that passed and it’s really helpful for me. Hope it works out for you too: https://mconsultingprep.com/management-consulting-resume-examples/