Resume Power: Ever Wonder How to Write Your Resume for Private Equity?

Clients often come into our coaching practice with fancy resumes they inevitably paid a lot to have "crafted". The resumes look beautiful and are visually appealing, yet almost 100% of the time, we have to start over. Private Equity is just a different animal.

Here are my top seven tips for creating a resume for Private Equity (at the fund level or at portfolio companies):

1) INDUSTRY COMES FIRST ALWAYS. Private Equity folks care deeply about industry experience. That is their very first acid test. I cannot tell you how many people don’t even mention industries in their resumes. They talk about being a great leader, the metrics they’ve achieved, and their education, but nowhere is their industry expertise. To PE professionals, your industry subsectors matter more than anything since that’s how they know which bucket you belong in. Please position yourself in your industry right up front.

As an aside, I know this is a hard one for some of you because you are not necessarily wedded to your industry and might be looking for a change. There’s good news and bad news here. PE players do not like to hire people from outside the industry where they’ve gotten their experience. PE professionals DO NOT LIKE RISK. At all. In fact, they will do everything in their power to mitigate the risks that they see as manageable since so many risks are outside of their control.

So if they are looking for a new CEO or a new divisional leader, or even a new Operations or R&D leader, it is a RISK to hire someone who doesn’t come from their industry. Hence, they don’t usually do it. There’s no way to convince them that you can “transfer” your knowledge or that you’ve changed industries before so they should trust in you. That is a fruitless effort.

The good news is that you can make small shifts into relevant subsectors or tangential relevant markets that will get you further away from your current focus. If you are in traditional energy markets, you can look at renewables and find common denominators in certain areas. If you are in managed services, you can look at healthcare software companies with similar aspects. If you are in consumer manufacturing, you can look at other kinds of manufacturing or maybe even look at distribution or logistics or even software. But stay in manufacturing software. You get the gist.

So, on your resume, please include your subsectors in the opening Summary statement.

2) Succinct Messaging - PE folks have 1000% information overload. They are inundated with all kinds of information related to deals, markets, the economy, portfolio company specifics, management team issues, financial data, fund concerns, fundraising processes, and a million more pieces of input every day. They have the attention span of a flea.  Not because they don’t care, they simply have to filter out information in the most effective way they can, aka they create buckets to dump information into which they can then sort through on relevant topics. This means anything put in front of them that doesn’t communicate clearly who you are, what you do and why it’s relevant to them within 10 seconds will probably never make it into a bucket nor be looked at again. They need you to spell it out and quickly.

Your messaging is so important and must be 1000% intentional. You must craft it to tell them EXACTLY what you do and which bucket they should put you in. Subsectors, functional roles, type of company, geographic location or flexibility. We use a specific format for this and it works very well because of how simple and clear it is. Make sure you are communicating what you do, for whom, in what industry, and where.

3) Employer Description - Next, and this actually goes for anyone writing a resume, please include a description of your employers. Not everyone knows your companies or what they do. It means that whoever is reading your resume will have to pull up a website to find out what your employer does, hence it’s probably not going to happen and your resume will go to the bottom of the pile.

4) Transitions - Explain why you left each job. One simple sentence, e.g., was recruited away for a new opportunity. Or had to relocate for personal family reasons. Or company was acquired and replaced management with new team. Or company was reorganized due to recession so I moved on. For those of you with shorter stints on your resume, this is especially important. First, if you have a lot of jobs on your resume, it’s a concern you may be able to address upfront. Second, if you have a lot of jobs because your companies were acquired and changed names, and you don’t make that clear on your resume, you are penalizing yourself for something that should be a positive. If you have one or two short stints, explanations help to assure that you are not a job hopper, rather you had a good reason for a change. In fact, everyone is given one or two passes on this front. It starts to raise concern when there are three or more shorter stints without good reason, but it’s pretty normal to have one or two shorter transitions that were due to a lay off for example.

5) Keep It Simple. You do not need to list all of your many responsibilities. Describe your role and your span of control. Mention how many people you manage. Then list your achievements in bullets. Like maybe 5 or 6 for recent jobs and only 2-3 for older jobs. Achievements, meaning things you literally helped the company achieve. Not just stuff you did every day. Make sure you include metrics in your achievements.  That is all we need to see.

6) Formats - Do not get fancy with your format. I don't know why any consultant recommends separating achievements from job titles, but to me, it's crazy. I see resumes with strengths described at the top and roles summarized below by dates with no detail. PE folks need to see the picture of your whole career and they need to see the story inherent in your experience. If it’s a puzzle they have to figure out, they won’t spend time on it.

7) Cover Letters No More - Lastly, please lose the cover letter. It does not get read. It goes back to number 2 above. It’s simply more information that private equity folks do not need. Fewer words with this audience is always better. Thrive has a proprietary approach we use instead which has been very successful. If interested, see below.

Want more tips? Thrive offers executive coaching to support clients in transition in finding a private equity-related opportunity whether for the first time or another go around in the space. We have worked extensively with private equity firms and their portfolio companies since 2009, so we have our fingers on the pulse of what it takes to make it in the PE space.