Resume and Cover Letter Kit for Consulting Applications

Whether you need a cover letter at all

Start with the published answer, because there is one and it is split three ways. Roland Berger's application FAQ states the requirement in one line: "Your application should include a detailed résumé and a cover letter, explaining why you'd like to join us and how you'd be a perfect fit for the role in question." Checked 7 October 2026. Cornerstone Research and KPMG Canada publish a requirement too. McKinsey and BCG Switzerland call the letter optional, and one OC&C vacancy states that none is required. All six positions sit in one table on our consulting cover letter page, each with the sentence that carries it.

The interview pages are a separate matter and they are what this page used to read. McKinsey and BCG describe assessments and interviews without mentioning a letter, which says nothing about what their application portals ask for. A page about interviewing is silent on attachments by design, and silence there was read here as an absence of requirement. The document that settles your own case is the posting you are filling in, which changes by office and by cycle. Open it before you write anything.

One thing holds across all six regimes. EY's interview tips page asks candidates to consider the application as a whole piece of work rather than a series of individual answers. Whatever the form asks for, it will be read as one submission.

There is a second case for writing one even where the form treats it as optional. A consulting application from an unusual background has an explanation problem that no bullet solves, and an optional field is the only place to solve it. A candidate moving from clinical research into strategy has three lines on a resume that look like a different career, and one paragraph can make them look like a reason.

The inverse also holds. A conventional applicant from a business degree applying to an on-campus intake usually has nothing to explain, and an optional letter that restates the resume costs an evening and adds no information.

The eleven rules Harvard publishes for cover letters

The career services guide carries a list of general rules about letters. They are more concrete than most advice on the subject, and four of them are the whole craft.

The tenth row is the only rule we found that treats the two documents as one object. Same font type, same size, across both. It takes a minute and it is the single visible difference between a kit and two files that happen to be attached to the same form.

The letter, in four paragraphs

This structure is ours. No consulting firm publishes one, and Harvard publishes a sample rather than a formula. Read the posting first, because two of the eleven rules above depend on it.

1. Why this role at this firm, in three sentences. Name something from the posting or from the firm's own published work. Harvard's rule is to reference skills or experiences from the job description and draw connections to your credentials, which means the specific words in the posting are your raw material.
2. The one argument your resume cannot make. A resume lists. A letter explains a choice, a pivot, or a pattern across three lines that look unrelated. This is the paragraph that justifies the letter existing.
3. One worked example, with a number. Harvard asks for examples that support your skills and qualifications. A single example with a figure in it outperforms three without.
4. What you are asking for, in one line. An interview. Nothing else.

Keep the whole thing inside a page, per the published bound, and count your sentences starting with I before you send it. Harvard's instruction is not to overuse the pronoun, and the usual draft has five.

What the consulting resume does, and what the cover letter does

Splitting the work stops the letter from paraphrasing the resume, which is the most common failure and the easiest to see.

The last row is the one Harvard makes explicit by calling the letter a writing sample. In a profession that bills for written deliverables, a letter with a broken sentence in it has demonstrated something the content cannot undo.

BCG adds a reason to keep paragraph one honest. Its interview process page says the skills interview explores your experience, skills and motivation for joining BCG. Whatever you claim as motivation will be asked about by a person, out loud, weeks later.

The AI boundary, as two firms publish it

This is the rare case where two firms have written down a rule in comparable detail, so the comparison is available rather than invented.

McKinsey's page closes that table with a sentence worth keeping in mind while you edit: misuse compromises fairness. BCG's page adds a practical warning rather than an ethical one, saying generated content may be incomplete, outdated or incorrect, and requiring that anything a model provides be reviewed and validated for accuracy and relevance.

Read together, the two pages authorize compression and forbid invention. Shortening your own paragraph is editing. Producing a claim you would have to defend in paragraph two of an interview is something else.

The consistency pass, five minutes

Do this once, after both documents are finished, with the posting open.

1. Set the same font and size in both files. Harvard's rule, and the only one that binds the kit together.
2. Check that the letter's example is not the resume's headline bullet. If it is, you have spent your best material twice.
3. Read every sentence that starts with I. Cut half of them, per the published rule on the pronoun.
4. Export both to pdf and reopen them. Harvard warns about conversion twice, once for each document.
5. Confirm the addressee. A named person if you can find one, per the first rule on the list.

Step two catches the failure that survives every other pass. When the letter and the resume lead with the same project, the reader meets your best evidence twice and your second-best never. Spending them separately doubles what the submission shows.

Step four is worth doing on a different device if you have one. Harvard warns about pdf conversion for both documents, and the warning exists because a layout that holds together in an editor can reflow once a font substitutes.

What a consulting resume and cover letter cannot do

It cannot tell you whether anyone reads the letter. No consulting firm publishes that, we have not measured it, and a page that gives you a percentage has made it up.

It cannot promise a reply. EY publishes the part most firms leave unsaid: because it receives so many applications, it cannot make personal contact with everyone. That is worth knowing before you read silence as a verdict on your writing.

And it cannot finish the resume. Harvard's own limit applies to the whole kit: the documents are an important factor in obtaining an interview, and that is all they do. The bullets are where the work is, and our resume action words page has the four-part bullet structure and our count of the verb list. For the section order, the consulting resume template page carries the ordering rule and what it means for a quantitative background.

Once the interview arrives, the documents stop mattering and the case starts. Our method page sets out the four dimensions we score a structuring answer against, with Coverage 45 the heaviest weight of the four.

Where an employer asks for the letter on camera instead, the brief does not change but the rehearsal does: what employers actually ask for in a video cover letter.

What changed on this application kit page

Corrections go here, dated, so that the body above holds only what is true today. A reader who followed the old version of this page has the right to see exactly what moved.

7 October 2026. The page said no firm requires a cover letter, and three of them do. The earlier version opened on the claim that none of the four consulting firm pages we had read asks for a letter, and it put that claim in the summary, in the figures at the head of the page and in the first section. The four pages were interview and assessment pages, which describe what happens after an application rather than what an application must contain. Read against the pages that do answer the question, the claim was wrong: Roland Berger's application FAQ, Cornerstone Research's how to apply page and KPMG Canada's applying page each require a letter, while McKinsey and BCG Switzerland call it optional and one OC&C vacancy says none is needed. The opening, the summary, the figure and the first section have been rewritten, and Roland Berger's FAQ was reread on 7 October 2026 before this correction was published.

7 October 2026. The figure at the head of the page counted the wrong thing. It read 0 of 4 firm pages requiring a letter. It now reads 3 of 6 published positions, which is the count of positions we can quote, and the six sit in a table on our cover letter page rather than being summarized here.