Resumé Builders

When she applied for her first job after graduating with an M.B.A., Keturah Leonforde almost erased her volunteer work as a choir director from her resumé. It seemed unrelated to any of the jobs she wanted. But after she scored a gig at a top accounting firm, she was surprised to find out that she owed the position, at least in part, to what she thought irrelevant.

“It was your volunteer experience that set you apart,” Leonforde recalled her new boss explaining. “On paper, your experience was quite comparable and competitive with everyone else, but that volunteer experience was far above and beyond.”

Now she is back at her alma mater, Wilfrid Laurier University—but this time on the other side of the job application game, advising students in her role as a career consultant for graduate and professional programs. And Leonforde, who is also a former recruiter, says that her experience shows that non-academic activities can be as important as academic studies in preparing students for the work world.

“Grades and diplomas are the price of admission these days,” she said. “What [employers are] really concerned about beyond that is: what have you done outside of the classroom?”

During orientation week and frosh week, new students are bombarded with scores of extracurricular options. At the University of Toronto, for instance, you can fill after-school hours with experiences from the Comic Book Club to the Bangladeshi Students’ Association. Many large universities have hundreds of groups and even the smallest schools offer recreation and sports teams, arts groups, student media, faith-based clubs, student government and activist groups, academic clubs, and many, many more.

With all these options and the time limitations of being a student, how can you pick something that will be both enjoyable and time well-spent?

Maurice Fernandas, a senior recruitment manager at Ceridian Canada, says that participation in just about any extracurricular activity can demonstrate whether an applicant is disciplined and has strong time management skills. “Rather than asking, ‘How are your time management skills?’ and hoping the student doesn’t lie to me, I tend to look at where they graduated in their class and what else they did during that time. Were you part of the student union? Were you a varsity athlete? What clubs did you belong to? Did you have a part-time job?”

The obvious choice for students wanting to boost their resumé is an activity related to their career interests.