Investment Banking Resumes

If you’ve decided to apply for an investment banking job, you should know that a standard resume just won’t cut it. After all, top banks receive thousands of CVs every year. They have too many candidates, so they only want the best out of the best.

Another brutal fact that you need to know is that bankers spend very little time in each CV. It could be as little as 6 seconds scanning your CV.  Read these again – 6 seconds – scanning (not reading)! However if you made any vital mistakes, your CV will be tossed away in a bin in even less than 6 seconds.

You spend a lot of time in writing your investment banking resume, don’t you? And you have perfect academics and impressive work experience – you will certainly be hired if you are interviewed. Correct? But if you have any of these 6 mistakes on your resume, you won’t even get a chance to enter the interview room!

Let see what these 6 mistakes are.

Investment Banking Resume: Top-6 Mistakes

Mistake #1: Calling your resume “Resume”.

Why waste your space? The recruiter knows it’s a resume. Replace it with your name on top. And make it twice the size of body text font. There are resumes that don’t even have the candidate’s name on it. Don’t laugh. It happens, and happens a lot. As a professional IB headhunter, I do come across many candidates making this mistake. I’m not a banker, and reading CV is my job, so I would care to find out who the resume belongs to. But bankers won’t. They simply ‘trash’ it. The resume that you spend hours to prepare will end up in the bin in less than a second!

Mistake #2: Summary sentence, career objective – to top of your resume.

Needless to say, the reader (the banker) who read your resume is very sure that you’re looking for a job in banking. Why say something useless at top of your resume?

Unfortunately, old library books, career counselors or almost 99% of the resume tips out there on the internet insist students to do this. And I’m really sad to see most students are doing it. According to IIB, there is a ‘15-second to bin’ rule for any an investment banking resume. If you want your resume to go to the bin in less than 15 seconds, do it.

Mistake #3: Including your smiling picture at the top.

Never do this, unless you are applying to become a photogenic model. At the initial screening stage, bankers want to know your achievements and experiences, not your face.

Mistake #4: Sharing confidential information.

Tough one. I know how much you might want to brag about your work on Facebook IPO or merger of Coca-Cola bottlers. But be very careful not to disclose any confidential information. Bankers are extremely sensitive about this – and sharing more than you should will immediately disqualify your application.

Mistake #5: Oversharing.

For all those people who can’t wait to tell their gender, age, marital status and whatever more. There is NO POINT. In some countries, employers are not allowed to ask these by law.   You don’t have to tell either.

Mistake #6: Using your favourite email address mydarling@gmail.com.

Non-professional email indicates that you’re not grown up yet. You are applying for a job, so get a proper email address, one that carries your personal brand or identity, such as john.smith@gmail.com. If this is already taken by another John Smith, try to add something unique, such as john.smith.ucla@gmail.com (in case you’re a graduate of UCLA).

Good luck. Still need help to write your investment banking resume?  Check out the IIB website.

 

 

So you want to write an A-grade investment banking resume? Let’s first of all take a look at an A-grade resume sample.

There are many resume samples, templates out there, but you ought to know which are the ones which worth your time to look at. Now here’s one I like to share with you.  It is in fact the one that I presented in the last post which has a perfect layout.  And now I’m going to analyze its content.

Here’s how an A-grade banking resume looks like…

Let me check first of all check this resume against the 10 basic rules of an investment banking resume.

1. Layout – 1 page with a clear layout. Has only 3 sections – education, work and skills. These are all that is needed.
2. Reviewed by insiders. This is from the Inside Investment Banking (IIB) website, of course, it has been reviewed by insiders. In real life, if your insider friends or acquaintances are too busy to help, may consider a paid service. IIB provides all-round Inside Investment Banking career assistance to students.
3. Flawless.  I can’t find any mistakes, errors. Can you? To find bones in eggs, I may add couple of hyphens like 30-slide PowerPoint and 50-page report.
4. School brand, GPA score, work experience.  Interest and hobby. You can find all these. Simple, concise and easy to read.
5. Work section focusing on achievements. The achievements are phenomenal, the presentation is beautiful and the writing is articulate (and succinct!!). But what if you don’t have similarly prestigious investment banking work experience or achievements? No problem.  To win bankers hearts and minds, get an insider investment banking resume writer to help.  After all, they’ll be able to help students turn a mediocre track record into something that looks amazing on their resume.
6. Be conservative.  This is a classic example of how banking conservation is in presentation. Clean layout with good balance of white space. This is exactly what bankers like to see, and read, of course.
7. List your SAT scores. GPA and SAT scores could be found at the top of the resume. Great strategy for a student’s resume.
8. No lies or exaggerations.  I can’t tell at this stage. But if there is any, you’re simply wasting your time, effort and even money in writing it.
9. Powerful words.  Can be found all over the place, evaluated, compiled, created, analyzed, improved liquidity…
10. Banker friendly terms.  M&A, DCF, IPO…

Further Evaluation

ON DESIGN
Notice the white space, line spacing and lack of clutter in this sample banking resume? But at the same time you’ll find enough information packed into this resume.

This is what investment bankers love.

In the first glance (~5 seconds) readers can find school, scores, work experience and something about your personality – simple!  Your banking resume will stand out from the crowd because of this.

Other notes on readability…
Notice that only a handful of items are bold.  That’s it.

It is very easy for a banker to scan the document to find the experiences they want to read about.

How to fit everything on one page
You’ll find some tiny little things here, but they all work together to contribute to your one-page investment banking resume.

1. Name and contact details go on two lines only.  Multiple interests or activities on one line, separated only by commas.
2. Crunch the 2 summary lines into 1, so for example you would then have “Trump University, Bachelor of Arts in Economics – New York, NY” all on one line.
3. Take line spacing from 1.1 to 1.0.
4. Reduce page margins. But don’t go below 0.75 inches on each side.
5. Take the body font down by about 0.5.
6. Reduce the paragraph spacing between dot points.
7. And if you still need help consider switching fonts. Compare Verdana 10 with Calibri 11. Calibri is a simple and easy to read font, elegant and at the same time occupies far less space than many other fonts.
8. Eliminating mediocre achievements and superfluous words in your descriptions.
9. If you’ve tried everything but still need a little more space. Then consider this – Omit “Proficient in Excel, knowledgeable about valuation concepts, expert in PowerPoint”. These are job requirements. And the recruiters assume you possess those – otherwise you shouldn’t apply. True, as a professional IB recruiter, I never put this on candidates’ CVs.

Choice of fonts between Serif and Sans Serif ?
IIB suggests serif fonts. I personally prefer sans serif.  Either way, investment banking resumes should go for easy-to-read fonts.  Remember the banking conservativeness?  For serif fonts, Times New Roman and Garamond both look classy and clear.  For sans serif, Arial and Calibri both look good and space effective.

Some rule of thumb about font sizes.

16 – Your name (Bold)

11 – Headings (Bold and CAPITALS allowed)

10 – Body text – depending on the type of font you use, keep ceiling 11, floor 9.5

In the sample resume above, there are only 3 Headings applying both bold and capitals to draw attention. School and company name using upper/lower case and bold.  Degrees and positions in regular italic.  Simple.  Banking conservativeness applied.

ON EDUCATION
For a junior banker’s resume, Education should appear at the top. See how simple this section is in the sample resume.  There’s no need to go on and on here. Bankers after all only care about your school name, GPA score and studies.  Why clutter this space with other things?

To save words and align with the one-page strategy, there’s no freaking need to put “/4.0” next to your GPA.  Bankers know it’s out of 4.0!  This is a small example, but this indicates how you consider the reader when constructing your IB resume.

ON WORK AND LEADERSHIP

Combined work and leadership
This is because leadership roles are work.  And often for students, their leadership experience will be as impressive, if not more, than their actual work experience.  This will help keeping your resume at as simple as 3 sections.  Bankers won’t expect a student to lead a big team to do big projects.  But at lease write something that shows your ability to influence others.

Only 3 experiences have been included
And they are naturally the 3 most impressive work experiences!

Results are all we talk about
Bankers know what an intern has to do, so they are not interested in “Responsible for organizing meetings with staff, answering client query calls and taking minutes at meetings”. Instead they like to see e.g. “Analyzed the inventory wastage rates for 30 days and found a way to reduce wastage by 35% via implementing an automated ordering system, which resulted in $2,000 food savings every month and increased front/back-of-house harmony”.

See how and why the above A-grade resume stand out? There are results that make the bankers’ eyes blink.

Simplicity wins
Notice there isn’t 10 dot points per job covering fairly average results/achievements or mere tasks? Instead, there are only 2-4 MEGA achievements/results for each job.

Knowing which dot points to put down is easy to achieve when you focus on the results you achieved from your 2-3 biggest projects at that job.

ON SKILLS AND INTERESTS

How to make this section pop?
This section is to bring out your personality, something that will make you more than just another piece of paper, something that will make you memorable!

Personality helps you stand out from the crowd. And the interest/hobby section does this job.

There are 3 sub-headings – languages, activities and interests. In fact you can add ‘others’ to the end. People start by reading from top down.  Before they finish, what’s written at the very bottom may also get a glance.  That’s why back cover advertising is always as expensive as those at the front page of a magazine.  Let’s talk about what to include in this ‘other’ part later on.

Language – English is not listed, because it’s obvious, so as Excel, Bloomberg etc. Imagine if you don’t speak or write English, cannot use Excel or don’t know what Bloomberg is, then investment banking is not a place for you.

Activities – Include only your most important/passionate skills, activities and interests.  Go ahead beat the competition by displaying your personality in this section. After all investment banking is a people business, bankers are stressful at work, so they would like to meet and work with interesting people who does interesting things at their spare times.

In the sample resume above, the “Death Valley” was a good pick; that’s going to pop out, and get bankers excited. When it comes to interview time, this section is literally going to drive 20% of the interview questions you get!  You see bankers will be desperate to talk to you about your investments in Chongqing, your Death Valley running and more.

ABOUT THE ‘OTHER’ SECTION

List anything else that will make your personality shine. Scholarship is one of the most attractive factors on intern/student resumes. When I did banking resume critiques for students, there was one who made me remember him all the time.  He wrote about an MNC SCHOLARSHIP that he won over a four-year period totaling $500,000. My market resources indicate that MNC scholarship does exist but the amount the candidate received was rarely given, except to really outstanding students.

You may not have received such scholarship. Do you have anything that really distinguishes yourself from others? Write it in an ‘other’ section at the end and the sleeping banker will be wakened by you and may call you up for an interview immediately.

NEED MORE HELP FOR YOUR INVESTMENT BANKING RESUME ?

If you want to see more investment banking resume samples (and even A grade cover letter samples), plus learn how to turn a track record of mediocre achievements into a rocking banking resume, then check out the Inside Investment Banking website.   They have a lot of freebies to help you find your way to investment banking.  They also have paid services but you don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want to.

So you want to write an investment banking resume that generates interviews. But your first objective is to go pass the ‘eye ball scanning test’ of the resume reviewer.

Listen, it is ‘scanning’, not reading. If your resume overall layout does not please the bankers’ eyes, then no matter how great your content is, it won’t get read.  And many bankers’ initial objective of scanning CV is not to look for qualified candidates, but to disqualify candidates for whatever error or even the tiniest typo they spot.  Only if you could survive through this short and cruel step, then you may be able to gain the golden 20 or 30 seconds to impress the banker with your resume content.

I read senior banker’s resumes everyday, so when I need a junior banker’s resume template, I go check the internet. You’re doing the same before landing on this page, right?  OK, you’ve come to the right place.  When you want an investment banking resume template, make sure it is provided by a banker, or someone who knows the banking business.  General resume templates are not going to help.

During my internet search, I found two templates which are ideal for junior bankers.   Lloyd’s is from Inside Investment Banking and Chris’ is from eduers.com.  At the moment, let’s don’t look at the contents yet.  Instead, let’s compare their layout and overall appearance.

Can you tell which template is better?

They are both good.  But Lloyd’s is far better.

Assume both candidates are having similar qualifications and experiences that bankers love, Lloyd is more likely to win an interview.  Why?

There are two major vital mistakes that Chris has made.  One, the margins on all sides are too slim.  Two, there are large patches of white spaces being wasted.  If Chris can improve these two weaknesses, then his resume will look perfect, just like Lloyd’s.  By the way, target the margins on all sides to be 1 inch, or no less than 3/4 of an inch.  As for font size, target for 11, and no smaller than 10, depending on the type of font you’re using.

So now you have an idea of how an ideal investment banking resume layout is. Write yours similar to Lloyd’s and we’ll go into details of how to write the resume content in the coming posts.

Would you want bankers like your resume over others? What makes them like yours?

These are important questions. If you know the answers, you’re one step closer to interviews and job offers even in today’s market.

There are students who are able to craft hypnotic resumes to get results. Is that you? Are there secrets in writing an investment banking resume?

In fact there are no secrets if you find the right people to help. Get someone from inside investment banking to tell you how they read resumes and how they choose candidate to interview, then you’re on the fast track to write a resume that bankers love.

Write Investment Banking Resumes that impress in the first 30 seconds

You may know that bankers spend as little as 30 seconds to read a resume. If you’re unable to impress them in 30 seconds, then your resume will go to the ‘no’ pile.

Before going specific, let’s go through the top 10 basic rules to make your investment banking resume stands out.

1. Write for junior bankers.  To impress a tired, stressed out junior banker who is only going to take no more than 30 seconds to read a resume, the best strategy is to keep it short and easy to read – 1 page resume with a clear layout – this is the single way that makes it easy for the poor investment banking analyst to run through their checklist (school, GPA, internship experience, interests).
2. Reviewed by insiders. Before submitting your resume, email it to a couple of your friends in banking – and perhaps one or two college friends who did an internship last year – and await their insiders’ opinion.  If you don’t have such resources from your own network, you may spend a little some money to get an investment banking resume review.
3. Flawless.  Bankers are trained to pick mistakes. Same applies when they read resumes. One single punctuation, grammar or spelling mistake will get your resume end up in the bin.  So as nonsensical sentences, incorrect word usage …etc.
4. Investment banking resume is all about 3 things. School brand, GPA score, work experience.  Interest and hobby could be the 4^th, if space allowed. Allocate the majority of your resume to pushing these 3 or 4 points.  That means eliminating the irrelevant or the less important, e.g. jobs worked outside of the corporate world.
5. Write work section focusing on achievements racked up during client work / live deals.  Talk about how you built tables, designed decks and other deal related work.  This after all, is what bankers want to hear about.
6. Be conservative. Yes, I mean it. Never apply creativity with your investment banking resume.  No borders, no artistic typefaces, no excessive divider bars, no multiple fonts, no weird font size, no colors.  Have a good understanding in banking conservativeness in presentation.
7. List your SAT scores.  Bankers love objective measures of intelligence, and this hits their sweet spot.  But do not go as far as to list your GMAT scores on your investment banking resume, unless you were going for associate positions.
8. No lies or exaggerations.  If you write wreck diving in the hobby section, be prepared to speak to someone with that same hobby at the end of the interview. Likewise, if you write fluent in a certain language, be prepared to speak with someone in that language.
9. Use powerful words.  Analyzed, managed, developed, projected, evaluated, researched etc.  Words that make you sound like an investment banking analyst.
10. Banker friendly terms.   Dollars, percentages, amounts, folds, dates, and other metrics would appear.  Jargons allowed. Jargons are generally not recommended in business writing, but resumes and recruitment ads are exceptions. This is a way to tell bankers that you know the business and the terms… AUM / M&A / ECM / DCM / TMT / FIG / ABS / OTC 

Bonus Tip – Spend a couple bucks to hire an investment banker to write your resume or at least get a resume review service.  Remember resumes for investment banking jobs are not for a normal professional resume writer to write. You need people who know the business and know how bankers choose candidates.  Your ROI will be great once you land an investment banking job of $100,000. Inside Investment Banking is a website of such kind, providing insiders’ assistance to guide you through resume writing to interviewing.