As you begin the investment banking recruiting process, your resume will be your most important document. For candidates recruiting for internships and entry-level positions, resumes are used for several purposes in the process. It is common to attach a resume when reaching out to bankers to connect or provide a hard copy at an in-person event banks are hosting. Resumes are also typically required as part of the application process.
Before you begin networking with bankers, you should have a well formatted, error free resume that gives a general idea of who you are and what your accomplishments and experiences are. In this article, we will lay out what items are important to include in a resume and how you should format the document.
The header section of a resume is typically the first section at the top of the page and includes general information about yourself. You should include your name (which should be in a much larger font than any other font on the document), home address (not your school address, as that may change), your phone number (which should be formatted as (XXX) XXX-XXXX), and your email. You can also provide a link to your LinkedIn profile, but this is less common in the field of finance.
The second section should consist of your academic experiences. By the time you are a sophomore, you should have enough content in this section to omit your high school experience. However, if you went to a well-known private school with numerous alumni in investment banking that you plan to network with, it may be beneficial to keep it on your resume. This section should start with the university you attend. If you attend a large university with multiple “colleges”, you should include your specific college, what type of degree you are getting (BS/BA/BBA), your majors and minors, your graduation year, and your GPA. This is also a good section to highlight any academic honors you may have received such as scholarships, Dean’s list, etc. Outside of your collegiate experience in the education section, if you have taken any supplemental finance course (such as Adventis’ FMC Program), this is a good place to include it since it is very visible and will show that you’ve taken steps outside of school to learn about finance.
The third section of the resume should be your professional experience. This section should include previous jobs or internships. In this section you will want to include all jobs that you think are relevant to investment banking. This could include finance-related internships, but also other non-finance related internships and jobs that are relevant to your candidacy. For each of these experiences, you should list the company, your job title, the timeframe that you worked in the role, and then 2 – 5 bullet points about your experience. There are a few rules of thumb about writing bullet points:
It is typical to have two or three professional experiences on your resume before you begin recruiting for investment banking internships. You don’t want one experience with 14 bullet points and you don’t want eight experiences with one bullet point each. Your resume should elaborate on a few of your most impressive professional experiences.
The fourth section is typically all your campus involvement. This section can include any organization, case competition, or adjacently related event that is relevant to the job. This section should follow the same format as the professional experience (organization name, position name, and dates involved). You should also write your bullet points the same way as you did you for professional experience.
The final section of the resume should be reserved for any other items that you feel are relevant and want the reviewer to know about you. This section typically includes interests and hobbies. It is always helpful to include interests, as they are a way for the interviewer to have a better understanding of who you are as a person, and they may also be more drawn to your resume (in the event that they have similar interests).
One important note on writing bullets on your resume is that you should always be truthful about the work you did. You may be tempted to build up your experiences to be more than what you actually did, but it is common to be asked about these bullet points in the interviews. You do not want to get caught in a situation where you need to make up an answer on the spot.
Additionally, your resume should be error free. There should be no formatting, spelling, or grammatical mistakes anywhere on your resume. This is a document that is meant to impress potential future employers and the last thing you want to do is give them a reason to overlook your resume because of errors. Candidates have been known to not get an interview because of a single typo.
Adventis works with many students who have successfully recruited for investment banking roles, and we have created two standard resume templates based on the numerous resumes we have come across. Click the button below to start building your resume with these templates!
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