Building Your Resume for the Finance Industry
As you begin your recruiting process for internships or early career full-time finance roles, your resume will be your most important document. Your resume will serve many purposes as you search for internships and early career opportunities.
Not only are resumes typically required as part of the application process, but they can also be vital in networking. It is common to attach a resume when connecting to professionals or provide a hard copy at an in-person event companies are hosting.
Before you begin networking with professionals, you should have a well-formatted, error-free resume. It should give the reader a good idea of who you are, what you’ve accomplishes, and your experiences.
How do you make sure your resume accomplishes all of these goals? The following tips can help you craft an impressive resume that meets industry standards.
Header
The header section of a resume is typically the first section at the top of the page. It includes general information about yourself, including your:
Full name; this should be in the largest font on the document
Home address: refrain from using your school address, as it may change
Phone number: format it as (XXX) XXX-XXXX)
Email address: make sure it is appropriate
You may also choose to add your LinkedIn profile. However, this is less common in the finance industry than in other industries.
Education
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 the finance industry 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. Be sure to include what type of degree you are getting (BS/BA/BBA), your majors and minors, your graduation year, and your current GPA.
This is also a good section to highlight any academic honors you may have received such as scholarships or Dean’s list. If you have taken any supplemental finance courses (such as Adventis’ FMC Program), this is a good place to include it. This section is very visible, and taking a course like that will demonstrate your dedication and willingness to learn.
Professional Experience
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 finance. This could include finance-related internships, but also other non-finance related internships and jobs. 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:
Use the SAR (Situation, Action, Result) method to generate your bullet points and the stories behind them. Generally the Action and Result are what make up resume bullet points. Then when you get asked to speak about that experience in an interview, you will elaborate by mentioning the Situation, Action, and Result, typically in more words than just the bullet points you wrote on the resume. A good example of a bullet point is “Generated an acquisition opportunity presentation to present to CEOs of current portfolio companies.” When the candidate gets asked about this question in an interview, they might elaborate on why this presentation was created (Situation), all the steps they took to create the presentation (Action), and what the outcome of delivering the presentation was (Result).
Quantify! Finance professionals love numbers. The more that you can include numbers that show your impact from your previous experiences, the greater impression you will leave on the reader. A good example of this is “Sourced over 1,200 potential investment targets in the wealth management and environmental services industries.”
It is typical to have two or three professional experiences on your resume before you begin recruiting for finance 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.
Campus Involvement
The fourth section is typically all about 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.
Additional Information
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 if you have similar interests.
Additional Commentary
When building your resume, 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 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 finance roles. We have used our experience to create two standard resume templates for you to use. Click the button below to start building your resume with these templates!