16 Tips to Improve Your Investment Banking Resume

Like many of you, I used to not know what to do with my resume. Now that's been solved; I give to you 6 don'ts, and 10 do's on your investment banking resume!

Why Is It So Important to Have a Good Resume?

Your resume is your first impression, and your first impression is going to depend on your resume. This is the one chance you get to capture the employer's attention. Employers only take a few seconds to look over your resume, so it is imperative that it makes a good impression during those few seconds. In the increasing investment banking job market, it is important that you stand out in the crowd in those first few seconds if you want a job. In essence, a well-presented resume is a prerequisite for getting an investment banking job. If you have a poorly presented resume, you will for sure get dinged.

What Is a Good Resume?

A well-written resume is more than a summary of one's accomplishments; a good resume conveys specific details, the ability to format documents, and the ability to summarize important points. These skills are critical in finance and having a well-presented resume can signal competence in the employer's eyes or at the very least high incompetence.

The Gold Standard Investment Banking Format

WSO has the correct template for investment banking resumes. It can be found at the investment banking resumes link. Thousands of undergraduate students have landed investment banking jobs using this template. In university at your careers offices, they may suggest a different resume template to use, but I suggest using the general framework of the WSO investment banking resume template for the actual job applications.

DON'Ts

• Have a resume longer than 1 page. This is the accepted norm in the finance world.

• Use an illegible font. Times New Roman, Calibri, and Arial are safe choices.

• Have a font size greater than 12 for standard text.

• Don't lie on your resume. This is pretty self-explanatory.

• Use creative deviations such as colored font, watermarks, or headshots.

• Don't include your high school information.

DO's

• Write in past tense even for current jobs.

• Use meaningful bullet points for action-oriented verbs.

• Make your actions verifiable and measurable with $, #, and % figures attached to them. Show the results of your work.

• Have a skills and interests section to highlight what you do outside of school and your personality.

• Save your resume in a PDF file.

• Stretch your margins and boundaries if necessary.

• Be able to defend every line on your resume as you will be grilled on them.

• Be consistent with formatting. All dashes are the same kind of dashes, etc. You should not bold or italicize punctuation.

• Try to maximize the horizontal space of each written line.

• If you worked for a short amount of time in a job, you could put the season of the year to hide that fact, e.g., "Summer 2017" instead of "August 2017".