Rate and berate please. Harshest criticism welcome.

Looking for finance analyst or I-banking positions and would appreciate your opinions on my resume (and if you are feeling particularly generous, my cover letter also). Bluntness is encouraged.

I am posting links to the cover letter and resume as well as a document that has the raw material - in essence a lengthier bulleted description of my experience at a boutique I-bank, research experience at school, and recommendations. I felt that I had to severely curtail my resume in order to make the information fit in one page and am wondering if I correctly chose which parts to keep/shorten and which to discard.

Links:

Resume_Public: http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/wcdfbZ

Resume_RawMaterial: http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/tcdjcV

Cover Letter: http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/dcdobI

To my reviewers: if you ever end up in Toronto, message me and let's have a drink.

Cheers.

8 Comments
 

I would remove the language part. I know sites like M&I take a hard stance on language and say that if you can't read analyst reports in that language, you shouldn't bother with it since it doesn't mean much.

and are you from philly searching for a job in toronto? or are you originally from canada and went to philly for college?

 

Your formatting is horrible. So much white space. I'd trash your resume after no longer than a 1-second glimpse. Fix your margins.

 
thatsracistI would remove the language part. I know sites like M&I take a hard stance on language and say that if you can't read analyst reports in that language, you shouldn't bother with it since it doesn't mean much.

and are you from philly searching for a job in toronto? or are you originally from canada and went to philly for college?

whateverittakesYour formatting is horrible. So much white space. I'd trash your resume after no longer than a 1-second glimpse. Fix your margins.

@that'sracist: I am a Canadian-American but my family is originally from Canada. I went to university in the States and am searching for a job in Toronto now that I've moved back here.

@whateverittakes: I'm on it. Will let you know when I post the fixed-margins res.

Thanks guys. Keep critiquing, everyone.

 
yourdreamtheater... why does everything stop in 2009? What have you been up to the past 2 years?

Um....oh boy, here we go. I left my job in 09 because I decided that I wanted to get a PhD so I went back to university in Toronto for a year to rack up the additional math classes that I would need to get into a math finance or applied math doctoral program. I enjoyed it/did well and math really is an elegant subject but I decided that I didn't want to spend the next 5-6 years in school getting a PhD. So I decided to go back to working. I omitted my year in school (2010-2011) on my resume because I felt that it would generate more questions and make me appear flaky (it was a flaky thing to do changing my mind twice) if I had to explain it.

What do you think?

 

Your stuff ends in 2009, you know it's 2011? Like other poster mentioned, you need to reformat this resume. Name is always on top and details on the bottom. Your community service needs to be separated out and generalized. Don't double indent. I say keep the french if you read and write it, since Canada is half french.

 
Best Response
1- your cover letter is fucking horrible. It reeks of "I use this cover letter for every job I apply to from bank telling to blackbox trading". Im not a fan of cover letters as it is. But if you insist on having one IMO, it should be no more than 4 short sentences. It should also speak DIRECTLY to the job to which you are applying. Why would a banker give a flying fuck about your experience using statistical software packages? And why would a quant trader give a shit about your <abbr title="mergers and acquisitions

">M&A and/or client facing experience? Seriously just scrap the entire cover letter. 4 sentences at most.

Resume:

2- Use some fuckin common sense, first off your grammar in your very first bullet is horrendous. Next, you only volunteer information when it is to your advantage and talking about an $8 million <abbr title="mergers and acquisitions

">M&A deal is NOT to your advantage. Leave the deal size out, its not doing you any favors.

3- second the horrible formatting, look at other people's resumes on here. Look at my recent posts, I recently critiqued a resume that was in a decent format. 4- Kill your last bullet, its fuckin ridiculous. First off, you didn't contribute to jack shit in terms of client retention, so don't claim you did. Second, you're doing $8 million deals, exactly how do to have a 99% client retention rate? That would imply you have atleast 100 clients who did deals within a 1 year span. Its obviously bullshit and it indicates poor judgement that you would put something that dumb on your resume, I'd ding you just for that. You should be asking yourself "what does THIS SPECIFIC bank look for in an analyst" and come up with a list of the 3 or 4 most important things, and make sure you demonstrate those qualities. I can assure you that absolutely no half decent bank looks for analysts to have the ability to "retain clients". 5- all your dates are MONTH YEAR format except your college. Inconsistent formatting. Also, why do I give a shit about when you started college? Unless you graduated in 3 years, I dont really care. Just put Graduated June 2009 or whatever so its consistent. 6- Nov. 2009 to current? What have you been doing? You can't not have anything there. Especially since its pretty obvious you got axed in Nov. 2009 without anything after that.

This needs ALOT of work. I would suggest you get it in much tighter and better shape and come back on here for more feedback.

 

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