Investment Banking Resume Template - Official WSO CV Example

Investment Banking Resume Template - Official Wallstreet Oasis CV Example

Attached to the bottom of this post, you will find the Wall Street Oasis Investment Banking Resume Template for undergraduate students, used by the WSO paid service and thousands of candidates to successfully land a job in investment banking.

For those of you looking to make sure your CV format is clean and your investment banking resume is polished, we have a great sample resume you can now use free of charge (attached to this post below).

After seeing members consistently reference other resume templates in the public resume review forum (which are good but inferior in our opinion), we have decided to release the WSO resume template for free to the public. This is the same CV template we use in our paid WSO resume reviews with experienced finance professionals. However, we know how competitive internship applications and summer analyst positions are nowadays, so we're hoping this gives you an even bigger edge in recruiting.

This particular banking resume sample is for undergraduates and is not intended for experienced hires. Go to the bottom of this post (2 atttached files) if you are looking for a resume for experienced hires (with deal experience).

Investment Banking Resume Template - Summary

 

Investment Banking Resume Bullets

General Formatting Rules

  • Keep bullet points at a max of 2 lines; ideal would be 1.5 lines
  • Make sure spacing is solid and that your bullet points hit the how/why/what/result

Sub-Bullets: Another thing to consider is sub-bullets. Including sub-bullets in your resume is something you have to be 100% confident in. If it's just something you're doing for the sake of having a "different" resume, then avoid it.

Here's one good scenario for the use of sub-bullets: if you are describing transaction experience in an internship. Essentially, if you have to go into more detail to discuss something that is highly relevant to investment banking, then it's worth considering using sub-bullets. Be wary, however, because going into too much detail can cause clutter and get you dinged.

 

Investment Banker Resume Content

Now it's time to talk about what goes into those bullet points. Fret not! While the content of your bullet points matter, the most important thing is that you don't fudge anything up in terms of formatting and grammar.

  1. Professional Experience: I want to see professional experience ie roles where you've worked under paid, professional discipline and had to pass through an interview process to get there. Having made it successfully through interview processes for earlier internships or jobs is important, as interviewing you is what we plan to do.
  2. Case study competitions: Some people listed these. These are no professional experience. Including them just looks like you don't have enough professional experience to fill in these area enough. Don't do it.
  3. Volunteer Positions: Not professional. Send it to extracurricular.
  4. Strong Names: I like to see names in the PE/banking/HR universe that I recognize, because it tells me you could get through their interview process and you've done an internship in something that has reinforced your academic finance skills.
  5. Keywords that Stand Out: Usually reviewers skim the bullet points. Key words that caught their eye (which reflect a particular teams' focus, might be different for another team):

     

    • comparables analysis
    • competition or industry analysis/research
    • due diligence
    • modeling
    • DCF valuation
    • presented
    • leveraged buy out
    • distressed debt

 

Resume Tense - Past or Present?

The main thing to focus on here is consistency. There are two options:

  1. Use past tense throughout the entire resume. The reasoning here is that your resume is a summary of everything you've done.
  2. Use past tense to describe past experiences and present tense to describe what you're currently doing. The reasoning here is self-explanatory; past experiences use past tense while current experiences use present.

Both options are totally acceptable, which is why it's up to you to choose which you prefer.

 

Investment Banker Resume Format

A poorly formatted resume will get thrown out. Think about it. A good amount of your time as an investment banker will be spent formatting, so what does it say about you if you can't properly format your own resume?

Lucky for you, you don't have to worry about formatting half as much as other candidates because our template does that for you.

Here's a download link to the resume template included below:

 

WSO Resume Template

 

"Additional Information" Resume Section

This is a section that you need to edit to best fit what you have to include. Don't have any modeling experience? Delete that line. No computer skills to show off? Same thing applies. Tailor this area of the resume to highlight your strengths beyond finance.

Here is one example of how you can structure your "Additional Information" section to be more meaningful and provide a few skills that may be impressive to the resume reviewer:

Investment Banking Additional Information Section

 

Final Resume Tips

Miscellaneous tidbits of wisdom from @blackice:

  • Do: Be Ready to Defend Everything on Your Resume.
    This should be a given, but people seem to fuck this up every day. If you write hang-gliding in your interests section and then I ask you about it, you better damn well be able to speak to hang-gliding. Otherwise, it undermines everything else on the page.
  • Do: Start Your Resume Early!

    These things take hours and hours to perfect. Many people think you can just sit down in an hour and bang out a perfect resume, but that is simply not the case. It takes time to get right. Do not wait to start until the day before the job posting.

  • Don't: Put "Founded Investment Banking Club" on Your Resume. Just Don't Do It.

A couple of quick notes:

  • Please feel free to share this post and pass it along to friends
  • If you're looking for our resume for experienced Investment Banking professionals or a private equity resume template, click here.
  • Remember, if you are looking for real finance professionals to help you structure and word your resume bullets and experiences, please consider our industry leading resume editing service, specifically targeted towards investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, trading, management consulting and other finance resumes. Our testimonials speak for themselves: www.wallstreetoasis.com/wso-finance-resume-review :-)

Read More About Getting An Investment Banking Job On WSO

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rankings:

top:GS, ms, Lazard, Evercore, pjt, Moelis topb: jp, top groups at other bb, Greenhill, centerview, pwp

mid: cs, baml, Citi midb: barcap

bottom: DB, UBS, Jefferies, houlihan

no you are not bb or elite boutique: Wells Fargo, RBC, BMO, William Blair, piper, guggen, Baird

 

You mean M&I template looks very similar to ours since we've been doing resume reviews longer? ;-)

I'd agree it's not too far off since both use best practices (both of us I'm sure have access to the templates that many of the BB bankers have used for years before WSO was even around). Although I would say our template is much more space efficient along the top of the resume and the default font is slightly smaller.

As a warning, this template is close to the absolute maximum you would want on the page and in practice, we try to scale it back ~5-10%, focus on the best points to give the resume a bit more white space, a bit larger margins and breathing room.

Enjoy! Patrick

 

Met with a recruiter last night and literally switched my resume 10 minutes before leaving with your header style... like you said much more space efficient in comparison to M&I.

Frank Sinatra - "Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy."
 
Best Response

Thanks for sharing, Patrick. I think many prospective monkeys will find this resume template very helpful. That said, I think you may have been overly harsh in your response to animalz ("projecting your own insecurities"... let's not attack the poster's character!).

Some quick thoughts on the WSO vs. M&I resumes from someone who has been mildly obsessed with resume formatting...

  • At a first glance, the WSO resume template looks better. When evaluating a thick stack of resumes, bankers can tell just by glancing which resumes look like a banker resume. Those resumes will get a little more attention becomes it primes the resume screener to take the candidate seriously. The two things I noticed that are most superior about the WSO format is that, from a purely high-level glance, it has (1) tighter margins and (2) a more distinct header. To expand, thick margins, such as the M&I one, convey that you are inexperienced. Doesn't matter if you're not, it just looks that way. And while it's understandable that a college kid may not have as much relevant experience and you don't want to pad your resume with too many BS items, thin margins still convey experience. As for the header, the problem with the M&I header is again, it conveys a lack of experience. Large headers imply you are trying to take up as much space as possible. The other issue is that it is a plain/vanilla header. While this is an appropriate resume header for most jobs, it doesn't, and this is subjective again, look like a banker resume.

  • General formatting points: I actually prefer the long divider lines separating the sections, but that is a preference. WSO resume does a nice job with smaller bullet points (the M&I bullet points are huge). WSO also does a nice job reducing the excessive bolding that the M&I format does, especially in the education and bottom section. My personal preference is to only use bold for the section headers and the company/school/organization name. I like keeping the dates in italics (symmetry with the italics of the job title), but to actually unbold the location of the job/activity. Like I mentioned, I just prefer bold items for the most important sections and the location doesn't really factor that high to me. Plus it's already in a pretty distinct location, separated from clutter, so there's no need to bold to make it stand out, it's already easy to read.

  • In re: animalz comment, I think two lines of coursework is OK. Based on the length of some of the course names, I'd be surprised if you could fit relevant coursework into one line.

  • I like separating the work experience from the activities/leadership experience, similar to the WSO format as opposed to combining them like in M&I. Bankers value professional experience more highly than activities, and I used to find it unnecessarily confusing when activities were mixed in with jobs. For instance, if I see "So-and-So Capital Management" in the work section, I expect it to be a real fund, not a student activity.

  • For the bottom miscellaneous section, I think both are more or less fine. Like I said above, I like how WSO doesn't bold everything. I'm not completely sold on some of WSO's category choices, especially the computer section. I know we're supposed to ignore the text, but I don't think the template should potentially mislead a student into saying that they are an "Expert in Excel, PowerPoint, CapitalIQ, Bloomberg". MS Office skills are generally a waste of space and are probably detrimental to put on your resume. Calling yourself an expert would just be the icing on the cake if you want to get laughed at. I might consider replacing "computer" with "skills" or something of the like. Better yet, my personal preference might be just to do three sub-categories: Skills, Certifications, and Interests. Languages and CapIQ/Bloomberg can fit into Skills, while classes and certifications can fit into Certifications. That being said, there's a lot of flexibility to do whatever you want at the bottom section, but I will caution you that it is one of the few sections people look at closely just because it provides a sense of character to your resume.

Hope some of those comments were helpful. Best thing for applicants to do is to take elements that they like from different resumes to make their own. The WSO resume template is a great start for that.

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