The resume

A banking resume is screened quickly, often by an analyst between tasks. They look for school and grades, previous finance experience, evidence of quantitative ability, and anything that suggests you can work long hours without dropping detail. Your job is to make those four facts visible in the top half of the page.

Formatting is part of the test. Banks produce documents where alignment and consistency are judged. A resume with uneven spacing or two fonts tells the reader you will produce pitch books the same way.

Use one page, reverse chronological order, and standard section headings: Education, Experience, Leadership/Activities, Skills & Interests. Put education first while you are a student. Include GPA if it is strong, and test scores only if they help.

Each bullet should follow action, scope, result. Lead with a strong verb, say what you worked on with numbers, and finish with what changed because of your work. 'Helped with analysis' tells the reader nothing; 'Built a comparable-companies analysis of 14 peers used in a $250m sell-side pitch' tells them you can do the job.

Numbers do the persuading. Deal sizes, number of companies analysed, percentage improvements, money raised, people managed. If you lack deals, quantify academic or club work in the same way.

Interviewers pick a line and dig. If you list a DCF, expect to walk through it. If you list a stock pitch, expect to be asked whether you still like it. Anything you cannot discuss for three minutes should come off the page.

Prepare a short story for each role: what you did, what was hard, what you learned. These stories double as answers to behavioural questions.

Read the page aloud, then have two people check it. Save as a PDF named with your first and last name. Tailor the objective nothing — banks do not want summaries or objectives — but do tailor which experience is listed first for coverage versus product groups.