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So in this video we are going to be rewriting my sophomore year resume my sophomore year resume is essentially what i used after two years of school so i already had two internships and i was recruiting for investment banking junior year internships so i think this is really going to be helpful if you’re a student in school if you’ve had no formal kind of work
Experience yet or if you’ve had no one to really properly review your resume now we do have a resume and cover letter course which has all of my private equity and investment banking resumes in there but this is just a helpful freebie so you understand the principles so i’m going to start with some very high level advice i would say the first piece of advice is
That bullet points should be detailed and they should articulate a clear specific outcome and that means you’re not using vague or very general language you want to focus on specific tasks you did specific projects you worked on the more specific the better because what you’re really trying to do is give the reader of the resume a clear indication of what you did
On the job you also want to involve numbers wherever possible this could be something like amounts of dollars invested however much percentage you improved whatever you can do to make that more tangible secondly i would say is you want to focus on your technical work even if you were just an intern and you’re assisting someone else with the actual deliverable as
Long as you can speak to it as long as you understand your role and how it impacted the work product i think it’s fair game to include it on your resume even when people get into first or second year banking a lot of the times they’re not actually going to have as much work experience as they put on their resume so it’s really finding a balance that is tactful
That is tasteful and something that you can still speak to and lastly i’m just going to say you should have a very careful eye towards formatting consistency now what this means is using the same headers throughout using the same font throughout making sure that all the bullets are aligned and this seems really pedantic and really tedious but it’s probably the
Thing that people can catch the most in the industry so with that being said let’s dive into word and actually go through my old resume line by line and then we’re going to go through an edited improved version of the resume to really show you how the changes might be incorporated so here we are in the word document for my old resume and i have all the comments
Pertaining to potential issues or errors within the resume on the right hand side in terms of overall format i would say that this is generally the scheme that i think most finance people are going to follow it’s just kind of the conventions that have been set over time and what i really mean by that is that it should be one page you’re gonna have these clear
Black headers you can also see that these are kind of sectioned out into relatively intuitive buckets we have education experience activities and interests which kind of culminates the rest of the information so let’s tick through this one at a time and one thing off the bat and this is pretty crazy but my font for my name is absurd it’s way too big i would say
Reduce this to 24 to 28 and then honestly reduce the overall font size to maybe 11. right now it is 12. i think that this single row capturing all of my kind of email and address is good you don’t want to spend too much space on this information i think condensing into one row is the right call next we have education i think if you’re a student you’re gonna have
This education section first that’ll change over time once you get more legitimate work experience now you can see in this education section i’m really just trying to include the most relevant information so gotta include your gpa your grades i would also just include maybe certifications or scholarships or if you excel in a particular course maybe if you’re
A ta for a specific class anything that’s directly related to your school can go here so the meat of your resume is going to be experience and a lot of the exercise when you’re in college or if you don’t have a lot of industry experience yet is determining what a value you still did what you contributed to on the job now looking at the specific bullet points
What we’re looking for is to try to have number values wherever possible we want to have the most detailed bullet point possible that also points to a specific outcome so one thing off the top evaluated i would say is not how people kind of describe this convention i would just go with valued i also thought this bullet point could be written a little bit more
Directly instead of saying and perform financial size up which in itself was kind of a vague analysis to be describing i think this bullet point you can just focus it on the valuation component talk about the dcf talk about economic value added and this is what i mean when i say highlight the outcome i think it’s a very good structure to have the first part of
Your bullet point talk about the analysis talk about the thing that you did and then the second part often you can just use you know a comma or a semicolon you want to outline exactly what that led to so this next bullet one thing that i thought was that this is very strong language the idea that a summer analyst would develop the company’s operating model is
Pretty it’s pretty lofty so maybe tone it down to assisted in development of and the impact here is to determine 2013 to 2015 financing requirements so again similar structure what was the analysis what did it involve what are some details and what was the outcome so for this bullet point i just thought it was a little bit of awkward wording conducted equity
Research doesn’t feel like a very organic way to describe this of several public companies in the security technology industry and the purpose was for investor relation updates i think my main idea was that this is kind of redundant with the first outcome so if you can think of something a little bit better like educating senior management or updating the
Internal evaluation model something like that that’s a little bit different would just potentially lead to more interesting interview so moving on this is the second entry this is when i entered at a software startup one thing i thought here that this was a little bit of an absurd claim saying that i increased the product margin by 30 percent as a summer intern
That seems just a little preposterous so maybe coming up with something that was more conventional more believable for here if it’s an existing term something like crm is a very well known initialism so i can just use crm instead of spelling it out completely for here it’s just a minor consistent units if i’m going to introduce commas somewhere then i should be
Using it for all my numbers and finally for the third entry i’ve already talked about the crm work i’ve done in this previous entry so i would actually focus more on this other stuff if it’s cold calling you know that’s a very underrated task that a lot of interns have to do i’d also love to hear more about this portfolio of investment products if you mention
It even if you’re extremely detached from it it’s useful to kind of know what is in the portfolio you know is it mortgage instruments is it bonds is it etfs whatever it is i think that just leads to a more interesting conversation and the last entry on this resume was my time with the university investment fund known as wik and i thought i did a good job of
Trying to mention numbers wherever possible you know talk about the roi i talked about the club budget now what i thought overall especially because i have stock pitches below just have one ticker somewhere on your resume so that people can ask you questions about it it might seem scary because you’ll have to kind of prepare for that stock pitch but i think it
Can create a lot more upside for your resume people want to talk about businesses they want to talk about companies and if i just mentioned a stock pitch here or even mentioned the ticker that i pitched for this competition i think that would make this resume a lot more precise in reading these bullets i thought it would be actually better to split them up one
More about pitching stocks one more about the fund itself i also think it’d be good to mention kind of what the index had done because in isolation this doesn’t mean a lot and in reading the bullets i thought that this one was not as important it articulates more about you know the club management but i think at this level it’s better to talk about the analysis
But the fundamental kind of valuation that i did i think my main kind of gripes with the awards section is that it’s not very precise it’s much better if you can talk about the actual basis of the competition what did it entail if you beat a lot of teams how many teams were it all these small details really add up it’s a similar comment for interest if something
Is truly your interest you should be able to add two or three more words if you’re doing creative writing have you made any submissions do you have a blog or what substantiates the idea that you’ve done creative writing even if it’s something like travel or food you should be able to mention specifically where you’ve traveled where you want to travel specific
Trips you’ve made things like that that just make it a lot more conversational so there’s a fair amount of issues that i found with the resume let’s take a look of what it looks like with these comments incorporated so here we are looking at the improved resume in my opinion a lot of the core information is very similar but it just adds a little bit more detail
Where possible and cleans it up we have the two decimals here we mentioned the actual portfolio company which is extremely important for a search fund that only holds one portfolio company for the portfolio of investment products i’d talk about some of the investments that were in that group for the fund we talked about the comparable index what you actually beat
It by that’s extremely important whenever talking about fund dynamics you can also see that the units are made more consistent see we have k here so we have a k for 150 000 here i think a lot of improvement was made to this section i’ve mentioned the specific companies i was working with or even just articulating what the kind of competition was for interest you
Can also see that i’ve added a lot more detail and this adding other small details makes it a more believable resume i again want to stress to you i think the most important thing is getting these bullet points right if you can clearly talk about the work you did if you can point to specific number outcomes then you’re doing a great job and you’re going to have a
Solid resume so i hope that was helpful for you again if you want to look at more real world examples you can download all my investment banking and private equity resumes from our resume and cover letter course in that course we’re also gonna have a lot more detailed instruction a resume bullet point bank and i think it’s gonna be a big help for you if you don’t
Think your resume’s in a good spot so thanks for watching and i’ll see you in the next video you
Transcribed from video
Rewriting my Resume from Investment Banking Recruiting By Peak Frameworks
