Search for an investment banking resume template and you will find a thousand of them. Nearly all are the same one page document with slightly different margins.
The template is not your problem.
We have looked at a very large number of these documents from experienced professionals, and the ones that fail almost never fail on formatting. They fail because of what is written inside a perfectly acceptable template.
The two readers you are writing for
Your CV gets read twice, by two readers with completely different requirements.
The software. Applicant tracking systems parse your document into structured fields. Anything that breaks parsing works against you: text inside images, multi-column layouts that scramble reading order, tables, headers and footers carrying critical information, unusual section names, non-standard fonts.
The human, for roughly six seconds. A recruiter scanning a stack is looking for firm names, role titles, dates, education, and whether the numbers suggest relevant scale.
A document that delights one and defeats the other gets you nowhere. Optimise for both, which mostly means being boring in structure and sharp in content.
Structure that works
Single column. One page for anything under roughly ten years of experience. Standard section headings, in this order.
- Name and contact. In the body of the document, not the header. Include your city, email, phone and LinkedIn.
- Education. Institution, degree, graduation year. Include GPA if it is strong. If you are more than about five years out, this drops below experience.
- Professional experience. Reverse chronological. Firm, title, location, dates.
- Skills and interests. Short. Genuine.
Save as PDF unless a portal specifically asks otherwise. Name the file properly: Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf, never resume-final-v4.pdf.
The part that actually decides it
Every bullet in your experience section should answer three questions: what did you do, how big was it, and what happened as a result.
Most professional CVs answer only the first.
Responsible for managing supplier relationships and supporting the procurement process.
That sentence contains no information. It describes a job title, not a person. Compare it with:
Renegotiated 14 supplier contracts covering $23m of annual spend, building the cost model that supported the decision and delivering a 9 percent reduction in unit cost.
Same job. Same truth. One of them survives a screen.
Three rules make this reliable.
Lead with the verb, not the context. Built, modelled, valued, negotiated, led, launched, reduced. Not "was responsible for" or "assisted with".
Put a number in most bullets. Dollar value, headcount, percentage, time saved, transaction count, portfolio size. If you genuinely cannot quantify it, say what changed as a result.
Name the relevant skill explicitly. If you built a discounted cash flow model, write discounted cash flow model. Do not write "performed financial analysis" and hope the reader infers it.
What experienced candidates consistently get wrong
Describing seniority instead of substance. Managing a team of nine is context. What the team produced is content.
Hiding the finance. People who have done genuinely relevant work bury it. The FP&A analyst who has built three-statement models, the consultant who has run commercial diligence, the operator who sat inside a sale process. That is the most valuable material on the page and it is usually in the last bullet of the second role.
Sending one document everywhere. A private equity role, a coverage role and a restructuring role read for different things. Same history, three different emphases, three documents. This is the single highest-return change most candidates can make, and almost nobody does it because it is tedious.
Listing responsibilities in the current role and results in old ones. It reads as though you stopped achieving things when you got promoted.
Overreaching. Do not claim modelling experience you cannot defend for twenty minutes under questioning. The interview is where that gets found out, and it is a bad place to be found out.
A quick self-test
Print it. Hand it to someone who does not know your industry. Give them ten seconds, take it back, and ask them three questions.
- Which firms have I worked at?
- Roughly how much money did I influence?
- What am I applying for?
If they cannot answer all three, the document is not ready. Not because they are the audience, but because the screening reader is giving you no more attention than they just did.
On templates, briefly
Use a clean single column layout. Any of the widely circulated banking templates are fine. Do not pay for one.
The difference between a candidate who gets interviews and one who does not is essentially never the template. It is whether the bullets contain quantified, relevant, defensible work, and whether the document in front of the reader was written for the role they are hiring for.
That is unglamorous, and it is the whole game.
If you want a second pair of eyes on yours, that is part of what happens in a Fit Assessment.
