The bullet points, structure, and confidence that turn a resume into interviews.
Your resume is the first filter — an ATS and a banker skim it in seconds. This guide covers how to write bullet points that quantify real impact, structure the page so your strongest experience gets seen, and put deals and projects on it with the confidence to back them up.
One principle governs the whole page: a resume unfolds from general to specific. The standard section stack, the two levers most students never pull — order by relevance, merge Professional & Extracurricular — and how to layer one entry from context down to named deals.
13 min readUpdated Jun 11, 2026
The Skills line is table stakes and never asked about, so software only: Bloomberg, Capital IQ, FactSet. Never "Financial Modelling" as a label. And if your bullets already name 3 platforms and 3 models, drop the line entirely.
8 min readUpdated Jun 11, 2026
At a large bank, software rejects 90%+ of resumes before a banker opens one. How the ATS scores you, and how to clear it: mirror the posting, make every bullet specific, name your tools — plus why the same specificity that beats the machine earns a banker's trust.
9 min readUpdated Jun 10, 2026
The three currencies for quantifying a resume bullet (%, $, and #), run through real before-and-afters: 'supported fundraising' becomes '$25,000+ in sponsorships.' Plus why you only quantify 60 to 80% of your bullets, and how to back up a number you estimated.
12 min readUpdated Jun 8, 2026
What gets a resume pulled from the pile instead of tossed is almost never the work. It's the writing. The four qualities that elevate a bullet: specificity, quantified impact, brevity, confidence. Plus why firms care less that you did the deal than that you can speak to it.
12 min readUpdated Jun 10, 2026
The four pillars that turn a weak IB resume bullet into a strong one: specificity, quantified impact, brevity, and confidence. With before/after rewrites of real bullets, plus the one almost no one teaches: claim the deal you only touched, then prepare to defend it.
24 min readUpdated Jun 10, 2026
How to make a non-IB internship read as analyst work: surface the transferable work you did, label it 'Selected Project Experience,' and lead the top line with its most finance-adjacent description. The work was always there; you just hadn't described it at the right depth.
13 min readUpdated Jun 5, 2026
How to format a deal under a "Selected Transaction Experience" label: value, type, parties, status, built from real lines like the $435M USA Truck / DB Schenker acquisition. Plus why the intern who did two hours of work gave the best interview answer in the room.
12 min readUpdated Jun 5, 2026
More articles coming soon
Lead with the action and the result, and quantify the impact wherever you honestly can — numbers are what make a bullet land. Show what you did and what changed because of it, not just what you were responsible for. A specific, quantified bullet ("built a model that flagged a 12% cost overrun") beats a vague one ("assisted with financial analysis") every time.
Reframe the work around the skills IB actually cares about — analysis, working with numbers, ownership, communication, attention to detail — rather than the industry label on the role. Almost any serious internship involved problem-solving, data, or stakeholder work you can present in banking-relevant terms. You're not lying; you're translating real experience into the language the reader is screening for.
Use a "Selected Transaction Experience" (or "Selected Project Experience") line — it calls attention to the work that best supports your candidacy, the same way bankers' own resumes devote roughly half their space to deals. Add a one-line contextualizer for the transaction, then bullets describing what you specifically did on it. Transaction and project work is your "career currency," so make it easy for the reader to find.
Keep the formatting clean and machine-readable — standard one-column layout, no text boxes, tables, or graphics that a parser can choke on — and mirror the language used in the role's description. Many resumes get filtered out before a human ever sees them, purely on format or missing keywords. A simple, well-structured, keyword-aligned resume clears the filter and still reads well to the banker on the other side.
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