How to Write Investment Banking Resume Bullet Points

Four years ago, halfway through my first year of university, I was just starting to find my footing in the recruiting void. I'd look at the resumes of the upper-years ahead of me, the ones who had already finished their investment banking internships, and think: damn, I wish I had experiences like that to talk about. Their resumes had multiple transactions, all the right buzzwords, and bullet points that made their work sound far more relevant, and far more sophisticated, than anything I'd done.

I was wrong. I had all the ammunition I needed. I just wasn't putting it to use in an optimal way.

That realization is the foundation of everything below. Most students who feel behind aren't actually behind on experience. They're behind on how they write about it. You probably looked at a few companies, did some research, built something, and passed an insight up to your manager. The raw material is already yours. What separates the resume that gets pulled from the pile from the one that gets tossed is almost never the work itself. It's the writing.

So let's learn to write the bullet point.

The anatomy of a bullet point

In its simplest form, a bullet point is made up of two things: what you did, and the result of what you did. That's it. Every framework you've heard of is just a rearrangement of those same parts:

• STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result
• RATS: Result, Action, Task, Situation
• ACR: Action, Context, Result

Don't get hung up on which acronym to follow. They all point at the same skeleton. If you've captured what you did and what came of it, you've satisfied all three.

The next rule is about voice. Bullet points should be written in the active voice, not the passive voice. The difference looks like this:

Active: Completed a 16-week internship at a bulge-bracket investment bank

Passive: A 16-week internship at a bulge-bracket investment bank was completed

The active version puts you in the driver's seat. You completed the internship; it didn't happen to you. This is exactly why every bullet point should begin with an action verb. Starting with a verb forces the active voice and signals ownership before the reader has even finished the line. For the full list of action verbs and the buzzwords that carry weight in finance, see our Action Verbs & Buzzwords List.

Content matters as much as structure

Structure gets you a readable bullet. Content gets you the interview. There are two reasons the words themselves matter as much as the shape they sit in.

The first is the Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. This is software that grades your resume before a human ever sees it, and it's most common at the largest firms, the bulge brackets, where reviewing tens of thousands of resumes by hand would be a poor use of anyone's time. The ATS scans for keywords, usually drawn straight from the job description, and rejects any resume that falls below a relevance threshold. That threshold typically cuts more than 90% of applicants. Only the resumes that survive it get read by a person and considered for the first-round shortlist.

The second reason is candidacy, which is just your fitness for the role. Firms evaluate that fitness on two levels: the technical question, "how good is this candidate at the job?", and the behavioral one, "how much do I want to work with this person?" Your resume speaks mostly to the technical side. It's the clearest evidence of what you're capable of, and your bullet points are the heart of that evidence. The more relevant they are to the role, the higher your perceived candidacy, and the more likely you move forward.

This is why buzzwords and action verbs matter. But don't make the mistake of thinking their mere presence is enough. A bullet stuffed with the right keywords can still be weak. Four qualities separate a stellar bullet point from a forgettable one, and we'll take each in turn: specificity, quantified impact, brevity, and confidence.

Specificity: show you actually did the work

A lack of specificity is the single biggest mistake students make on a resume. When a bullet is vague, it reads as unfamiliarity. It quietly tells the reader you don't really know the work you're claiming to have done, which casts doubt on that bullet, and once one bullet looks inflated, the credibility of the whole resume starts to wobble.

The fix is to go one layer deeper on what you did. Most students don't lack the details; they just don't think to include them. Here are the buckets to mine when a bullet feels thin:

• The software you used (Bloomberg, Capital IQ, and so on)
• The receiving parties, meaning who you submitted or presented your work to, and how long the project ran
• The industry, geography, business model, and investment mandate
• The number of participants or the size of your team
• Your information sources, like sell-side research or public filings

Watch what happens when you run a vague bullet through those buckets:

Before: Evaluated M&A opportunities and supported business due diligence

After: Facilitated acquisition of ~$10mm junior miner through synergy analysis, cross-selling opportunity identification, and Colombian gold market sizing

The "before" could have been written by someone who sat in the room or by someone who only read about the deal in the news. The "after" could only have been written by someone who was there. It names the deal size, the target, the analytical methods, and the geography. Each detail is a small proof of involvement, and they compound.

Here's a second one:

Before: Analyzed competitive landscape using sell-side research and public filings

After: Spearheaded benchmarking analysis of global CDMO players to draft 5-page investment committee memo by consolidating consultant call transcripts, identifying secular trends, and heat-mapping global activity

Notice that the "after" tells you what the work produced (a 5-page investment committee memo), how it was built (consolidating call transcripts, spotting secular trends, heat-mapping activity), and across what universe (global CDMO players). You finish reading it with a clear picture of the actual job. That picture is what earns trust.

Quantified impact: put a number on the result

Specificity sharpens what you did. Quantifying impact sharpens the result. It's the same move, one layer deeper, except now you're measuring the outcome of the work rather than describing the work itself.

There are three ways to put a number on impact:

• Percentages (%): growth, efficiency gains, cost reductions, error rates, success rates
• Dollars ($): transaction value, savings, assets or fund size, investment made
• Numbers (#): competitors, participants, team or club size, deliverables produced

See how a number transforms a bullet:

Before: Screened M&A opportunities looking at recurring revenue, earnings seasonality, and industry tailwinds

After: Screened 300+ M&A opportunities across 3 sectors looking at businesses with 90%+ ARR, low earnings seasonality, and a 5-year end-market CAGR of >7%

The "before" tells the reader what you looked at. The "after" tells them the scale you operated at (300+ opportunities, 3 sectors) and the exact screen you applied (90%+ ARR, a five-year end-market CAGR above 7%). It reads like the work of someone who has actually run a screen, because that's what running a screen sounds like.

One more, this time leaning on percentages:

Before: Assessed client needs and provided personalized services to increase client satisfaction by 75%

After: Evaluating 50+ customer reviews daily to optimize medicine delivery and communicate insights to management; initiated implementation across 5 offices resulting in 75% increase in client satisfaction

Same headline result (75%), but the "after" shows the machinery behind it: 50+ reviews a day, a rollout across 5 offices, insight passed to management. The number means more once the reader can see how you got there.

Brevity: every word should earn its place

You have very little space on a resume, so every word has to pull its weight. The enemies here are flowery vocabulary, cliché adjectives, and value judgments. Less is almost always more.

The worst offenders are the adjectives you use to grade your own work:

Before: Provided timely, insightful, and accurate recommendations to sales team

After: Collaborated with sales team

"Timely, insightful, and accurate" are judgments the reader will never take at face value, because of course you'd describe your own work that way. They take up space and add nothing. Cutting them isn't losing information; it's removing noise. (From there you'd layer specificity and a number back on, but you start by clearing the dead weight.)

Brevity doesn't always mean shorter, though. Sometimes it means trading a tangle of words for a clean one:

Before: Conducted daily dividend reconciliation, updating systems to maintain a consistent and reliable dividend stream across all accounts

After: Conducted daily dividend reconciliation to ensure consistent dividend stream across all accounts

The "after" keeps everything that matters (the daily reconciliation, the consistent stream, all accounts) and drops the filler around it. The test is simple: read the bullet, then try to delete words. If the meaning survives the cut, the words were never needed.

Confidence: claim the work you touched

This last quality is less about phrasing and more about permission: the permission you give yourself to claim what you worked on.

Early on, I genuinely believed that writing about a workflow I wasn't "hugely" involved in, where I wasn't a "key" member of the team, would be lying. Here's what I missed: no intern is ever a key member of the team, and firms know it. We're early in our careers. Understanding a workflow end to end draws on the same skills as doing it. And going above and beyond, working not just on what's assigned to you but on what your team is tackling, is the difference between an average intern and a good one. To limit your bullets to only the tasks formally handed to you is to quietly admit you were average. You probably weren't.

If blurring that line makes you uneasy, the honest tool is your verb. Open with "supported" or "assisted" and you've claimed real involvement without ever pretending you ran the show. You get to speak to the meatiest parts of a deal without overclaiming a word of it.

And here's the part that should change how you think about all of this:

Read that again. The resume line is a promise; the interview is where you keep it. Two interns can put the same deal on the page, and the one who walks in able to discuss it in granular detail, the screens, the model, the market, will always make the stronger impression, even if, on paper, he did less of the original work. That edge doesn't come from having been assigned more. It comes from preparation.

Which is the good news hiding in this whole section: the quality of your work, and your grasp of it, isn't frozen the moment an internship ends. Worried a deal didn't close, or wasn't "live"? It still belongs on your resume. You surely looked at a company or two, did the research, and shared an insight. If two hours of work isn't enough to speak to it well, spend ten more after the internship is over. Rebuild the model, reread the filings, and retell yourself the story of the deal until you could give it in your sleep. Be bold about what you put on the page, then work backward to earn it. (How to actually prepare and deliver a deal walkthrough is a subject of its own, and one worth its own deep dive.)

The takeaway is short: be confident, and never downplay your experiences. The only one rooting for you is you.

Bringing it all together

A few things sit just outside what we've covered but are worth a flag. The very first bullet under each experience plays a different role: it sets the scene, a one-line contextualizer, and it follows its own formula. So does the "Selected Transaction Experience" label that bankers use to spotlight their deals, and the Skills and Interests lines at the bottom of the page. Each is its own subject in how a resume is structured, and each is worth learning once you have the bullet itself down.

But the bullet is where it starts. Remember where we began: the odds are you already have the ammunition. The work is done. All that's left is to write it like it was yours, because it was.

Frequently Asked Questions