The Resume Guide for Investment Banking

Midway through my first year of university, when I was just starting to find a foothold in the recruiting void, I'd look at the resumes of the upper-years 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 look 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.

That realization is the single most important thing I can teach you about your resume, so let me say it plainly: the gap between a weak resume and a strong one is almost never the experience. It's the presentation. Two students can do the exact same internship, look at the exact same screen, and run the exact same analysis, and one will walk out with a resume that reads like a banker wrote it while the other reads like a confused undergrad. The difference is in how they write it down.

This guide is about that. Specifically, it's about the content of your bullet points: what you write inside each one and why it works. Layout, length, fonts, and page count all matter, but they're a separate discipline. Here we're solving the harder problem, the one that actually moves the needle, which is the words themselves.

What a Bullet Point Actually Is

In its simplest form, a bullet point is two things: what you did, and the result of what you did. That's it. The frameworks you may have heard of are all just rearrangements of that same idea:

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're variations on the same theme. What matters more is that every bullet is written in the active voice, not the passive voice:

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

The active version puts you at the front of the action. This is exactly why every bullet point should begin with an action verb. The first word the reader sees should be a verb that signals you did something — spearheaded, originated, facilitated, constructed — not a flat helped or worked on.

But here's the trap. Most students hear "use action verbs and buzzwords" and assume that checking those two boxes produces a great bullet. It doesn't. Action verbs and buzzwords are the price of entry, not the finished product. Before I show you the four things that actually separate a strong bullet from a weak one, you need to understand who, and what, is reading your resume in the first place.

Why Your Resume Gets Judged Before a Human Ever Sees It

There are two reasons content matters so much, and the first one isn't even human.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). This is AI that grades your resume. It's more common at larger firms, the bulge brackets especially, for a simple reason: when you receive tens of thousands of resumes, reading every one by hand is a poor use of the firm's resources, and it produces inconsistent, unreliable results anyway. So the machine goes first. It scans your resume for certain keywords, usually drawn straight from the job description, and rejects anything that doesn't clear a pre-set relevance threshold.

That threshold will reject 90%+ of resumes. Read that again. The majority of applicants are filtered out before a single banker lays eyes on them. Only the survivors get passed to humans, who then build the first-round interview shortlist. If your bullets don't speak the language of the role, you never make it into the room.

Candidacy. This is your "fitness" for the role, and firms evaluate it on two levels:

Technical | "How good is this candidate at this job?"
Behavioral | "How much do I want to work with this candidate?"

Some experiences, like volunteering, hint at your behavior, at who you are. But your resume primarily conveys what you're capable of, your technical skillset, through the lens of what you've already done. And bullet point content is the purest expression of that. It's the literal record of what you did in each experience. So the logic is direct: the more relevant your bullets are to the role, the higher your perceived candidacy, and the more likely you are to advance.

So content matters twice. It gets you past the machine, and then it convinces the human. Now, the four pillars that make a bullet do both jobs: Specificity, Impact, Brevity, and Confidence.

Pillar 1: Specificity

Watch what specificity does to the same underlying experience:

Before: Collaborated with team to implement growth initiatives
After: Collaborated with 3-person team to identify global telecom industry incumbents' unique growth initiatives; liaised with strategic finance team to refine ideas for implementation

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" lines could have been written by anyone about anything. The "after" lines could only have been written by someone who was actually in the room. That's the whole game.

When you're staring at a thin bullet and don't know how to enrich it, run through these five buckets and ask which ones you can fill in:

• Software used (Bloomberg, Capital IQ, etc.)

• Receiving parties (to whom you submitted or presented your work) and the duration of the project

• Industry, geography, business model, and investment mandate

• Number of participants or team size

• Information sources (sell-side research, public filings, etc.)

Almost any vague bullet can be sharpened by answering two or three of these.

Pillar 2: Quantifying Impact

Impact is specificity taken one layer deeper. Where specificity nails down what you did, quantifying impact nails down the result of what you did. There are three ways to put a number on it:

• Percentages (%) | growth, efficiency improvements, cost-cutting, error-rate, success rate

• Dollars ($) | transaction value, cost savings, AUM or fund size, investment made

• Number (#) | number of competitors, participants, executive team members, club size, deliverables

Here's where students freeze up: "But I don't know the exact number." You don't need to. Any quantity on your resume is going to be approximate, it won't be 100% accurate, and that is completely okay. Firms know this and expect it. The unwritten rule is simply that you should be able to roughly outline the steps you took to arrive at the figure. If you can explain how you got there, whatever number you computed is acceptable.

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%

Before: Published a report on the Global Semiconductor Industry covering revenue and cost drivers, industry trends, and precedent transactions and comparable company analyses; presented to chapters across Canada
After: Published a 16-page report on the Global Semiconductor Industry covering revenue and cost drivers, 5-year industry trends, and precedent transactions and comparable company analysis; presented to 100+ Investa members across Canada

Just like specificity, the more numbers you carry across your bullets, the more credible the underlying experiences feel. A good target is to quantify 60 to 80% of your bullet points. You don't need a figure in every single one, but a resume with numbers sprinkled throughout reads as the work of someone who measured what they did, and that's exactly the impression you want.

Pillar 3: Brevity

You have limited space, so every word has to earn its place. The enemies here are flowery vocabulary, cliché adjectives, and value judgments. Less is almost always more.

The sharpest illustration of this principle is also the most uncomfortable one:

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

At first glance the "after" looks like it lost information. It didn't. The "before" was nothing but adjectives and self-flattery. "Timely," "insightful," "accurate," these are value judgments you're handing yourself, and they carry zero verifiable information. Cutting them doesn't subtract substance, because there was no substance there to begin with.

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

This is where students get confused, because brevity sounds like the opposite of specificity and impact. It isn't. Specificity and impact tell you to add words that carry information: a number, a software platform, an industry. Brevity tells you to cut words that carry none: adjectives, hedges, and value judgments. They point in the same direction. Both are about maximizing the ratio of information to words. When you find yourself reaching for "timely, insightful, and accurate," that's usually a sign the work underneath was thin, and the honest fix is to say less, not to dress it up.

Pillar 4: Confidence

This is the pillar that transformed my own resume, and it's the one almost no one teaches, so I want to be careful with it.

I used to believe that because I wasn't "hugely" involved in a given workflow, because I wasn't a "key" member of the team, writing about that workflow on my resume would be lying. That belief was holding me back, and it's probably holding you back too.

Here's the reality: no intern is ever a "key" member of the team, and firms know it. We're early in our careers. Understanding a workflow in its entirety draws on the same skills as actually completing it. So you are allowed to claim the work you touched, not just the narrow slice formally assigned to you. Two frames make this click.

First, going above and beyond. An "average" employee does only what's assigned to them. An employee who goes above and beyond works on what's assigned and engages with what the rest of their team is working on. The only real prerequisite for understanding those broader deliverables is, well, choosing to understand them. So if you limit your resume to only the tasks formally handed to you, you're effectively admitting you were an average intern. Were you?

Second, the hedge. If blurring the line between "work I owned" and "work I touched" makes you nervous, that's healthy, and there's a clean solution. Use action verbs like "supported" and "assisted." These let you speak to the meatiest parts of a deal or project without ever claiming "I did everything." You get the relevance without the dishonesty.

The transactions on my own "after" resume? I didn't do all of that work during the internship. But I did do all of it in the lead-up to my next interview. I rebuilt the models from scratch, did my own industry and company research, pored over articles, press releases, and public filings, and wrote and rewrote the story of each deal until I could tell it in my sleep.

So here's the practical move. Before your internship ends, download everything relevant to the mandates you want on your resume: CIMs, sell-side research, call notes and transcripts. Then revise that material, re-tell yourself the story of the mandate, and repeat until you land an interview. Be bold with what you write, then work backwards from each entry to build your preparation timeline. (How to actually deliver that walkthrough when they ask "tell me about this deal" is a craft of its own, and it deserves its own treatment, so I'll cover the mechanics of a 10/10 deal walkthrough separately.)

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

The 1-Line Contextualizer: Your Most Important Bullet

Everything we've covered so far applies to the bullets that describe specific work. But the bullet that sits at the top of each experience is a different animal, and I call it the "1-line contextualizer." To understand why it exists, you have to understand how a resume is meant to be read.

A resume is designed to increase in specificity as you move from top to bottom. For us as students, the Education section sits at the top, because the most general description of a student is, well, "student": the school, the GPA, the clubs. For a 30-year-old banker, Education drops to the very bottom, replaced at the top by their current role, because the most general description of them is now their profession. The clearest proof of this principle is the "Additional Information" section. The very name tells you it's the least relevant material, an "addition" to the core.

This unfolding happens between sections and within them. Think about it: have you ever seen a strong student resume where the GPA wasn't right at the top of the Education section? Within each experience entry, the same logic applies. The first bullet should give the most general picture of the experience, a clear idea of what the whole thing was. You'll want to capture:

• Duration of the internship or tenure

• Team / group / industry / geography

• Organization description / business model / AUM

• Competitiveness or scarcity (more common for extracurriculars)

For professional experiences, the formula looks like this:

And here's how that plays out for investment banking roles:

Completed a 15-week internship with the M&A group at [Firm Name], one of Canada's largest investment banks

Completed a 32-week internship with the diversified industries (TMT, gaming, healthcare) and mining groups on 7+ M&A deals

Completed a 10-week internship with the Restructuring Group at [Firm Name]; returning full-time in 2026

For extracurricular experiences, there are two go-to formulae:

Which look like this in practice:

Selected as 1 of 4 analysts, from 100+ applicants, to manage a $1.5mm VC-focused endowment fund backing early-stage companies

Placed 2nd in North America and selected as 1 of 6 teams invited to NYC final round out of 200+ teams across world

A Note on Ordering

You do not have to order your resume strictly reverse-chronologically. You can instead order experiences by relevance. This guarantees your most relevant experience sits near the top where no reader can miss it. Without that move, there's a real chance a reader tosses your resume back on the pile before ever reaching your best work.

And if you lack relevant professional experience but have relevant extracurricular experience, you can combine the two sections under a single header: "Professional & Extracurricular Experience." Again, the goal is to drive to zero the chance that the reader misses your strongest material. Both of these tactics are common enough that following them won't raise any eyebrows.

"Selected […] Experience": Your Career Currency

Now for the most specific bullets on your resume, the ones that live under a "Selected […] Experience" label. This label is a spotlight. It calls attention to the components of your experience you're proudest of, the ones that best support your candidacy: transactions (prospective, closed, or ongoing), projects, reports, anything worth elevating.

For investment banking, you'd use "Selected Transaction Experience" if you worked on deals during, say, a search fund internship. And because building a stock pitch draws on the same muscles as supporting an M&A deal (modelling, fundamental analysis, company and industry research), if you have the space, adding "Selected Research Experience" under your student investment fund is worth it too. Take a look at any working banker's resume and you'll see transaction experience makes up roughly 50% of it. Whether you're aiming at private equity, public equity, credit, investment banking, hedge funds, sales and trading, or equity research, the deals, mandates, trades, and reports you work on are your career currency. That's also why so many bankers and PE investors showcase their deals right on their LinkedIn profiles.

A few rules on the label itself. The two most common are Transaction and Project. Two others come up often: Research, usually for equity-research work, and Portfolio Company, usually for private equity internships. Never use more than one label per experience. If your projects aren't all the same type, reach for the general term, "Projects," rather than concatenating two labels with "&" or stacking two separate "Selected […] Experience" lines.

Structurally, the "Selected […] Experience" line comes first, then a 1-line contextualizer for the transaction or project, then the bullets describing what you did, indented one level deeper than the contextualizer. The two formulae for a transaction contextualizer:

And here's what those look like fully built out. Treat these as illustrations of the format, not as anyone's specific track record:

$1B Co-investment with Advent to acquire Maxar Technologies (NYSE:MAXR), a Space Technology company, for $6.5B (Closed – May'23)

Buy-side Advisor on $435M Acquisition of USA Truck (NASDAQ:USAK) by DB Schenker (Closed – Jun'22)

Sell-side Advisor on $1.8B sale of Pilot Freight Services to Maersk (CPH:MAERSK) (Ongoing)

The bullets that follow each contextualizer obey the same four pillars as everything else: specificity, quantified impact, brevity, confidence. These bullets in particular are perfect homes for buzzwords, so use them liberally, and lean on action verbs like "supported" so you can describe the meatiest parts of a transaction without falsely claiming you ran it.

Using the Label to Rescue an "Irrelevant" Internship

Here's the move most students miss. The "Selected […] Experience" label doesn't just spotlight obviously relevant work. It can also reframe work a reader would otherwise overlook for its apparent lack of relevance.

Say you're a financial analyst intern at a small- or mid-cap company, and you're tasked with industry research on a new healthcare vertical. You compile your findings, build a presentation, and deliver it to your managers. That work is genuinely close to what you'd do in investment banking or private equity, but it isn't a "transaction," so on a normal resume it would read as generic corporate work. Slap a "Selected Project Experience" label on it, and suddenly it's organized and presented like the sophisticated analysis it actually was.

Industry research, information-database construction, financial analysis and modelling, strategic evaluations, equity research: these are all activities worth calling out, especially if you lack relevant work experience, because doing so essentially converts an irrelevant internship into a relevant one.

Additional Information: The Bottom of the Page Still Counts

This section traditionally holds "Skills" and "Interests," and less frequently things like Athletics, Languages, or Volunteering. It sits at the bottom because, by the unfolding logic we discussed, it's the least critical material. But "least critical" is not "ignore it," and the Interests line in particular punches well above its position.

Skills

List software only, primarily financial software. The acceptable categories:

Non-Financial | Microsoft Office Suite, Python, PowerBI, SQL, etc.
Financial | Bloomberg, Capital IQ, Refinitiv Eikon, Preqin, Pitchbook, FactSet, etc.

There's also a case for dropping the Skills line entirely. A standalone Skills line is unnecessary if you've already woven financial software and financial models throughout your bullet points. To clear that bar, you need at least 3 financial software platforms and 3 financial or valuation models (DCF, LBO, Comps, Precedents, 3-statement, Operating, M&A) showing up naturally across your resume. Hit that, and a dedicated Skills line is redundant. Fall short of it, and keep Skills as its own standalone line.

Interests

The Skills line is table stakes, and you'll basically never be asked about it in an interview. Interests are the opposite. Almost every interviewer will ask about your Interests, certainly in superday interviews, and very commonly at the end of first-round interviews, right before they hand the floor over for your questions. Because Interests is the most unique line on your entire resume, you should optimize it for one thing: building maximum intrigue and rapport with your interviewer before they've even spoken to you.

A few firm rules:

• Don't list things like "Watching Netflix" or "Eating." Put some thought in. While honesty is appreciated, recruitment has no-fly zones, and lazy interests are one of them (citing "money" as your reason for wanting IB is another).
• Make them specific. Instead of "Soccer," write "Soccer (Chelsea, Real Madrid)" if those are your two teams. Instead of "Travelling," write "Travelling (Morocco & Swiss Alps)" if those are your top destinations.

That specificity comes in two flavors:

Unique Accomplishments | Chess (Vancouver '24 Champion)
Personal Preferences | Cooking (slow-cooked meat)

You should carry at least 1 unique accomplishment and at least 2 personal preferences. Aim for 3 to 7 interests across 1 to 2 lines, and include at least one from each of these types: Intellectual (Reading, Chess, Poker, a musical instrument, language learning, writing), Athletic (Running, Weightlifting, Cycling, Rowing, Soccer, Basketball), and Recreational (Travel, Movies, Fashion, Music). A line like "Rubik's Cube (<10s PR)," "Weightlifting (405lbs bench)," or "Running (finished 3 marathons)" does far more work than the bare noun on its own.

Here's a fully worked example to anchor the calibration:

Triathlon (Ironman 70.3 Tulsa, OK), Boxing (~5 years), Cooking (slow-cooked meat), Quentin Tarantino movies (Inglourious Basterds), Water Polo (U18 Team Singapore), Reading (Philosophy)

Notice the balance. Each interest is specific enough that the reader instantly understands how it fits into a life, but not so specific that it loses everyone. "Reading (Philosophy)" builds rapport. Swap in "Reading (Nicomachean Ethics)" and it registers with almost no one, so the rapport evaporates. The interests are unique without being weird or lazy, and they're a little bit of a flex without tipping into arrogance. That's the line you're walking.

The "Catch-all" Line

There's one more line worth knowing about, a catch-all for two kinds of material: Education-section overflow that couldn't fit upstairs, and personal achievements you haven't mentioned anywhere else. It typically takes one of these forms:

Athletics: Tennis (2024 U19 Ontario Champion), Cross-country (High School 5km record-holder)
Entrepreneurship: founded general hardware store (Bob's Merchandise); $300k in LTM Revenue; hired & trained 3 part-time employees
Activities: Icahn Capital 2023 Stock Pitch Competition (1st/20 teams), BuffettU Investment Club
Volunteering: Bolivian Red Cross (3+ years), Kids for Cancer (2+ years), WWF (1+ years)

The Hard Cap

Your entire "Additional Information" section should be no more than 4 lines. In practice that means either 4 labels at 1 line each (Skills, Interests, Athletics, Volunteering), or 3 labels with only one of them running to 2 lines (Skills, Interests, Activities). Honestly, just Skills and Interests will usually do the job. If you have nothing more worth writing, don't feel compelled to manufacture filler to fill the space. An honest, sharp two lines beats a padded four.

The Real Lesson