The Perfect Sales & Trading Resume Template?

This is a guest post from a reader who broke into Sales & Trading (S&T) coming from a non-target school. In Part 3 of this series, you’ll learn all about how to write sales & trading resumes and how to use them to win interviews and offers.

I still remember the beginning of my freshman year and my first visit to the career office…

I was eager and determined to craft the perfect resume that would land me a summer internship in Sales & Trading at a bulge bracket bank.

After spending hours and days working with an advisor going back and forth, I sent it over to a buddy of mine who was a trader at Citi, who had promised to help me with it…

In less than 5 minutes, he emailed me back with his assessment: “This is sh*t.”

And that was my welcome to the world of trading – blunt, rude, and to the point.

Ultimately, I completely revamped my resume and used it to land an offer at a bulge bracket bank – coming from a non-target school with absolutely 0 on-campus recruiting.

Here’s how I did it, and how you can do the same:

How to Prepare for Investment Banking Summer Internship Recruiting

While I’ve written lots of summer internship tutorials, most of them focus on what to do once you’re actually working, or how to prepare for the internship.

Even back in the dark ages (in Internet time, 2-3 years ago) one of the most asked questions here was “OK, but how do I get a summer internship in the first place?”

And since then I’ve gotten many more questions on the timing for summer internship recruiting, how it’s different from full-time recruiting, what to focus on, and what happens when – so let’s get to it.

The Investment Banking Cover Letter Template You’ve Been Waiting For

A long time ago I said that we would never post a cover letter template here:

“I was tempted to post a Word template, but I don’t want 5,000 daily visitors to copy it and to start using the same exact cover letter.”

But hey, we already have resume templates that everyone is using, so why not go a step further and give you a cover letter template as well?

Plus, “investment banking cover letter” is one of the top 10 search terms visitors use to find this site – so you must be looking for a template.

The Template & Tutorial