How Investment Bankers Read Your Resume
In continuing this week’s carnival of resumes, I thought it might be helpful to shed some light on how an investment bank reviews resumes and decides who gets interviews and who doesn’t. You’ll find a lot of “resume tips” out there, but few people on the inside explain how banks review resumes.
Who reads resumes? Do the Managing Directors ever get involved? How do they decide who to grant an interview to? How much time do they spend on your resume?
Even those who are very well-informed and have read the Vault guide thrice over don’t seem to have a good sense of the resume review process. So sit back and watch as I reveal the secrets of how we evaluate and select resumes.
Who Reads Your Resume
Pretty much every bank will have investment banking analysts from your university review your resume. Occasionally Associates will get involved, but typically it’s a task assigned to Analysts simply because there are so many resumes to go through, especially at “target” schools (the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the rest of the top 20 or so schools in the nation).
We might receive 100-150 resumes for only 20-30 interview spots. Even if we only spend 30 seconds reviewing each one (see below), the process still takes considerable time and resources.
VPs, Directors, and MDs generally do not become involved at all until interviews actually begin. Even then, MDs rarely do on-campus 1st round interviews, instead sticking only to superday interviews. So you won’t see Navid Mahmoodzadegan (formerly of UBS LA) reviewing your resume anytime soon.
Their time is worth $1,000 per hour; ours is worth around $30 per hour (investment banking salaries are high, but not on an hourly basis).
How Much Time Is Spent Reading Your Resume
30 seconds.
As Anna writes on her Investment Banking Resumes blog, you have a golden 30 seconds to impress the Analysts reviewing your resume.
With hundreds of resumes to review on top of our own work, we don’t have time to go through everything in detail and look at your beautifully-composed prose, no matter how splendid it is.
30 seconds may actually be high; sometimes when a group of us is looking at resumes, it might be closer to 10-15. Either way, you have very little time to make a positive impression.
So make sure your resume is good to avoid wasting those 30 seconds.
What Bankers Look For In Resumes
I covered much of this when I explained how to get an investment banking job, but for those who missed it the first time around, you want to “bankify” your resume as much as possible by making what you did sound more business/finance-oriented. You can refer to my guide to getting a banking job for some detailed examples on that. This same advice also applies to private equity resumes, and really anything else business-related.
While finance experience is officially not required to get the job, don’t kid yourself into thinking that it doesn’t give you a huge advantage: when we review resumes, we basically separate them into the “banking experience” and “non-banking experience” categories and most of the interviews will be given to the first group.
For investment banking summer internships, though, a previous finance internship is less important since most will not have prior experience. Just make sure your resume is detailed, result-oriented and formatted properly, and that will go a long way toward ensuring you get selected.
I’m constantly amazed at how bad many resumes are: with all the resources out there, you would think they would be great, but that’s rarely the case (note: this does not apply to readers of this site 
.
Parting Thoughts
Above all else, remember those Golden 30 Seconds. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a great resume. It means you need to focus on grabbing our attention instead of being detail-oriented about every single thing you’ve ever done. Get our attention and you get an interview.
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Tags: finance internships, investment banking, investment banking analyst, investment banking interviews, investment banking jobs, investment banking resume, investment banking summer internship, superday interviews
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I am a rising senior and am currently interning at a Big Four accounting firm. Though accounting is fine, I am more interested in finance. Will working at a Big Four give me any advantage (or a better chance, which may be a better way to put it)? I do not attend a target school like an Ivy or MIT, but I do attend a smaller, liberal arts college with a very strong accounting department as well as numerous alumni spread out across finance, from the bulge firms to the smaller players. I know that the easiest way in the door is an internship, but I was smart (stupid) enough to accept the offer from the Big 4 firm because… well… they offered it to me very early – plus, they were more than generous with the wage.
Essentially – will working at an accounting firm give me a leg up, or will they toss me into the “non-banking experience” category?
By the way, I just discovered your site and it’s pretty fixating – I have a bunch of shit to do today but I just can’t quit reading.
Glad you like the site. Working at Big 4 gives you an advantage over someone with no business/finance experience (e.g. someone who just worked at non-profits or did technical work) but it doesn’t put you on par with those who have had previous banking/PE experience. Definitely still worth applying as accounting is actually more relevant to banking than “finance” is – most of what we do is accounting-related.
“rising senior” sounds so cliched and dated. You should not use the phrase or risk having your resume pushed aside.
I don’t think he was referring to using it on his resume…
Do languages help?
Do you recommend me putting:
“Additional languages: Spanish, German, Pirate”
(the last one as a way to stand out?)
Ok i was kidding about ‘Pirate.’
Yes, languages always help. Make sure you actually know them, though, or you may be surprised by an interviewer who catches you off-guard…
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Brian,
I hope you can answer my question;
Do banks generally start reviewing applications as they come in before the resume drop period ends (4 January) ? I am able to update my resume or cancel my request at university’s career centre website, but it’s no use doing that if banks have already downloaded my original resume that I’ve submitted when the resume submission period opened up in the early autumn. But since they spend only 30 seconds reviewing each one, I reckon they do it in one burst.
Thanks and I wish you wherever you may be a very happy new year!
Usually they review them just before sending out interview notifications. But not sure when they actually download it, if you have something major you could try to add it.