As a more general topic, I have done resume reviews at a major investment bank and can provide a little color on how resumes are reviewed. Please keep in mind that the details below only apply to giant firms where hundreds of resumes are submitted. I have also been through the process at a much smaller firm and it is much different.
Your resume will likely first be reviewed by an analyst (typically from same school) or HR rep, who has a stack of about 100 to go through. They will spend about 15 seconds on you (there are 100 resumes after all, on top of the pitch tomorrow), and here's what he's going to look at:
1.) The name of your school and your GPA.
2.) The names of your previous employers, and your job title there.
3.) Cursory glance at bullets to "bucket" your experience into one of the following, in descending order of prestige: "Real investment banking", "Sales/Trading", "Wealth management", "Other random ****", or "Waiting tables".
4.) Formatting. If it is clean and readable, you are okay, but anything hard to follow, with typos, etc. is an automatic cut.
5.) Extracurriculars. Cursory glance, and will get credit for varsity sport, editor of school newspaper and president/treasurer of big time organization. Maybe a bit of consideration for investment club, etc. otherwise don't matter at all.
If the above look good, you'll likely go into the "Keep" pile. Otherwise, you are already done.
Turns out its the experience that counts (brand name is highly important as well), not the actual words on the page.
After each analyst on the recruiting reviews resumes, they will meet with the HR rep and discuss to make final decisions on who gets interviews. Every year criteria gets set differently depending on how many are hired, but GPA and experience are by far the most important. If you have networked with one of the analysts on the team it can guarantee you an interview but if you aren't in the top half by qualifications alone and have not talked to anyone, fat chance.
These session to make final decisions can be brutal and things as simple as who has better formatting can and do make the difference when it is a toss up. GPA is basically inconsequential above 3.5, unless it is like 4.0 or a ridiculously hard major. Otherwise, assuming everyone remaining has 3.5 and above, it will basically come down to experience. Extracurriculars will never get you an interview (except in rare situations) but can be the tiebreaker with two similar candidates.
If you want to concentrate on a few things for your resume, I would focus on the following:
1.) Experience. You want to provide solid detail for previous employment and bullets should make whatever you do sound more important than it was. You can even fluff up the bullets on your high school job at the mall or job waiting table to sound pretty good.
2.) Formatting is the first thing anyone notices when seeing your resume and is extremely important. Should be clean and neat with absolutely no typos. (You will probably find typos in my resume after I say this.)
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=1...4e75f6e8ebb871
I have attached a copy of my resume with personal info removed for anyone to use. Please note that the format I have attached has my experience before education.
If you are still in college I would recommend placing education first and experience second. Also note that the selected transaction experience section was only added post-graduation as well. I had two additional jobs on the resume when graduating from college: congresional intern from freshman year and lawn mowing business from high school. Additionally, I had significantly more info about my High School achievements when applying to jobs during college.
Last edited by jws43yale; 10-04-2009 at 04:14 PM.
