Investment banking resume template

Fill it in, section by section

Keep the order and the layout. Replace each line with your own, using the rules under each heading.

1. Heading

   • Name, city, phone, email and LinkedIn on two lines. No photo, no objective statement.
   • Use an email address with your name in it.

2. Education

   • Students put education first. Add your expected graduation month, GPA if it helps you, and a test score if you have a strong one.
   • One line of honors and one of coursework. Only list classes that show finance or accounting.

3. Experience

   • Newest first. Each role gets the firm, city, title, group and dates.
   • Start every bullet with a verb, then what you built or did, then the deal and its size, then what happened because of it.
   • Name the work a banker recognizes: model, DCF, comparables, buyer list, CIM, pitch book. Write the size of the deal even when you can't name the client.
   • Three to four bullets for your most relevant role, two for older ones.

4. Leadership

   • One or two clubs or teams where you held a role, with what changed while you led it.
   • Numbers work here too: members, events, money raised, offers won.

5. Skills & interests

   • Software you can use in an interview without notes, certifications, languages with your level.
   • Two or three real interests with a detail. Interviewers often open with this line, so pick ones you can talk about for a minute.

Eight bullets, rewritten

The pattern for every line: a verb, what you built or did, the deal and its size, then what it changed.

1. 1

   Assisted with financial modeling for various clients

   Built a three-statement model and DCF for the $240M sale of a packaging manufacturer; the range set the price guidance sent to 38 buyers

   Names the model, the deal size and what the work decided.

2. 2

   Responsible for creating pitch books

   Drafted 9 pages of a sell-side pitch for a $70M software company, including trading comps on 11 peers; the bank won the mandate

   Says which pages, which analysis and the result.

3. 3

   Helped research potential buyers

   Screened 160 strategic and financial buyers by size and end market; 9 of the 21 that signed NDAs came from this list

   A count, a method and an outcome a banker can check.

4. 4

   Worked on M&A transactions in the industrials group

   Staffed on 2 live sell-side deals ($95M and $240M) and 1 pitch; ran the data room and tracked 300+ diligence requests

   Real deal sizes and a task the reader recognizes.

5. 5

   Analyzed companies for the investment club

   Pitched 3 consumer stocks to a 15-person investment committee; 2 were bought, and the larger returned 18% in its first year

   Shows judgment with a result, which is the point of a club.

6. 6

   Strong Excel and PowerPoint skills

   Rebuilt the monthly portfolio dashboard in Excel, cutting reporting time from 2 days to 3 hours

   Skills move into a bullet that proves them.

7. 7

   Member of the finance society

   Organized 11 firm presentations and a 6-week technical series for 140 members; 23 members won banking or PE internships

   A role with outcomes instead of a membership.

8. 8

   Interned at a private equity firm and learned about LBOs

   Built an LBO model for a $60M add-on at 7.0x EBITDA; showed a 24% IRR in the base case and 17% with no margin gains

   What you built and what it showed, not what you learned.

For a private equity resume

The same template works. Four changes make it read as a buyer's resume.

• Add a deal list

  Banking analysts moving to private equity often add a short list of the deals they worked on under their banking role: the company type, size, and your part in each.

• Show judgment, not only process

  Say what you thought of the business, the price or the risks. A bullet like “flagged customer concentration that cut the bid by 0.5x” says more than “ran diligence”.

• Lead with modeling

  LBO and operating models go to the top of each role, with the returns you showed, because the PE interview tests them.

• Same page, same order

  Still one page, newest first. Education can move below experience once you have worked full time.