Three banking insiders – a banking graduate recruiter, a graduate recruitment consultancy, and a CV and career coach – review a real* CV (see opposite) selected from those submitted by students to efinancialcareers.com. We’ve pulled out the top 20 tips to help you ensure you don’t make the same mistakes.

* The names, dates, personal details and locations have been changed to

protect the identity of the real student behind the CV.

What we look for

1. A decent amount of experience working in financial institutions and evidence that they have been proactive in gaining work experience and internships throughout university.

2. Some sort of position of responsibility or extra-curricular activities, whether that’s societies, or other interests.

3. Are your interests really interesting? What does this tell us about your passions beyond finance?

Format

4. The format is good: clear, well presented and easy to read.5. For a one-pager it contains a lot of key information; graduate CVs

really shouldn’t go over one page.6. There’s an extra line space between the Commerzbank and

CapitalCorp entries – this lack of attention to detail will kill your chances in M&A; this is exactly what M&A recruiters in particular look for.

Work experience

7. The work experience summaries are good and succinct, but need a bit of flavour on what core skills have been gained.

8. For each internship, mention the department of the bank in which you worked.

9. Clarify the duration of the internships (number of weeks/months rather than simply ‘summer’).

10. Put in actual dates of employment in this section. 11. Focus on accomplishments and results achieved, rather than a

simple description of tasks.12. Employers do like to see that candidates have worked and paid

their own way through university, even if the job is outside of finance.

Education

13. Can be above or below Work Experience.14. A-level grades should be included at this stage; GCSEs are not

as important.

Skills and interests

15. The student doesn’t seem at all interesting – one-dimensional interests don’t give an impression of who you really are.

16. There’s a broader cultural shift currently shaping the industry – employers don’t want to work with ‘robots’ any more. Think of it from the CV screener’s point of view – if they’ve got 200 to go through, and they all only mention finance, they’ll get easily bored; you’ve got to make it easy for people to think “I could talk to this person about other things”.

Language

17. Good use of verbs rather than nouns; use action verbs rather than descriptive ones.

18. Keep titles simple e.g. Education (rather than Education and Qualifications).19. English should be ‘fluent’ and not ‘proficient’ if student has been

educated in British school in Singapore.20. If English isn’t your first language, you have to be ‘pitch perfect’

including tenses – this should read ‘established’.

Overall

• CViscoherent–wegettheimpressionthatthispersonisreallyhoming in on what they want to do.

• There’snorealpersonalitycomingthrough,however.• ButIstillfeelIshouldmeetthisperson–they’vedonewhatthey

should do to meet the criteria for at least the first screening interview.

Making Sure Your CV is Revered, Not Reviled

Careers in Financial Markets 2013 | efinancialcareers.com/students

The art of pitching yourself properly on paper

12 13GETTING IN GETTING IN

efinancialcareers.com/students | Careers in Financial Markets 2013

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“Think of it from the CV screener’s point of view – if

they’ve got 200 to go through, and they all only mention

finance, they’ll get easily bored.”

LOGAN NAIDUCEODARTMOUTH PARTNERS

Our thanks to: Laila Crosby of the graduate recruitment team, Royal Bank of Scotland

Terri Loska, Kirsteen Deane and Logan Naidu of Dartmouth Partners graduate consultancy

Nathalie Nahum, of CNM Consultants, career and executive coaching

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