How to write a banking CV
Getting a job in an investment bank is pretty tough.
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Okay, let’s not understate things. It’ll probably be the hardest thing you ever do in your life. Goldman Sachs has an acceptance rate of 0.7% for interns, last we checked. And it’s even harder to get into the bank as an established professional – the most recently disclosed figures from the bank in 2023 show that 300 people applied for each open role at the bank, an acceptance rate of 0.33%.
Given those odds, you need to absolutely maximise your chances of a successful application. You can’t turn back time and go to a different university, and you can’t have started your career anywhere better. You have what you’ve done, and you’re at your laptop after work (or school) trying to apply to a job. The best – pretty much only – thing you can do now is maximise your CV’s potential.
Here’s what you need to know to do that.
Format and Structure
“CV formatting is a highly strategic move,” says Victoria McLean, CEO of London-based careers consultancy CityCV. “The design and structure of your CV can determine whether it’s even seen by a human.”
The vast majority of investment banks make use of software known as an “Applicant Tracking System”, or ATS. “These systems scan for relevance using algorithms, assessing everything from job titles and dates to keywords and layout,” McLean says. “If your CV isn’t formatted with ATS in mind, it will lose.”
A keyword is a specific word or phrase such as a skill, qualification, job title, or other technical term that employers and ATSs use to identify relevant candidates. They can usually be identified from job descriptions – things like “Excel”, “Python”, “modelling”, and so on.
Formatting isn't difficult: you'll need your name and contact details at the top, and then an executive summary. And then your education, experience, and skills, with order dependent on your experience in life: students always have education listed first, and experienced professionals have experience listed first.
Fonts are important. If you want an ATS to read your CV, McLean says it must be written in Arial, Calibri, Tahoma or Verdana. Anything other than these fonts is a risk, and serif fonts in particular should be avoided. Keep font size consistent across the document (McLean suggests size 10 to 12). Use bold text “sparingly”, and don’t use text boxes, graphics, columns, or tables at all. Unless you're in Germany, you won't need a photo, and an interested employer will find your social media presence, anyway.
Your CV should generally be as short as you can make it. The template approved by Goldman Sachs recruiters at the bottom of the article is only one page long, for example. Unless you have a decade plus of experience, you do not need multiple pages.
The executive summary
If you're a student, the executive summary is important. “The more junior you are, the more you need to explain to people exactly what you want to be and what you're looking for,” says Roy Cohen, a Wall Street career coach and author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide.
An executive summary is a short (100-word) introduction to you, your skills, and your motivations. It's not as tacky as a university personal statement, but it should be convincing to a recruiter that your life experience so far naturally leads you to want to work in the industry.
Executive summaries are less important for established professionals. "The experience should speak for itself," Cohen says.
McLean also mentions that a professional summary should be “keyword-rich” – more on that later. "That section is critical," McLean says. "In a few short lines, it should articulate your specialism, sector expertise, and what you bring to the table."
Education and Qualifications
Your education and qualifications are vital to beginning your career in finance.
“Qualifications are one of the first filters banks use to assess your fit,” says McLean. “Undergraduate degrees are still the foundational entry point, and for many roles, particularly in the front office, academic pedigree makes a real difference.” The better your university, the better your chance of getting into your internship of choice.
We won’t go into detail here about target universities, but generally speaking, it’s the ones you expect – University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Stanford in the USA; LSE, HEC, and Bocconi in Europe, among many, many others. There are also “semi-target” universities, which are usually good enough to not have your application thrown out, but not good enough to be targeted by campus recruiters.
“There’s an increasing appreciation for intellectually rigorous degrees from non-traditional universities,” McLean says. “I've seen excellent candidates from this pool succeed, especially when they've combined strong academic performance with clear evidence of technical, analytical and commercial skill.”
Although people see “financial services” and imagine that their degree in finance will help them cruise to a financial services role, things aren’t quite that simple. There’s remarkably little – if any – overlap between what you learn on a finance undergraduate course and the skills you’ll use as an investment banker. However, studying finance demonstrates an analytical mind, and that itself is worthwhile.
Grade requirements vary by school and situation. In the US, you’ll want to show off your GPA of around 3.5 if you’re from a target school, and a higher GPA if you’re from a non-target school or studying humanities or a humanities-adjacent subject. In the UK, you’ll want to be maintain a 2:1 at the very least.
Getting a postgraduate degree can also help – although lower tier postgrads are to be avoided. McLean says that master’s degrees “often work best when paired with practical exposure, such as internships, research projects, or work experience.”
If you're applying for jobs in M&A, research, or asset management you might want to consider the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) course. You’ll have to have work experience to complete the last level of the course (there are three), but you can do Levels I and II as a student. Given that you’ll be applying for a summer internship as a second-year student, you can realistically have a Level I pass on your CV – consider having it. We list relevant qualifications for other roles here.
“Having a designation like the CFA allows you to stand out,” says Cohen. “If you’ve passed the first two levels and haven’t even graduated from college, what message does that send?”
McLean agrees. “Completing even one level signals a high level of commitment and technical fluency… When the CFA fits the direction you’re heading, it adds real weight to your CV.”
It’s worth noting, however, that the CFA has been sharply criticized in recent years. Partly due to a collapse in pass rates during the pandemic, major banks (such as Berenberg in the UK) have removed possessing a CFA designation as a cornerstone of their training program.
Skills and Achievements
All the achievements you list – and you should be listing achievements – need to be qualified. “Quantifying your achievements “shows employers the measurable impact you had on an organization and this adds credibility to your banking CV,” McLean says.
What that means in practice is saying "sales increase by 16% due to my newly implement outreach method" rather than "successfully increase outreach efficiency", or "customer referrals doubled" rather than "customer referrals increased".
You want to learn (if you haven’t already) the ins and outs of the S.T.A.R. technique (we have a whole article about it here). S.T.A.R. stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result – the gist of the technique is that it’s an efficient story telling structure that showcases your actions, thought processes, and results. The S.T.A.R. technique is as important in your one-line storytelling as it is your interview ability.
Hobbies & Personality
It isn’t all about your qualifications and skills and formality, however.
“Banks hire people, not grade sheets,” says McLean. “They want individuals who’ve shown they can collaborate under pressure, take ownership, and think beyond the confines of a lecture hall.”
Famously, senior bankers talk about the “airport test:” how much fun would a candidate be if you were stuck in an airport with them for 100 hours. Being a fun person might not get you an investment banking job but not being one can certainly lose you it.
“Extracurriculars also matter, often more than people expect,” McLean notes. “Finance societies, competitive sports, volunteering, hackathons - these paint a fuller picture of who you are.”
Cohen agrees. “Wall Street companies like people who have athletic backgrounds. It suggests that you know how to compete, and that you know how to thrive in a competitive environment.” Individual competitors (tennis or skiing) impress a potential employer more than a group participant (rowing or football), Cohen says. He also suggests that if you’re a team player, you should be aiming to be captain. “There may be questions about if you can thrive independently.”
Why you shouldn’t use AI to entirely write your banking résumé
We update this article every year. And for the last few years, we’ve said pretty conclusively that AI cannot write your CV for you. The answer in 2026 is that… Well, it still can’t, but there’s more of an asterisk to it now.
“At first glance, AI can create what seems to be a reasonably polished, well-structured document in a matter of minutes,” says McLean. The problem, however, is that CVs are heavily templated, and she says AI makes candidates sound “remarkably” similar.
“In some cases, I've worked with professionals from completely different areas of financial services whose AI-generated profiles used almost identical language,” McLean says – basically, the issue here is that AI defaults to generic language because it doesn’t really know you well enough to give detail. “Results-driven people with strong stakeholder management skills and a proven track record of delivering business outcomes,” sound good, but are also unbelievably bland.
“When you're competing against hundreds of applicants with similar qualifications and experience, sounding like everyone else is rarely a winning strategy,” McLean explains. “Recruiters are looking for differentiated evidence, context and results, not just well-written ‘polished’ statements.” You therefore have to roll your sleeves up and work alongside Claude (or any other AI) to add differentiation.
Differentiation is increasingly important in the AI CV world. “Good writing is no longer enough,” McLean says. “The quality floor has risen. More candidates are submitting well-written CVs, which means employers are placing less emphasis on presentation and more emphasis on substance.”
Don't exaggerate. “Candidates still need to demonstrate that they can back up the claims they've made on paper,” McLean explains. “Evidence carries far more weight than broad statements about leadership, stakeholder management or project delivery,” McLean says.
Beating the Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
The ATS is how a serious employer handles CVs. Its AI scans your CV and gives you a score or pass/fail based on your qualifications and experience. Theoretically.
The use of ATS in the recruitment process is “massively overplayed”, says Matt Craven, former UBS recruiter and founder of The CV & Interview Advisors, a careers consultancy. In reality, Craven says that most CVs will end up in someone’s inbox and won’t be discarded by an impartial AI model. “A lot of recruiting teams turn off matching software on their ATS, because it’s not very good.”
Craven points out that recruitment consultancies don’t use ATSs. However, he says that huge employers like banks, which have hundreds of thousands of applications, do use ATS systems.
Trying to game an ATS is a bad idea, Craven says, even if it is tempting. “It’s such a competitive job market that anything job seekers can do is fair game, as long as they don’t lie.” Lying is the crux of the issue – because lies lead to either an interview failure or a termination just a few months into a role. Both situations waste the time of everyone involved.
While some ways of trying to game the ATS, such as injecting a readable LLM prompt in white text, is just straight up not a good idea, other ways can be clean. There’s no need to keyword stuff in white text or size 1 text, for example, when a CV can be structured to have a “key skills” section.
McLean says the same. “Ultimately, AI may influence how applications are reviewed, but employers are still hiring people,” McLean explains. “The candidates who perform best are usually those who make it easy for both technology and humans to understand their expertise.”
Curiously, a 2025 research paper suggests that AI systems “consistently prefer” the CVs that they’ve written themselves and even prefer the CVs other AIs have written over human-generated content.
Should you tailor your CV to each application you make?
AI’s grip on the process will not stop anytime soon. That doesn’t mean that you should tailor your CV from top to bottom for each application, but it does mean some light re-wording is a good idea, McLean says.
“That might mean bringing certain achievements higher up the page, highlighting different areas of expertise, aligning your language more closely with the role, adjusting your professional profile or emphasising particular sector experience,” she explains. “Small adjustments can make a significant difference.”
You don’t have to do it from top to bottom – you should have a good core that is your CV – but it can help to place additional emphasis on certain keywords that appear in the application for the job(s) you are applying to.
Those small changes can make an AI ATS give you small little bonuses to your score that move you up the pile. “In a market where many candidates have similar qualifications, technical skills and industry experience, tailoring can often be the difference between securing an interview and being overlooked,” McLean says.
A CV for students without experience in finance
There are certain other rules that are worth following for non-traditional applicants, especially those with a bit of experience under their belt.
“If you are applying for your first graduate role,” McLean says, “and you don't have any experience, the first thing to say is don't worry about it. What the banks are looking for is potential and passion.” It’s more important to demonstrate commitment to the industry than it is to tick every past experience box directly.
Besides, your unique experience might be more useful to a bank than you think. McLean gives the example of a client of hers who worked for a major supermarket chain and (separately) as a kitchen appliance salesperson and then got an internship at a “top tier” US investment bank.
“What he did was put a lot of spin on those two roles. At the electrical retailer organization where he was working, he talked about the fact that he got involved in merchandising. He increased customer service ratings by a particular amount. He wrote about the kind of impact it had on sales,” McLean explained.
“What you need to be thinking about really is what skills is that organization looking for. If I'm looking forward to working at Goldman Sachs, what do I know they're looking for, and what are their core values or their core principles?” That sort of information is readily available on their website, she notes. “How can I match my experience to show that I have the skills and the values that align with what they need? And secondarily, what might I have learned from my experience that might be relevant to that organization?”
Cohen also notes that the CFA can be valuable to an established professional’s application, as it shows that some degree of work has already been put into a career change. Time and buy can buy skin in the game.
Free banking CV/Resume template
Here is Goldman Sachs' Ideal Resume/CV template; it was released by Goldman's own recruiters back in 2023. Critically, it is only one page long, possibly because Goldman also demands that candidates write a short cover letter. The main takeaways, which apply equally to other banks are:
- Bullet points are good.
- Use each bullet point to describe individual actions/successes.
- Tailor your CV to the role.
- Focus on recent and relevant experience.
Apologies for the poor image quality. Rest assured, the body of the text is not as important as the headings and general structure.
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