Investment Banking Resume: The One-Page Template That Gets Interviews

It's 11:40 on a Sunday night and a sophomore I work with through WSG, call him D, sends me his investment banking resume twenty minutes before a JPMorgan application closes. Two pages. A paragraph-long objective at the top. A bullet that reads "Responsible for assisting the team with various financial analyses." He has a 3.8 GPA and a real internship, and none of it is visible in the first ten seconds of reading.

I'm Stephen Turban, founder of WSG. I went to Harvard, went through McKinsey's on-cycle recruiting, and now spend a good part of every week reading resumes from undergrads who want to get into banking. The pattern is always the same: the students who get interviews don't have better experiences than the students who don't. They have resumes that make a screener's job easy.

This guide gives you the exact one-page template that does that, walks through a full sample resume section by section, and shows you how to rewrite your bullets so the person reading them sees a banker.

Once the one-page layout is locked in, the internship version of the document has its own priorities, which are broken down in the 8 things every strong IB internship CV includes here. If your experience section still looks thin, these 9 steps for getting into banking with no experience here show what is worth adding before you send it out.

How long should an investment banking resume be?

For investment banking recruiting, your resume should be one page. Not one page plus a line. Not one page with microscopic margins, 8-point font, or a second page containing “just a few more bullets.” One page, with normal margins and readable formatting.

Screeners at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and every elite boutique read hundreds of resumes per opening, and a second page signals that you can't prioritize, which is the single skill an analyst gets judged on every day. A two-page investment banking resume gets cut before anyone reads the second page. If you're an undergrad with more than one page of material, the problem is selection, and the fix is in section 6 below. Your resume is not being evaluated as a complete autobiography; it is being scanned for the handful of experiences and signals that answer one question: Is this person worth spending 30 minutes interviewing? If you have more than one page of material, do not start by making the page smaller. Start by making the content better.

Cut experiences that are redundant. Combine bullets that communicate the same skill. Remove low-impact activities. Delete generic responsibilities and replace them with measurable accomplishments. Give more space to the experiences that actually differentiate you. And remember that an impressive experience can still deserve only one or two bullets if those bullets capture the part that matters for recruiting.

What do banks actually look for on an investment banking resume?

Four things, roughly in this order: school and GPA, relevant experience (banking, accounting, investing, anything with a spreadsheet), evidence that your interest in finance is real (a student fund, a competition, a course you didn't have to take), and leadership. The screener is trying to answer one question: can this person do the analyst job, and will they have a story that holds up in an interview? Everything on the page should help answer that.

That does not mean every line needs to scream “investment banking.” Your resume should still show that you are a well-rounded person. But space is limited, and every bullet has an opportunity cost.

The best resumes therefore aren't necessarily the ones with the most impressive individual experiences. They are the ones where every section adds a different piece of evidence to the same overall case.

1. A screener decides in seconds, so the top third of the page has to do the work

Here's what a first-pass resume screen looks like at a bank. A junior banker or an HR coordinator has a stack of applications for one summer analyst seat. The bank's own posted requirements already screened for graduation year. Now a human is looking at each resume for long enough to make a yes-or-maybe-or-no call, and "long enough" is seconds, not minutes.

In those seconds, the eyes go to three spots: the school name, the GPA, and the most recent job title. If those three are strong, the reader slows down and reads bullets. If they aren't, the reader is looking for a reason to keep going, and it has to be visible without scrolling.

The top third of your resume decides whether the bottom two thirds get read. That's why the template below puts Education first for an undergrad, puts the GPA on its own line, and puts your most banking-relevant experience directly under it, even if it's not your most recent job in strict date order.

2. The template: five sections, one page, nothing else

The sample below is the resume I'd hand a junior today. The layout is the standard two-column-header format that every bank recruiter has seen a thousand times, which is exactly the point. Nobody gets an interview for a creative resume design. They get one for content that reads fast.

Here is the full sample. The person is invented, the firms are placeholders, and the numbers are examples, but every bullet follows a rule explained later in this guide. 

That's the whole thing. Five sections, seventeen bullets under Experience and Leadership combined, three lines of Additional Information, and not one blank line between entries. Every investment banking resume that gets interviews has this same skeleton, because screeners read by pattern and the pattern lets them find what they need without hunting.

A note on the sample's timeline. John is a senior with a completed Investment Banking Summer Analyst stint and a private equity summer before it. If you're a sophomore, your Experience section will be thinner and your Leadership section will carry more weight. The structure of the resume doesn't change between a sophomore and a senior; the sections just rebalance. Section 7 covers how.

3. Education: GPA on its own line, and the rules for when to show it

Banks care about GPA more than most students want to hear, and they care about it most for sophomores and juniors, because there isn't much else to judge yet. So the Education section has three jobs: name the school, state the degree and expected graduation month, and show the GPA plainly.

The rule is simple: if your GPA helps you, make it visible. If it does not, do not disguise it with formatting tricks. Use the space to strengthen the parts of your profile that give the recruiter better evidence of why you belong in the interview pool.

The GPA rules I give students:

• 3.5 or above: list it, two decimals, out of 4.00.

• 3.3 to 3.5: list it, and if your major GPA is meaningfully higher, list both ("GPA: 3.4 / 4.00 (Major: 3.7)"). Screeners know what this means and it's a fair signal.

• Below 3.3: leaving it off is a choice, but understand what happens next. Most banks' application portals ask for it anyway, and a missing GPA on the resume reads as "below 3.3" to anyone experienced. The better fix is a bullet somewhere that explains the trajectory: a strong upward trend, a heavy course load, a job that paid for school.

Put the expected graduation date on the same line as the degree. Banks recruit by graduation year, and the screener needs to confirm you match the posting without doing math. Honors programs, relevant coursework (only if it's advanced: corporate finance, financial modeling, accounting II), and academic awards go here as short bullets. High school stays off unless you're a freshman with nothing else, or the school is a real signal (a specialized public school, a national award).

A clearly stated GPA saves the screener a step, and a screener who doesn't have to work is a screener who reads your bullets.

4. Experience bullets follow one formula: verb, what, how, number

Look at the difference between these two bullets, both describing the same summer at the same private equity firm.

Weak: "Responsible for helping the deal team look at potential acquisition targets for a portfolio company."

Strong: "Screened 60+ add-on acquisition targets for a $400MM healthcare services platform; built one-page profiles on each, presented 5 targets to the deal team, and 2 of them advanced to management meetings and initial diligence within the summer."

The weak version tells a screener nothing they can picture. "Helping" hides who did the work. "Potential targets" hides the scale. "Look at" could mean anything from reading a website to building a model. The strong version has a verb that names the work (screened), a specific deliverable (one-page profiles), the size of the platform ($400MM), and a chain of numbers that shows the outcome (60 screened, 5 presented, 2 advanced). A strong bullet lets the reader picture the work and see what came of it, and a weak bullet does neither.

The formula for every Experience bullet:

• Start with a past-tense action verb for finished roles and present tense for current ones. Built, analyzed, drafted, prepared, modeled, valued, screened. Never "responsible for," never "assisted with," never "helped."

• Name the specific thing you produced or did. A memo, a model, a reconciliation, a presentation page.

• Add the technical how, if there is one. DCF, comparable companies, sources and uses, sensitivity tables.

• Close with a number that sizes it: deal size, number of clients, dollars, hours saved, percentage.

Two to three bullets per role. Each bullet one to two lines, and if it runs to two, the second line should be nearly full rather than a dangling word or two. A bullet that wraps onto a second line and stops after three words looks unfinished, and screeners notice it before they read it. If a bullet runs to a third line, it's two bullets or it's padded.

One more rule that separates banking resumes from every other kind: every bullet on an investment banking resume should be something you'd be comfortable explaining for five minutes in an interview. The interviewer will pick the most interesting-sounding bullet and say "walk me through this." If the honest answer is "I mostly watched," the bullet gets rewritten to what you actually did, because a smaller true bullet beats a bigger one that collapses under a question.

5. Numbers make bullets believable, and every number is a future interview question

Numbers do two things. They make the reader trust the bullet, and they make the reader picture the scale. "Analyzed prospective borrowers" is a sentence. "Analyzed historical financials and management projections for 8 prospective borrowers" is a job.

The rules for numbers on a banking resume:

• Use real numbers, rounded the way you'd say them out loud. "$750MM term loan," "12 clients," "over $2MM monthly." Not "$748.3MM," which reads as either invented or as confidential information you shouldn't be sharing.

• Deal sizes and client financials are fine to include if they were public or if you round them enough that they can't identify a private client. When in doubt, describe the scale in a range ("companies with revenues up to $15MM").

• Never invent a number to make a bullet look better. Interviewers have sat where you sat, and they know what a summer analyst actually does. A bullet claiming you "led" a $2Bn deal as an intern gets a raised eyebrow and a follow-up you can't survive.

• If a role produced no natural numbers (a mentoring role, a club position), count something real: sessions taught, students, members, dollars raised, events run.

A number the interviewer can push on and you can defend is worth more than a bigger number that isn't yours. The John Doe sample has 42 numbers across 17 bullets. Every one of them is the kind of number a student would actually know: how many targets they screened, how many advanced, how big the fund is, what a position returned.

6. Cut to one page by ranking, not by shrinking the font

D's two-page resume had nothing on it that was wrong. It had too much of everything, and the fix wasn't a smaller font. When a student brings me a resume that runs long, we do the same exercise every time.

Write every role and activity on a list. Next to each one, answer one question: does this help a banker believe I can do the analyst job or that my interest in finance is real? Rank them. The top four to five go under Experience or Leadership. The rest either get one line under Additional Information or leave the page.

Things that almost always leave the page for an undergrad:

• The objective statement. Banks know your objective. You applied.

• A skills section listing Microsoft Word, "communication," and "teamwork." Skills that every human has don't earn space. Bloomberg, Capital IQ, FactSet, PitchBook, and modeling coursework do.

• High school activities once you're past freshman year, unless one of them is a real achievement (a national competition, a business you started).

• "References available upon request." They know.

• A photo. Never on a US resume.

Then set the format and leave it alone: 10 to 11 point font, 0.5 to 0.75 inch margins, black text, no color, no icons, no columns beyond the standard right-aligned locations and dates. Blank lines between entries are wasted space on a one-page resume; the section headers and the bold firm names already separate the entries. Save as a PDF named "Firstname Lastname Resume.pdf" so a recruiter can find it in a folder of five hundred files.

That sounds trivial, but your resume may eventually sit in a folder alongside hundreds of other files. Make it immediately identifiable.

The important point is that getting to one page is not primarily a formatting exercise. It is a ranking exercise.

You are deciding what deserves the recruiter's limited attention and what does not. That ranking is what makes the resume good.

Getting to one page is a ranking exercise, and the ranking is the part that makes the resume good.

7. Leadership and activities carry the sophomore resume

If you're a sophomore reading this with a summer of lifeguarding and one campus club, the Experience section of the sample probably looks out of reach. The screener isn't comparing your sophomore resume to a senior's. They're comparing it to other sophomores, and most sophomore resumes are empty.

Three things fill the gap and read as real finance interest:

• A student investment fund or finance club with an actual role. Not "member." Analyst, sector head, pitch presenter. One pitch you gave, with the company name and what you recommended, is a bullet a banker will ask about.

• A program or competition with a result attached. Bank insight programs, diversity fellowships, sophomore programs, a case competition. Two bullets: what you did and what came of it (the sample's case competition entry, with the team size, the field of 24, what was presented, and what the judges said, is exactly the shape).

• Something you started or ran. A nonprofit, a tutoring business, a club you founded. Bankers rate ownership highly because the analyst job is mostly unsupervised execution.

Translate non-finance work into the same formula. A campus job managing a dining hall shift becomes "Managed a 6-person shift team and $3,000 nightly cash reconciliation." A research assistant role becomes "Cleaned and analyzed a 40,000-row survey dataset in Excel and Stata for a labor economics paper." The verb, the deliverable, the number: same rules.

A sophomore with two real bullets under a student fund and one under a program they had to apply for beats a sophomore with four vague bullets under a retail job.

8. Additional Information should start a conversation, not fill space

The last three lines of the resume get read more than students think, because they're where the interviewer looks for something to ask about in the last five minutes.

Computer skills: list the finance tools you've actually used (Bloomberg Terminal, FactSet, S&P Capital IQ, PitchBook) and modeling courses you've completed (a Wall Street Prep or Breaking Into Wall Street course counts, and both are names bankers recognize). Excel goes on the list. "Advanced Excel" only goes on the list if you can build a three-statement model without looking anything up.

Languages: only with a proficiency level. "Conversational Spanish" is honest and useful. "Spanish" alone invites the interviewer to switch languages on you.

Your Interests section should contain two to five specific things that make you memorable and give an interviewer an easy opening for conversation.

“Running” is generic. “Marathon running” tells me something. “Music” is generic. “Jazz piano” gives me something to ask about. The more specific the interest, the easier it is for an interviewer to turn it into a genuine conversation.

 Avoid generic interests such as “reading,” “traveling,” “hanging out with friends,” or “fitness.” They are perfectly normal things to enjoy, but they do not tell the interviewer much about you.  Most importantly, only list interests you would actually enjoy discussing. Anything on your resume is fair game in an interview. 

9. The mistakes that get otherwise strong resumes cut

I keep a running list from the resumes I review. In rough order of how often they show up:

• Inconsistent formatting is the most common reason a strong resume gets cut. Dates as "June 2026" in one place and "6/2026" in another, or bullets that end with periods in one section and not the next. Screeners read consistency as attention to detail, which is the analyst job in one phrase.

• "Assisted with," "helped," "responsible for," "participated in." Each of these tells the reader you weren't the one doing the work.

• Typos. A single typo is disqualifying at most banks. Read the resume out loud, backwards, and have two people you trust read it cold.

• Inflated titles. "Vice President" of a two-person club, "Analyst" at a family business. The interviewer will ask, and the honest answer will be worse than a modest title.

• Bullets with no numbers anywhere. See section 5.

• A gap of a full year with no explanation. If you took time off, one line under Additional Information ("Took spring 2025 off to care for a family member; returned with a 3.9 semester") is better than leaving the reader to guess.

• The resume that's clearly a template with the old text swapped out and a stray "Company Name" left in. It happens more than you'd think.

A clean, boring, consistent resume with real numbers beats a creative one every time, because the reader is a banker and bankers are paid to notice what's off.

10. Rewrite your three most important bullets before you touch anything else

Most students, given this guide, will open their resume and start moving margins around. Don't. Do the highest-value thing first.

Pick the three bullets that describe your most finance-relevant work and rewrite each one with the formula: verb, what, how, number. Then read each rewritten bullet and ask two questions. Would a banker understand exactly what I did? Could I talk about this for five minutes? If either answer is no, rewrite again.

Some rewrites from students I've worked with, with the details changed:

Club position

Don't write: "Member of the finance club, attended weekly meetings and participated in stock pitch events."

Write: "Presented a long pitch on a mid-cap restaurant chain to a 30-person investment committee; recommendation was added to the club's $250,000 portfolio."

Accounting internship

Don't write: "Assisted with bookkeeping and tax preparation for clients."

Write: "Reconciled accounts payable and receivable ledgers for 9 clients totaling $1.5MM monthly; prepared supporting schedules for 20+ quarterly tax filings."

Non-finance job

Don't write: "Worked as a barista at a busy coffee shop."

Write: "Managed opening shifts for a store doing $4,000 in daily sales; trained 5 new hires and cut average order time by about a fifth after reorganizing the prep station."

Then do the top third of the page: Education clean, GPA visible, best experience directly under it. Then the cut to one page. Then the formatting, last.

D, the sophomore from the top of this guide, sent a one-page version the next morning. Same experiences, eleven bullets instead of nineteen, numbers in every one. He got the JPMorgan first round. The resume didn't get him the interview because his experience improved overnight. It got him the interview because a screener could finally see what was already there.

Download the template, rewrite your three bullets tonight, and send the one-page version to someone in banking before you send it to a bank.