How to force bankers to read your investment banking resume

There are 2 main ways to side step the normal recruiting process to guarantee your investment banking resume gets read.

Experience

This first exception is thanks to the class system in the banking candidate world; experienced v virgin.  It's two tiered with the experienced at the top and the virgins at the bottom.

Any Investment banking internship success">investment banking internship counts as experience – from bulge bracket to 10-man boutique investment bank.

By ‘investment banking' we mean summers spent in M&A or capital markets etc.  S&T and research will suffice, but expect to show up at the bottom of the ‘experienced pile'. 

Meanwhile back office internships barely count.

Other high quality finance experiences count too, eg hedge fund internship.  Whilst 5-star names like McKinsey, Microsoft, Newscorp (provided you weren't phone tapping it up!) work too – i.e. management consulting and F500 corporate.

If you possess this experience you are "pre approved".

That means your resume (especially those of you with an investment banking intern resume) will get preferential treatment – think top of the pile and 20 extra seconds of consideration. 

Or perhaps – ironically – less attention since you're such an obvious candidate!

Contacts

The second exception is thanks to nepotism, ass-kissing and cold hard cash.

Aka the Resume Pass, this involves emailing your resume to an interested banker outside of the normal recruiting process.

You could be asked for it at a networking event by a Credit Suisse Associate (eg me) or your Daddy who's on one of MD Larry Larryson's boards could slip it into Larry's bag at the next meeting of Giganticfuknconglomerate Inc (eg my friend).

The power of a resume pass is that the banker who asked for it will take significant time to review it.  I mean, they will actually take 40 seconds to read it from top to bottom. 

And if the banker likes it, they will pass it on to the bankers in charge of recruiting along with a note "like this kid".  Can you spell ‘guaranteed interview' you nepotistic rich kid?!

I need to pause us for a second here to talk about networking & resumes. 

Your chance of getting an interview from a ‘warm' resume submission like this is literally 1000% greater than submitting it into the cold, unforgiving vacuum that is official recruiting.  So please make sure you master networking in banking – a topic we'll talk extensively about in a later tutorial.

Author: Inside Investment Banking