The CV mistakes article described the 30-second screen: where the eye goes, what ends the read. This one shows the repair work. Three student profiles, each built from patterns I saw hundreds of times on the hiring side, rewritten bullet by bullet. The profiles are synthetic; the mistakes and the fixes are not.
CV one: non-target, no finance experience
Second-year economics student at a non-target university. Work experience: supermarket shift supervisor. Extracurricular: treasurer of the mountaineering society. On paper, nothing to do with banking. That is only true if the bullets stay lazy.
Work experience
BEFORE · Responsible for supervising staff and helping customers during evening shifts.
AFTER · Ran the 4-person closing shift in a store taking roughly £8,000 a day; till discrepancies fell to zero across six months after I rebuilt the cash-up checklist.
Society role
BEFORE · Managed the society's budget and organised events.
AFTER · Managed a £6,500 annual budget across 12 events; negotiated a 20% sponsorship uplift and closed the year with the society's first surplus in four seasons.
What changed: a chair became a person. Scale appeared (people, money, frequency), an action appeared (rebuilt, negotiated) and an outcome appeared (zero, surplus, 20%). No banking words were added, because none were needed. A screener reads those bullets and sees reliability with money and other people's time, which is precisely what a first-year analyst is. The non-target article covers the rest of that battle.
CV two: target school, real internship, wasted bullets
Penultimate-year student at a target school with a boutique M&A internship already banked. This is the most painful archetype, because the raw material is excellent and the bullets bury it.
Internship
BEFORE · Assisted the team with financial analysis and preparation of client materials.
AFTER · Built the comparable set of 11 European software companies for a US$300m sell-side mandate; my multiples page went to the client unchanged.
Internship
BEFORE · Conducted research on potential buyers for transactions.
AFTER · Screened 40+ strategic and sponsor buyers by acquisition history and balance-sheet capacity; 6 of my additions made the final outreach list.
What changed: 'assisted' and 'conducted' describe attendance. The rewrite claims ownership of a specific artefact (the comp set, the buyer screen), sizes it and proves it mattered ('unchanged', 'final list'). One honest test I gave every mentee: if a bullet could appear on the CV of everyone who sat near you that summer, it is not your bullet yet. In the interview, each of these lines becomes a two-minute story; the Walk Me Through Your CV article shows how they connect.
CV three: academics only, nothing else yet
First-semester penultimate-year student, strong grades, no internships, no society titles. The instinct is to pad. The correct move is to promote coursework and projects into evidence.
Education
BEFORE · Modules include Corporate Finance, Econometrics and Accounting.
AFTER · Valued a listed European retailer at 6.8x EV/EBITDA in the corporate finance capstone, reconciling comps against a DCF; graded in the top 5 of a cohort of 140.
Activities
BEFORE · Member of the finance society.
AFTER · Placed second of 18 teams in the society's stock pitch competition with a long thesis on a French industrial; presented to a judging panel of three professionals.
What changed: a module list became a deliverable with a number, a rank and a method. At this stage of a CV, a graded project genuinely is experience, provided it is written like work: what you produced, how, against what benchmark. If your page currently looks like the 'before' lines, the Building a CV From Second Year article is the forward plan.
The pattern across all three
Every rewrite did the same four things: named an artefact, attached a number, claimed an action verb that only you can claim and landed an outcome. Notice what none of them did: no adjectives, no 'passionate', no responsibilities. The screen does not read character descriptions; it reads evidence. Three seconds per bullet and the bullet either stops the eye or it does not.
This before-and-after exercise on your own page is exactly what the IBD Recruiting Review session does: your CV, line by line, against the screen it has to survive.
FAQ
What makes an investment banking CV bullet strong?
An artefact you owned, a number that sizes it, an action verb only you can claim and an outcome. If the bullet could belong to everyone who sat near you, it is not your bullet yet.
How do I write a banking CV with no finance experience?
Reframe what you have with scale and outcomes: money handled, people managed, results ranked. Screeners read reliability with money and other people's time as directly transferable.
Can coursework count as experience on a CV?
Yes, if written like work: a graded valuation project with method, benchmark and rank is genuine evidence at student level and far stronger than a list of module names.
Former Executive Director in TMT Investment Banking at Nomura and M&A banker at BNP Paribas. Top-rated mentor with 300+ sessions. About
