The one page finance CV, line by line.

A finance CV does not need to be creative. It needs to be readable, dense and credible.

For a student or junior profile, a single page remains an excellent default. Yale recommends a one-page résumé for undergraduates, with a simple 10-12 point font and margins no smaller than half an inch. Harvard sums up the purpose well: it should be a concise summary of skills, education and experience, tailored to the kind of role you are applying for.

So let’s go down the page from the top.

Name and contacts

Your name should be large enough to be instantly readable. It does not need to become a logo: the recruiter should remember the content of the profile, not the typeface of your surname.

Below it, phone, a professional email and LinkedIn if it is up to date. Avoid teenage email addresses and information that does not help the application. For applications to international banks and funds I would keep the header minimal, Anglo-Saxon style: the CV should speak first about your professional qualifications.

Education

For a student this section usually sits high on the page, because university, course, grades and expected graduation date are among the first pieces of information a recruiter can use.

An effective structure is: university and city, the course with expected graduation date, GPA or grade if useful, and only then relevant coursework, scholarships or exceptional academic results, when they genuinely add something.

Do not turn “Relevant Coursework” into the index of your degree. Corporate Finance, Accounting and Econometrics can make sense. “Mathematics I” probably does not differentiate the profile.

Experience: bullets that work

This is the section that should take more space as your experience grows. Each entry has to make four things immediately clear: company, role, location, dates. Then come the bullets.

The second sentence gives an action, an object, a context and a scale. Yale explicitly suggests the structure Action + Project + Result, describing your personal contribution and, where possible, quantifying its impact.

Don’t invent numbers to “quantify”

“Quantify your impact” does not mean adding random percentages.

• If you analysed 30 companies, write 30.
• If the model covered three scenarios and five forecast years, say so.
• If the transaction was public and worth €500 million, you can give that context.

But do not write “improved team efficiency by 37%” if you have no idea how that was calculated. In finance, precision signals credibility.

How technical should the bullets be?

Technical enough to show what you did, not so technical that it reads like internal deal documentation. “Supported M&A transaction” says too little. “Built DCF and trading-comparable analyses and prepared materials for management presentations on a sell-side process” is far more informative.

But you have to be ready to explain every word. Morgan Stanley explicitly warns candidates not to inflate their CV: anything on the document can become interview material, and its preparation guidance adds that you should be able to talk through everything you put down without reading from the résumé.

Leadership, skills and interests

The leadership and extracurricular section is far more useful when it shows selectivity, responsibility or genuine interest. Running the equity research team of a finance society, managing a small student portfolio or organising a conference with industry professionals says something. Listing five societies where you are simply a “member” says much less.

Keep skills verifiable: languages with the real level, tools you can actually use, certifications you genuinely completed. Avoid graphical bars like “Excel ███████░”: they communicate no interpretable standard. And avoid a section full of “leadership, teamwork, problem solving, hard-working” — those qualities have to emerge from what you did.

One or two lines of interests can be surprisingly useful. “Skiing, marathon running, AC Milan, contemporary Italian photography” gives the interviewer possible conversation openings; “Finance, travelling, reading” says almost nothing. The best interests are specific and true: do not put “Formula 1” because you imagine the managing director likes it, if you could not name the last race you watched.

Then the page has to reach its reader: through the application, as soon as the role opens, or directly to someone who works in that team.