7 Must-Know Resume Tips From a Former J.P. Morgan Recruiting Captain

As a recruiting captain for JP Morgan and also just over the course of my life I probably reviewed over a thousand resumes and today I'm going to give you some of my best tips and tricks so that you can land your dream job. What's up everyone my name is Ben and welcome to Rare Liquid, a channel for tech investing and career advice Today's agenda looks like this- I'll first provide you with some overall guidance, then show you the evolution of my resumes, I'll then go over the seven key tips I have for you, and lastly go over some giveaways and shoutouts. As a friendly reminder I'll be posting career related videos on the weekends and stock and crypto related videos on the weekdays, and if you'd like some more personal career advice from me feel free to check out my Rare Liquid careers Patreon in the description below. Okay so first up let me give you some overall guidance from a recruiter's perspective As you may have seen from my previous video I was the JP Morgan recruiting captain for summer analyst recruiting for two years and a lot of what I'm about to really share today stems from that experience. My recruiting team and I usually would review about 150 to 200 resumes in usually one to two hours and so if you think about that it's usually around 30 to 60 seconds max. Usually if the resume just had some glaring errors or had a really really low GPA I would probably not even spend more than five seconds and if it was a pretty solid resume then I might spend something like 30 seconds maybe a little bit more if I needed to but basically the point is that your resume is your first impression to get an interview or maybe if you're doing a coffee chat it's the first thing someone knows about you and so the most important thing about a resume you have to understand is that you have to make a really strong first impression with it. This really boils down to two things which is first that your resume needs to be pretty aesthetically pleasing and really well formatted, and second of all all of your individual lines have to be really really well crafted and I'll basically walk you through how to do that throughout this video With that said, let me share with you the evolution of my resumes I'm going to be sharing with you my resumes just because I think it's the best way for you to really learn by using an example and I'm going to be sharing three- one that I use for consulting recruiting, one for banking recruiting, and one for when I left banking and so it's kind of more one of my more recent resumes Starting with consulting, this resume got me interviews with Deloitte, Bain, and BCG during my junior year. What I really want to focus on here is For the professional section, you can see that I have four consulting experiences in a row and so if a recruiter saw this resume they wouldn't have to spend much time to see that I'm really interested in consulting. In the leadership and activity section, my second and third experiences are also consulting related and I also included my volunteer experience at Tanzania because it was a really big part of my story when I was recruiting Let's now compare this to my senior year resume that I use for banking As you can see, I completely changed my professional and leadership sections to focus on finance experiences and also changed a lot of the individual lines as well to focus on finance work streams I also changed my titles a bit from consultant to analyst for social sector solutions and cisco and this was just because I was applying for an investment banking analyst position and you can have a little bit of flexibility with your titles. In the professional section, I took out one of my consulting projects with Andresen Horowitz because that project didn't involve any finance work and I also added an older internship from Merrill Lynch. In the leadership and activity section, I added a Goldman Sachs case competition I participated in just to show a little bit more of my interest in finance and I also took out my volunteer work. Now I'm not going to go too much in detail into everything that changed here so here are the resumes again side by side and you can pause the video and compare them if you'd like Basically with these resumes, what I really just wanted to show you is that for the industry that you're applying for, you should really cater your resume to it as much as you can. Next up, let me show you one of my more recent resumes which looks way different First of all, I changed up my formatting because I needed a lot more space to write about my experiences. I also have my education section at the bottom because once you are in the workforce, your professional experience is the main priority but if you're an undergraduate student you'll want education to be at the top But anyway, I'm going to be using this resume to go through my seven resume tips for you so let's move on to that. First up, let me tell you about the only four sections you need. In my opinion, for the vast majority of industries, I think the only four sections you really need are education, professional, leadership and activities, and skills and interests This means you do not need an objective statement and most recruiters find it to be pretty outdated to add this. Also of course if you're in a specialized industry, I don't know like medicine or engineering or something and your resumes look really really different, then I think that's totally fair and there may be some sections that I just don't know about that's important for those industries. It's just that this is mainly for business and I do think that the tips that I have for you will still probably be relevant no matter what industry you're in Before I go into each of these sections, also remember to put your name at the very top and I put it on the left hand side and contact information and LinkedIn link on the right hand side to save some space. Most resumes have their names in the middle and contact information below but as you get older you actually start to run out of room so this is why I do it like that Moving on to the sections for education, you should have your standard things like your university, GPA, major GPA if it's higher, standardized test scores if you have decent scores, awards, and you can also add relevant coursework if you need to fill up your resume The professional and leadership and activity sections should include the company or organization name, your title, location, and dates One thing I also like to do is add the industry for each company or organization because some people may not know the companies you've worked at but this of course is optional And for my skills and interest section I do go a bit overboard but I'll explain this a little bit later and for most resumes just the skills and interests should suffice if that's all you really want to add Second, let me share some tips on overall formatting Personally I really liked my college format because I thought it was pretty unique but later on as I just had more and more experiences I realized that I needed to switch over to kind of more standard template like my post banking resume just because it allowed more space for me to write Of course you can choose whatever formatting you like and prefer but just remember that the most important thing is that you just need to make sure your resume makes a killer first impression and is aesthetically pleasing The first tip I have for formatting is to make sure that each line reaches the right hand side margin of the page If you look at my resume there's very little white space on the right hand side and this is purposefully done and I made sure that all the words that I used reached that right hand side of the page and I know it's going to be difficult to perfectly get it there but trust me when I say that it's worth it If your resume bullets are one line each and it doesn't reach the full page and it only reaches half then I'm going to look at it and think you know is this work stream even important and if it is then how come this person could not even fill up an entire line on a page If your resume bullet is two lines then I do think that it may be okay for the first one to be the full length and then the second one to be half or two thirds but generally speaking and maybe just I just have too much attention to detail or something I just like having everything reach the right hand side I think when you look at the overall resume things just look a lot more symmetrical and aesthetic The second thing that I like to do is bold the company name and location and italicize the position title and date and I think this is relatively standard stuff Third, I like to use square bullets because it just looks nicer in my opinion but again totally up to you Fourth, the font I'm using right now is Gaudi old style which I personally think looks the nicest but there are others like Garamond or Times New Roman which are pretty popular as well And lastly probably the most important formatting tip is consistency All the formatting in your resume should be consistent from where you are bolding things to the amount of space in between each experience and this is super super important Overall when a recruiter looks at your resume they should be able to tell that you put a ton of time and effort into it and all the details like formatting really come into play for that really killer first impression so make sure you're spending that extra time that upfront energy to make sure your resume formatting is all perfect so that you can make that really really good first impression My third tip is to add subsections if possible What I'm referring to here are the sections highlighted in red here from my most recent resume If you are recruiting for investment banking and have transaction experience from previous banking or private equity internships, then you should 100% have these subsections For you future bankers out there, here is a more fleshed out section that I used to have in my resume when JP Morgan was my only professional experience These subsections are really standard for bankers once they have left undergraduate and are full-time working in banking and you know laying out the transactions like that really help call out what you worked on when you're recruiting for things like private equity or hedge funds so if you are a candidate for banking and if I was reviewing your resume you had a pretty solid GPA and you had these subsections where you worked on transactions for different boutique investment banking internships or private equity firms that you worked at, then most likely I would lean towards giving you an interview But regardless of the industry you're in I do think it's helpful to break down your professional experiences especially if it's a really long section into different subsections and you probably saw that in my aesthetic studio section My fourth tip is in regards to the importance of the first words and lines in your resume. The first words should always be in the past tense even if it's a job you're currently in just so that everything in the resume is consistent The biggest tip I have for you in choosing the first words to use in the lines of your resume is to look at the job description that you're applying for and see what kind of words that they use So if they use words like analyze, construct, or build then you probably want to use those words as well so that when a recruiter looks at your resume they see that okay this person is kind of doing similar things in previous jobs and so maybe he or she can you know just apply the skills that they've already built to this current job and also I have heard that some computers now are analyzing the types of words that resumes use and that can make a difference in recruiting for that first resume screen I don't really know if this is true but you know if it is then another good reason to look at that job description and use those words You also need to pay attention to the first few lines under each company you worked at or whatever experience and what you put there because as I mentioned earlier, recruiters and people don't really spend that much time on your resume so they might read the first one to two lines under each experience and you want to make sure that those lines are the most hard-hitting and impactful ones that you have My fifth tip for you is to use the template for your lines of what you did plus the impact you made and this is what I mean by that if you look at this line from my resume the analyzed 3,000 job descriptions is what I did and the rest of the line that you see here is the impact that I made I personally think that this template structure is super super valuable because as recruiters you do really just want to know from a candidate what they did and the impact that they made right so if you're able to structure your lines like this then that is super super powerful and I recommend doing it for at least 75% of your lines if you can now I know that not every single line is able to be structured in this way for example when I was back in college I worked as an administrative assistant at a school for about a semester and really all I did was like photocopy papers and I can't really say what kind of impact I made there right so I get it if you're young and you don't have the ability to structure all your lines in that way then that's totally fine just if you can this is a really really good structure to keep in mind and implement You also get a lot of bonus points if you're able to quantify the what you did part and especially the impact you made part and this is really important because it shows that you're really thoughtful about the impact that you made to your company or organization and that's actually part of the next part of the video so let's move on to that Like I said my sixth tip is to quantify quantify quantify Having a lot of numbers in your resume makes for a really strong good first impression because it kind of shows that you're comfortable with numbers whether you are or not because it makes it seem like you are focused on making a measurable impact in your organizations or companies that you work at and what kind of employer would not want to see that Whenever I gave resume feedback I would always ask for every single line can you quantify this can you quantify this whether it was the number of people you're managing or the number of companies that you reached out to when you're doing some outreach You'd be surprised at the amount of things that you can actually quantify if you really put some time to think about it and I really highly recommend at least 75% or more of your lines having at least one number in them each A question I get a lot is what if you don't know exactly what the numbers are and for that I say it's totally fine to use an estimate as long as you're not lying and really stretching the truth and as long as you're in the right ballpark My last tip for you is to make your skills and interest section a conversation starter. The skills line is pretty self-explanatory but that should include anything like software or technical skills like programming languages For the interests line make sure to try to choose ones that make you sound as unique as possible and if you're going to choose something more quote-unquote cookie cutter like traveling I highly recommend adding a parentheses afterwards and making it sound more unique like what I did with 8 Ball Pool here Now I go a little bit overboard here with my section with favorite books movies and personal feats but I have personally found that this has led to a lot of conversations during interviews. The reason that I think adding a bit more than usual is beneficial and the reason I did it beyond just liking books and movies is just that it gives you more chances for the interviewer to have a similar interest as you and kind of pinpoint that out during an interview and it could lead to a conversation and maybe lead for you guys to you know develop more of a personal bond during that short interview and so that's personally why I recommend trying to add a little bit more if you can or at least making your skills and interest section as interesting as you can and if you don't want to then you know of course it's totally optional. Okay lastly let me chat about giveaways and announcements First up as I announced in my last video I'm going to be giving away $10 to the first comment on each future video and a random comment So these are our two winners today just DM me on Instagram and I'll tell you how you can collect your winnings. Second if you'd like to win 10% of my May 2021 YouTube earnings then look for this picture of Oprah on my Instagram and it'll be at least $300 but probably more than that from what everything is looking like so far. And lastly a brief shout out to Yue So for joining as a terabyte patron in the community. Thank you so much for joining I appreciate it and for the rest of you if you'd like to join the patreon check out a link for it in the description below. All right so this wraps up the video thank you so much as always for watching you can check out my different social media platforms if you want I have links for it in the description below as well and let me know in the comments if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer as many as I can Thanks so much for watching as always and for tuning in hope to catch you in the next one Peace out