Finance resume review? Need honest advice
Hi everyone,
I’m a recent finance grad trying to break into finance and would really appreciate honest advice from people who recruit or work in the industry. I’ve spent so much time tweaking my resume and I feel like I keep getting conflicting advice and havent gotten any interviews.
Some questions I genuinely have:
Do recruiters actually care about formatting details like margins, spacing, bolding, alignment, etc., or is content overwhelmingly what matters?
Is a summary section worth keeping for finance roles, or does it just waste space?
How specific should technical skills be? (e.g. Excel/VBA/Bloomberg/SQL/Python vs other broad overarching categories)
How much do quantifiable metrics matter if some roles are harder to quantify?
Do leadership/extracurriculars meaningfully help for early-career finance recruiting?
Is tailoring your resume for every industry actually necessary?
What makes a finance resume immediately look weak or inexperienced?
If you’ve recruited/interviewed candidates: what’s something applicants obsess over that doesn’t actually matter?
I’d also really appreciate if anyone in finance would be open to me DMing an anonymized version of my resume for blunt feedback. I’m trying to understand whether my issue is positioning, formatting, targeting the wrong roles, or just the current market.
Thank you!! =D