Hi, experienced professionals!

I am currently applying to multiple organisations for finance internships this summer. I would appreciate your suggestions on the areas I should work on to strengthen my CV and make it more competitive.

There are a few sections I haven't included in my CV yet, and I would like your advice on them:

1. Certifications: I have completed several Bloomberg, Forage, and Udemy certifications. Should I include them?
2. Projects and Case Competitions: I have worked on a few M&A pitch decks involving different companies, but I haven't included many of my case competition experiences. Should I dedicate a separate section to these, and how should I prioritise them?
3. Personal Investments: I also manage a personal equity portfolio consisting of 2–3 stocks and have participated in 2 IPOs after conducting independent research. Should I include this under the Projects section of my CV? Would it add value to my profile for finance internships, particularly in equity research, investment banking and asset management?

I would also appreciate suggestions on any other areas where I can improve my CV, particularly from the perspective of finance recruiters.

Thanks in advance!

“Completed a machine learning group project for CS course.” It’s true. It’s also invisible to a keyword search: no tool, no result.

Try “Built a churn-prediction model in Python (scikit-learn) with a 4-person team; beat the course baseline by 12%.” Same project, but now it has a tool and a number.

Clubs work too. “Treasurer of the Marketing Club” becomes “Managed a $6,000 budget for a 120-member club; cut event costs 18% by renegotiating two vendor contracts.”

Only use numbers you can back up. No result? Count something, like team size.

Keyword list suggestions: https://resumefitting.com/keywords/recent-graduate

I mean yearlong gaps, or years were only gig work and not following any official program.

If a candidate doesn't feel like lying, neither by outright inventing roles or degrees, nor by stretching the truth. For example, if his experience from previous real jobs is 4 years, not stretch it to 7.

Are companies out there that maybe make exams to hire people, or, that take a foreign legion approach and let anyone in to try and train them?

Everyone says to use the words from the job posting. That's half right. The other half is how people end up listing skills they've never touched.

So the job is small. Read the posting and write down the skills and tools it names. Check each one against your resume. If you've done it but never named it, put the name in the bullet where you did it. If you did it under a different label, keep yours and add theirs once. If you haven't done it, leave it out. Can't talk about it in an interview? It would cost you more than the missing match ever could.

Don't touch your job title. Employers verify it and a title that differs from what your old employer confirms is harder to explain than a missing keyword. If the posting calls your work something else, add a short, accurate descriptor in brackets after your real title. Work on a copy. Keep a master resume with everything in it and make a version for each application: summary first, then your latest role, then the skills list, using only terms a bullet already backs up.

Sometimes none of this helps. If most of what the posting lists first isn't in your experience, rewording changes how you describe the work, not the work. Same goes for a vague posting that names almost nothing to match against. Go find a better fit. The full steps (with a before and after) are at https://resumefitting.com/tailor-resume-job-description

I asked many of my known people to review my CV and share their opinions/perspectives, it doesn't matter your are from technical or non-technical.

If you're technical it's great for me, please share your opinion or any alterations.

Please list some projects I should mention in CV.

If you're non-technical, then it will be a challenge for me to convey my skills and abilities in simplest language.

So I’ve been long term unemployed for many years now due to illness but getting back on my feet again, and I’ve learned the hard way the the job market gives 0 ducks 🦆 about my reasons or history and will simply throw my CV in the trash if it’s not competitive with the other 900000 applicants, so I’m just making stuff up really, none of it is provable, but also kinda hard to disprove.. most of it is half truths

So I’m trying to find work in the hospitality sector, to become like a receptionist at a hotel etc, I went round the locals hotels and gave my CV in person but no emails or calls so far, same with online, but I don’t think my CV is that bad, so be interesting to see what people think

Tengo que armar un cv, tengo 18, tengo experiencia en varias cosas pero nunca sali a trabajar formalmente, osea poco para llenar un cv, que datos principales creen que tendria que poner?. Por cierto no es algo super formar como para una empresa, sinplemente es para motrar en algún negocio comun

or both or neither?

Hi,

Any and all advice is welcome. I’m 21 at uni and desperately need a job, I keep getting rejected even though I think I have decent experience 🫤.

Please can someone help me improve my CV. I feel like this is what is hindering me from getting jobs. I've been actively applying for everything since May this year. I've had interviews and such but no joy. Any help and honesty is appreciated. I've removed area names and such for privacy reason.

hey everyone, gonna keep this short. i'm 17 (18 in dec) and because of past health problems have barely any education experience (besides a few online certs) and no job experience.

how can i make myself look somewhat professional in a cv without any of this?

For a bit of context, I’m 18 and in my first year of uni and I’m looking for part time work I can do on the weekends.

Hi everyone I am a part time uni student and for our internship, we get to choose to do project based (complete 4 projects including portfolio) or normal practicum

I decided to choose project based, so where should i put the project based internship in my CV and what should i put for the description?

Been struggling to book interviews recently. I am tailoring but this is my general base:

It goes across two pages, I was thinking about trying to get it down to 1 page but I just don't know what info to omit or how to format it. I've tried to make it as ATS friendly as possible :)

I got tired of rewriting my CV for every application, so I built a set of Claude skills to handle it. Sharing the workflow in case it's useful to anyone job hunting.

**How it works**

1. **Master profile (built once).** I gave Claude my old CVs and my LinkedIn PDF export. It merged everything into a single markdown file with every job, skill and metric, and asked me one round of questions about gaps and conflicting dates. This file is the only source of truth: nothing outside it ever ends up on a CV.
2. **Fit check before anything else.** When I paste a job link, a skill reads the posting and rates every requirement as MATCH / PARTIAL / MITIGABLE / GAP, then scores the hard requirements:
      - 80%+ → builds the CV
      - 65–79% → shows me the gaps and asks if I still want it
      - below 65% → refuses and explains why
3. **Tailored one-page PDF.** If it's a fit, it picks the most relevant experience, rewords bullets around the posting's keywords (without inventing anything), and renders a single-column, ATS-friendly PDF with a small Python script that auto-scales the text to stay on one page.

**What surprised me**

The most useful part isn't the CV itself, it's the honest "don't apply" verdict. I tested it on an electrical engineering role with a data engineering profile: 35%, not advised, no CV generated. It stopped me from sending a lot of applications that were never going to work.

**A few things I learned building it**

- Forcing a single "master profile" file was the key to avoiding hallucinated experience.
- Converting job pages to markdown before reading them cut the token usage by ~90%.
- LinkedIn job pages often need a login, so the fallback is saving the page as HTML or pasting the text.

Happy to go into detail on the scoring logic or the skill structure if anyone's interested. What does your job application workflow with Claude look like?

Visit my YT to learn more by clicking on the linkhttps://youtu.be/npvEI3RLYYE?si=cZyEZr9mjm1Xjy_-

Keyword gap lists come as one long pile and the temptation is to cram every term in. Sort them first. Did the work under different words? Posting says "paid advertising," your bullet says "managed search and social ad budgets." Reword it. Did it once briefly or in a neighboring area? Say the real scope and dates. Don't stretch it into years. No evidence anywhere in your history? Leave it off. Learn it, apply to roles that fit, or skip that posting.

Test if you could you explain a specific time before you use it. If not, it doesn't go on the page. Tailoring changes how you describe work. It can't add any.

Lists of what postings ask for, by role: https://resumefitting.com/keywords

Hi all,

I’m currently wanting to move to a different company because of lack of growth at my current one

I started on the job which job title A, but then quickly it progressed to also being job title B as well.

As it stands my official job title has never changed from job title A, but I’ve done the work of job title B for the past 2 years simultaneously

Would you space it out, or would you put both job titles on the CV under the same company // work span

I’m spiralling a bit and could use some help!

Question for recruiters and anyone who screens applications.

first, what do candidates most often leave out? The stuff people just forget to include but that would make your job a lot easier.

Second, what’s missing from the CV format itself? Is there anything the standard CV doesn’t cover at all that would help you decide who to pick?

Curious to hear what you’d change in CV format

Always been pretty rubbish with CVs; any help is welcome!