FRESH GRADUATE (FINANCE) CV [Full Sample]
Kickstart your career with confidence! Download our fresh graduate resume sample to highlight your academic achievements and potential, making you stand out in the job market.
Bonus Job Hunting Tips for Fresh Graduate
Of course, not everyone will be going into the Finance industry. With that in mind, here are a few things that I’d have looked out for back when I was an active recruiter and headhunter. You can generalise these tips to CVs in almost any industry:
Key Pointers Hiring Managers Look For in Fresh Graduate
- Demonstrable Skills and Experiences: If you have no prior work experience, make sure that you include internship experiences, community service, or any relevant activities where you can demonstrate essential abilities such as leadership and communication skills.
- Relevant Coursework: If you are looking at joining an industry, but have no prior internship/working experience there, consider highlighting any relevant coursework you have done in University to demonstrate your interest and theoretical foundation in the area.
- Your Portfolio: Depending on the industry you have in mind, this may or may not apply to you. Some industries place much more focus on your capabilities rather than your paper qualifications. Programming and creative design are two which immediately come to mind. In CVs for those industries, you could add some previous works and showcase your portfolio.
- Ability to Work with Various Stakeholders: As you cannot showcase yet your experience in working for large business environments, you can at least speak about how you were able to successfully work with different types of people such as professors, coaches, community leaders, other students, as well as local government officers.
- Transferable or Technical Skills: You may not have previous professional experience, but you can always highlight transferable skills you may have utilised while you were in university such as auditing, marketing, writing, data entry, graphic designing, coding, and the like. Look for courses relevant to your industry. In Marketing/Advertising? Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom are good to have. Interested in Finance? Be sure to take Bloomberg’s certifications and look into the CFA Institute’s courses.
CV Design
This is a really underlooked point that I want to discuss briefly. First impressions matter a lot. I’ve seen employers discard CVs that were poorly formatted without even bothering to glance through the content. A few key points to note:
- Neat and professional templates are key. Don’t use fancy pictures or layouts that are hard to read.
- Proofread your CV! Spelling and grammatical errors are huge no-nos. As an employer, I’d be very reluctant to hire someone who makes simple spelling errors. It says a lot about that candidate’s professionalism and attention to detail. You can use apps like Grammarly, or ask a friend to proofread your CV for you.
- Use a suitable, professional font. Keep the flowery and artistic fonts for an ad; there are fonts which help you stand out without making you look unprofessional.
- Watch the fluff! With less content to work with, there is a natural tendency to ‘inflate’ our responsibilities and achievements a little. While this is acceptable in moderation, it looks really bad if overdone. Know when to stop!
- Keep it short! Most fresh grad CVs can easily fit within a page or two. If you’re going over that, chances are you’re including too many irrelevant points. Employers are busy people – they are unlikely to read all 5 or 6 pages of a long CV!
Additional Fresh Graduate Resume Writing Tips
- If you have the time, reading my Ultimate Guide to Resume Writing is a great way to get started. There’s a lot of detail there about how to craft each section. Drop me a feedback request if you have any questions – I read each one personally.
- The executive summary gives a quick overview of your work history. Thus, use this to communicate your strong work ethic, desire to learn and leadership abilities, if any. If you’ve got domain expertise in the field you’re applying for, do heavily emphasise that.
- Always break your work experiences into 2 parts – your daily workscope and your achievements. For the daily workscope, include a high level summary. Workscopes which are implied can be omitted. Remember, you want to keep your resume short and sharp for the recruiter.
- As a fresh grad, you might be a little lacking in work experience. As such, do include any volunteer or leadership experiences you’ve had, as well as training and seminars you’ve attended. This will help to differentiate your resume from that of your peers. You can also include your CCA or OCSP experiences.
Fresh Graduate Job Opportunities
- Join LinkedIn groups or follow companies you wish to work for to keep abreast with new job openings.
- Alternatively, you can reach out to these headhunters in singapore to learn about any vacancies they may be trying to fill out.
Job Hunting Tips from our Resident Headhunter
- Create a winning cover letter and send it along your resume. The cover letter will serve as an introduction about yourself and is a great venue to answer the question “Why should we hire you?”
- Be active on social media, particularly on LinkedIn. Make sure to create a strong online profile that represents you and you professional experiences. Here’s our comprehensive guide on writing a great LinkedIn profile.
Before You Go… Common Questions about Fresh Graduates Resumes
How do you write a resume if you are a fresh graduate?
As a fresh graduate, you can still create a great resume that’ll make you stand out from the crowd. Be sure to include all of your educational experience, and if you have any volunteering work, you can include that as well.
What is the best resume format for a fresh graduate student?
A reverse chronological resume format is a great choice for a graduate. It will list your most recent experience first, which gets straight to the point – be sure to include any professional experience you have too!
How many pages should a fresh graduate resume have?
If you have little experience, you can reduce your resume down from two pages to one. For those with more experience, two pages is considered the maximum if you want the hiring manager to read it in full.
Be sure to download this resume sample, which uses our tested-and-proven resume writing techniques, as a guide for your own CV. Best part is, this sample is available for free 🙂
And before you start sending out applications, send us your resume for a free CV feedback analysis from our team. We’ll review your CV in detail, share personalised feedback on its strengths and weaknesses, and show you how you can improve it.
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