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bjbj In this video, you're going to learn how to properly use the sample investment
banking cover letter template. Now, the first question I want to address here, before moving
into anything else, is whether or not cover letters actually matter in investment banking,
because you've probably heard different things about them. Some people say they matter a
lot. Some people say that banks don't even read them, they just tear them off when you
submit your resume. I've seen both scenarios happen. The short answer, in my view, is that
cover letters can do you a lot of harm if you write them incorrectly, but a great cover
letter, on the other hand, will not really help you all that much. So, similar to GPA
and test scores, it's important to have at least a basic cover letter, looking appropriate
so that you can submit it. But don't go overboard and try to do everything perfectly because
it really doesn't matter. At bulge bracket banks, often times, they don't even read the
cover letter at all. Sometimes, at smaller banks, they care more, but for the most part,
don't stress out too much over the cover letter because it doesn't matter nearly as much as
your resume, networking, and other factors. Once again, cover letters tend to matter more
if you're applying to boutiques or smaller places. They also matter more if you have
an unusual background. Maybe you went to medical school, you started doing a residency, and
then you stopped and decided you wanted to become a banker. Well, in that case, you might
have to do some additional explanation in your cover letter. Cover letters can also
matter more outside the U.S., especially in Europe, where banks place more of an emphasis
on online applications, cover letters, CVs, and everything like that. Those are some scenarios
where you might want to pay more attention to your cover letter, but regardless, to get
started with this template now, just to point out a couple things overall, you see here
that I'm using size 11 Times New Roman font throughout. The margins here, I'm using one-inch
margins around the entire page, and I recommend doing this for any type of cover letter that
you have. Don't set the margins to be too low. I would say at least half an inch to
three-quarters of an inch on each side of the page. The font size should be at least
10 to make everything legible. With resumes and CVs, if you have too much information,
you can make the font size smaller to fit everything in. I would recommend against doing
that with cover letters. Try to make it always at least size 10, 11, 12 font, somewhere in
that range. Also note that this cover letter is just one page. We have four paragraphs
here, the address and other information at the top, an introduction, and then a signature
conclusion at the bottom. Never go over one page. Sometimes people argue that, if you
have a lot of experience, you can get away with it. From what I've seen in investment
banking, you just do not want to do this. Keep it to one page or else it will not get
read. It may actually even hurt you if you go beyond one page. So always stick to one
page here. Aside from that, also note that, whereas with resumes, we saw that we had a
couple different templates depending on whether you're a university student, or currently
working full time, or you're in business school. With cover letters, we really just have this
one template and it works for pretty much all those situations. You have to change it
around a little bit. But it's not worth the effort of going through different templates
and trying to pick what template to use, because cover letters are really pretty much the same
no matter where you are applying from and what your background is. So to actually jump
into the mechanics and the structure of this cover letter now. We see at the top, we have
your name, your address, phone number, and email address. Of course, make sure that all
this information is correct. It goes without saying. But you would be surprised how many
people have typos or don't write down their correct email address or correct phone number
here. You want to right align your information here at the top and then the company that
you're applying to, the bank that you're applying to, their information and the date should
be left aligned here, as should the rest of the cover letter. One question that comes
up here is, what if you don't have a specific person's name at this bank? What if you don't
know the recruiter's name? In that case, you can write in something like "Dear Sir or Madam".
You could do that. You could write "To Whom It May Concern". I think "Dear Sir or Madam"
is probably better. In any case, don't stress out too much if you don't have the person's
name. It's not worth doing hours of research to find this because, once again, a lot of
banks don't even pay close attention to cover letters. Don't worry too much about that.
If you don't have it, just use "Dear Sir or Madam". Now moving into the body of the letter
now. The first paragraph, this is really an introduction, and this is where you can go
in and do some name dropping. You want to give your own name, of course, right here.
After that, you want to immediately tell them what your status is. Maybe you're a third
year economics major at Wharton, or maybe you're a business school student at Columbia,
or maybe you're working at IBM in their business development division. So you would write something
like that in this first sentence here. Especially if you have large, well-known companies or
universities or business schools, you definitely want to put those names here. Because they
grab the person's attention and the first paragraph here is really all about name dropping
and attention grabbing. But even if you're not in that position, even if you go to a
lesser known school, business school, or you're working at a lesser known or smaller company,
you still have to list them here. In those cases, you may want to place more of an emphasis
on the next part of this paragraph which, as you can see right here, is how you came
across this firm, how you were introduced to them. In this case, ideally, you want to
be able to cite a specific person at the firm who you met at an event or through networking
or through other means, as I have right here. So you could say that "I met John Smith at
a presentation that you gave at our school on January 11th and I enjoyed speaking with
him about such and such about your bank." If you can, it's good if you have bank specific
information here that you discussed. You could always say something generic like your culture
or working environment or deal flow or clients or something like that. But if you have some
kind of bank specific information that doesn't sound too artificial, you can certainly throw
it in here. Some banks like to pride themselves on having global reach. Some of them like
to brag about having the smartest, most capable people. Some like to talk about how they can
use their balance sheet well to win deals, for example. So those are the types of things
that you could potentially mention right here. And then to close off the first paragraph,
say that you're interested in pursuing an investment banking analyst or associate positions
at your firm, and you've enclosed your resume and background information. So this is just
to make it perfectly clear of what you're actually applying for, especially at smaller
places, where recruiting is not as well organized. Now you've already listed your year in school
and major up here at the top in the first line, but it's good to reiterate. If you're
applying for summer internships, you would change this to investment banking summer analyst
or summer associate position right here. Now the second paragraph - this is probably the
most important one in the cover letter - this is where you go into your work experience
and say what you've done in terms of internships or full time work. You also want to highlight
the skills that you've gained that are relevant to investment banking. For this one, for example,
let's say that you've had internships in private wealth management. You could say, "I've completed
internships in private wealth management at UBS and Bank of America. Through this experience,
leading teams, working with clients, and performing analysis on investments, I have gained analytical,
leadership, teamwork, finance, accounting skills." Anything of that nature. Don't go
overboard here. Maybe list two or three, so pick a few skills out of the ones that I have
listed here and you can go into them. Then you can close by saying that you honed any
other relevant skills. So if you did something particularly technical, you could talk about
how you honed your accounting or finance or valuation skills or something like that. Usually,
you can use the first part here to talk about qualitative skills and then the second part
here to talk about more technical skills. It doesn't matter too much, but that's the
basic idea, that's the basic outline for this paragraph. Now, if you are well beyond university
level, you have many years of work experience; don't go into everything here; don't write
your life story. What you want to do is pick the one or two most relevant full time jobs
that you've had, full time experiences that you've had, and simply go into them in a bit
of detail here and talk about the skills that you've gained. If you have no work experience
or minimal work experience, then what you could do instead is talk about clubs you've
been in, talk about activities that you've done, talk about any kind of independent investing
you've done on your own, if you've done any day trading of your own. Anything like that.
Shift the focus from work to activities and clubs if you don't have much in the way of
work experience. Then, at the end here, one other thing I like to do in this paragraph
is have something on any high-impact projects or high-impact clients or transactions or
anything like that that you worked on. Maybe if you did a wealth management internship,
going back to that example, you came up with a portfolio or an investment strategy that
got your client a 20% return. Maybe if you were working in banking, you had to take over
for a full time analyst on a major $10 billion deal, let's say, and you did much of the modeling
work on that despite the fact that you were only an intern. So you want to go into detail
on something like that and talk about any kind of high-impact project. If you don't
know all the results, that's fine, but if it's some kind of deal or some type of case
or anything like that that was very well known especially, then you definitely want to list
it here, once again, fitting in with our theme of name dropping here. After you've gone into
your work experience in the second paragraph, in the third paragraph here, what you want
to do is tie together your work experience and background to the position that you're
applying for. This is pretty simple and paragraphs three and four here are really the easiest
part of the cover letter because you can really just copy and paste this template. What you
want to say here is something like, Given my background in wealth management and accounting
and my analytical, teamwork, and leadership skills, I am a particularly good fit for the
investment banking analyst position at your firm. I am impressed by your track record
of transactions or clients or deal flow, or anything like that at, and put the banking
name right here, and the significant responsibilities given to investment banking analysts or associates,
and I look forward to joining and contributing to your firm. So really, this is just a templated
few sentences right here. You're just tying together and summarizing your work experience
and saying, Hey! I've gained these analytical or teamwork or leadership skills and they
would be a good fit for being an investment banking analyst or associate. Then in paragraph
four here, hits is the conclusion. This is just where you're closing out and saying that
your resume is attached, that they can contact you. Your contact information is here, your
phone number and email. You're listing it here. It's good to have it twice on your cover
letter, once at the top right here, and then once in the final paragraph, just in case
they're reading it on a computer, they don't have to scroll up again. Bankers do tend to
be lazy. HR tends to be lazy. The easier you can make their job for them, the more likely
they are to actually call you. But once again, paragraph four here is really just a template
that you can copy and paste and fill in your own information. Now, when you're going through
and creating cover letter templates and swapping in firm names, make sure that you do this
correctly. Make sure that you're not leaving in Morgan Stanley if you're applying for Goldman
Sachs, for example. So you do want to be careful of that as you're going through and creating
templates here. Once you have this paragraph done, you simply conclude by writing your
name and signature, and then you can put something at the bottom about enclosure/resume. I've
used the word "Enclosed" and enclosed here to refer to the resume. If you're sending
this via email, then you can say "Attached" or "My resume is attached" or "Attached",
here at the bottom, "Resume". Something like that. A couple other points here. One question
that comes up is what to do if you have a more unusual background. Here we've assumed
that you're someone in university or business school or someone who's been working for a
few years. What if your background doesn't fit into that exactly? So, going back to the
example that I gave in the beginning. Let's say that you'd gone to medical school, done
your residency, and then quit and decided you wanted to be an investment banker. Well,
in that case, you probably want to have a couple extra sentences here in paragraphs
two and three, explaining your motivation and saying, "I started out being really interested
in medicine and working directly in patients and solving their problems, but ultimately,
I realized that I got more interested in business and now I want to work in bio-tech or healthcare
and apply my industry knowledge to the business world." So you want to go in with some type
of angle like that and add in some more information here. Another question is, when you're actually
going in and applying for jobs, do you create a separate attachment for this cover letter,
or do you simply send it in the body of your email? I think it's better to send it in the
body of your email and to make the email itself your cover letter. It seems a little bit redundant
to actually create an attachment unless they specifically ask for it. Sometimes, if you're
applying online, they will say upload your cover letter right here, in which case, you
would make this into a PDF and upload it. But overall, I think it's much better to simply
make your email the cover letter rather than making a separate attachment. You can just
delete the part here at the top with the address information and just start with, "Dear Mr.
or Mrs." You can also cut down the length here quite a bit if it's an email. I would
say cut this down to maybe four or five sentences total, rather than the three or four paragraphs
that we have here right now. Another question is what happens if the bank says that your
cover letter is optional? What if they say you don't really need to include this? It's
just a nice-to-have, but you don't really need to include it. I would still lean toward
including it and uploading it and sending them something. It doesn't have to be anything
fancy. Just go in and swap in the right information. Take two minutes, three minutes to do that.
It's just good to have something on record just in case everyone else happens to submit
a cover letter and you don't. You want to have something just so that your application
is comparable to everyone elses. That is a little bit about how you can use this investment
banking cover letter template to properly craft your own applications and apply to banks.
The top mistakes with cover letters. Sometimes people try to get fancy with colors or font
sizes or background images or photos. Avoid all that; you really do not want to make your
cover letter fancy. If you do, it will get passed around and made fun of and forwarded
endlessly, and you will become a celebrity in a bad way, and you will never get investment
banking offers. So keep it simple. It's better to be boring with cover letters than to go
overboard and try to be too fancy. Some people make their cover letters way too long, they
go on for pages and pages. Big mistake. Keep it to one page, two, three, four paragraphs
at the most. Another mistake people make is trying to throw in too many irrelevant facts
or too much irrelevant information. So talking about their interests and hobbies and their
favorite ice cream and their favorite movies, and all that kind of stuff. That is something
that you may bring up in an interview if it comes up and you happen to be talking about
it, but do not mention it in a cover letter. It just takes up way too much space and, unless
it happens to be somehow relevant to what you're applying for, I would leave those out
altogether. It's better to be too boring with a cover letter than to go overboard and to
get people's attention in a bad way. Sometimes you do hear stories about people who write
really impassioned cover letters and use those to win the attention of boutiques, and somehow
get into the industry like that. Sometimes that can work, but again, I would say it's
a bad idea in general. You're better off spending your efforts and your time and energy on networking
and on interviews and impressing like that and showing your passion like that versus
spending all your time and energy writing a really fancy cover letter. So I would still
recommend against doing that. I'm sure it does work sometimes. I'm sure some people
have used it to break in, but overall, your time and energy could be spent more effectively
on other areas. So that's a quick overview of how you use this investment banking cover
letter template, how you tailor it to your own specific situations, some of the mistakes
to avoid, and how you can use it to win investment banking interviews and offers. [Content_Types].xml
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