The cover letter that will get you a job in a bank
If you’re trying to get a job at an investment bank, especially as a student applicant, you’ll almost certainly need to provide a cover letter.
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CVs and resumes might be the meat of your application – and are the main thing that recruiters look at – but when it comes down to the wire, it’s your cover letter than could get you (or lose you) the banking internship of your dreams.
And it comes down to the wire more often than you think. Both Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan accept less than 1% of student applicants to internship roles. As Peter Su, formerly part of Goldman’s graduate recruitment team at UC Berkeley in California, says in a YouTube video: “We were supposed to go through this big book and then vote on who we would want to bring in for a first round interview. I spent about 10 to 30 seconds just breezing through resumes. If someone had a high GPA and great work experience, I would put them in my tier one and vote for them to get the first-round interview.”
While cover letters didn't matter for this elite group, Su says they were important for people in the tier below. For them, cover letters were a key differentiator.
"I would go to the cover letter to see if there's something extra something special that I missed about them or if they're really motivated," Su says.
Cover letters are less important for more senior roles in financial services. "For experienced roles, we rarely look at cover letters," the CEO of one London-based financial services recruitment firm tells us. “I just go for the CV," agrees another. "I look at the CV and then I phone them. If the CV is relevant, I'll get everything that would have been in the cover letter from that call."
Most of the advice below, therefore, is related to cover letters for entry level jobs in financial services. Not all banks expect cover letters, but some like Goldman (see below) do. Others will use questions to elicit information on, "motivation, strengths and key behaviours or competencies (these are of varying word counts depending on the bank)," says Victoria McLean, former Goldman Sachs and Bank of America recruiter, and current CEO of London-based CV writing firm CityCV.
What makes a good cover letter? It's your a sales pitch. “You are a product in an extremely competitive banking job market,” McLean says. “Your future employer – the bank recruitment team – is the buyer.” And like with sales, there is a general best way to write a cover letter.
It’s worth doing it properly if you’re going to do it at all. “As the candidate,” McLean says, “you will be investing a lot of time into each one you write so you need to ensure that you do it right, and that you don’t waste time writing letters that won’t be read or on applications that are destined to fail.” Some of the most common mistakes when writing a cover letter are to do with a lack of preperation.
The banking cover letter template
Although your cover letter is tailored to the role you’re applying to, they’ll generally be very similar.
Goldman Sachs intern-turned-youtuber Kenji Farré says in one video that he used the same template successfully for multiple investment banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley.
“You might wonder if I made a cover letter for each application. The honest answer is no, usually I just had a template and it would take me about five minutes to rearrange that to whatever bank I was applying to,” Farré says. The extent of this tailoring would be to “look up a deal that they worked on and kind of put that in there.”
You might not even have to do that. “Sometimes,” Farré says, “I just didn't have the time, or I wasn't bothered, and I just had the exact same cover letter, only changing the name of the bank.” But be warned – that’s the sort of tactic that you can only get away with when you have a 3.99 GPA from Cornell.
In a nutshell, you want three or four sections to your cover letter:
- A catchy introduction that serves as a hook;
- A section selling what you've achieved and why it would be so great to employ you, especially in that particular role;
- A section on why you're specifically interested in the job and the employer, and why you think you’d be a great fit for both;
- A relatively generic outro section in which you thank the reader for their time.
There's a lot of overlap in the middle, what with all the selling, this is what is generally agreed upon as the best format to use.
The first paragraphs of your cover letter
The first part of your cover letter is introductory. It doesn’t take much research, but it does require some imagination.
"The first paragraph is just to say who you are and why you're writing the letter," McLean says. It reads something like this: “I am an X with X year history of X at global banking firms including X as well as X. I have been working for X for the past X years.”
In a short cover letter (such as to Goldman Sachs) this section will be, obviously, even shorter. You just don’t have the space for a full introduction in 300 words.
Your job here is to hook the reader, says careers coach Jeff Su in a video. You should mention a personal connection to the company you’re applying to, and why it stands out from its peers, which it will likely be very, very similar to.
Cover letters to external recruiters are a bit different, however. "If someone says they've been referred to me by someone I know and respect, I will sit up and pay attention," one US-based recruiter tells us. "The same applies if they say they've learned that I mentor women and that this is something they're interested in too."
The second paragraphs of your cover letter
Your introduction should have started doing this already, but it’s time to sell yourself. “You need to convince the hiring manager that your motivation, energy, and willingness to learn will make you a stronger addition to the team than someone who might have a bit more experience but fail to be interesting in their cover letter,” Su says.
The worst sin you could commit now would be to be boring, but this can be more difficult than you think. You need to sell yourself according to the job description you’re reading, and these are generally written with very bland, corporate phrases.
Peter Su, the ex-Goldman recruiter, suggests breaking up this section into two paragraphs: why your work experience makes you a suitable candidate for the role, and why your extracurriculars do. “Personalize your experiences,” Peter Su says. “A lot of this goes back to actually looking at the job spec and reading what they want.”
A job description might suggest that analysts, for example, analyze financial models, perform scenario analysis, and organize and prepare presentations. “You can go and personalize your experiences to show how it fits the role,” Peter Su says. On the work experience side, this is easy enough (if you have the relevant financial services work experience).
On the extracurricular side, it takes some more imagination: “As a head coordinator of a non-profit, Stiles Hall, and then VP of finance of my Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity, I learned the leadership skills and teamwork skills that I know deal teams need,” Peter Su gives as an example. “Then I talk about how I did all the work experiences and extracurriculars while having a GPA 3.8 to show that I have time management, and that I’m ready for the intensity of banking.”
Never, ever, make empty statements. "Many successful trading cover letters feature the candidate's trading return profile and their rationales for their success or failure," says former Goldman Sachs investment banking associate Mai Le, who also ran CoverLetterLibrary. "Cover letters for sales positions highlight the candidate's track record that evident their ability as a natural salesperson."
The third paragraph of your cover letter
This part of your cover letter shifts away from you (partly) to the place you want to work. McLean says that graduates often copy and paste from banks' own websites. For example: "I want to work for Goldman Sachs because you have 170 locations across 90 cities in over 30 countries." This is, obviously, very poor.
What you should be doing really is continuing the subtle selling you did in the previous section. “The idea is not to flatter your potential employer but to identify what makes them a good choice for you and makes you a good fit," McLean says. "Telling Goldman or Citi you want to work for them because they are the best is not going to impress anyone. However, writing that it’s an opportunity to work with some of the best minds on the street and that you want to be held to those same exacting standards is a bit more engaging."
You want to contrast your potential employer with their rivals. Jeff Su gives the example of a cover letter to tech firm Apple: “If you're applying for a position in Apple, probably don't say how you're going to come up with the next big iPhone idea. Instead, perhaps bring up their emphasis on privacy and how that's impacting the advertising industry.”
If you're a student, it helps to say here that you've met some of the banks' staff and were impressed by them. Jeff Su suggests speaking to at least three industry professionals to both get a grip on what differentiates the firm, but also to directly name in your cover letter (with their permission).
Mark Hatz, a former M&A associate at Goldman Sachs and Perella Weinberg Partners and current careers coach, says that stressing your rapport with people you've met from the firm you’re applying to is particularly important when you're applying for a job in investment banking.
"These are advisory businesses, and they want to see that you can build a rapport and work in a team.” Hatz says. “If you get the job, you'll also be spending a lot of hours in the office with these people, so showing you like them is very important."
"Show a grasp of where they are going, what the plan is and why this appeals to you," McLean adds. You need to be deeply intimate with the firm you’re applying to, past present and future. What have they done? What are they doing? What do they want to do? You can find this sort of information in investor letters and quarterly calls. " You should be planning to be there for a few years and hoping to share that future with them," McLean says.
The last part of your cover letter
This part is the most generic. You could say, for example, "I really look forward to hearing from you. I am available for interview and contactable by X,” according to McLean.
There are other little touches you can add. Peter Su, for instance, suggests that you print the written cover letter, sign it (with a blue pen), scan it, and then send it off. It’s a nice touch to show that you’ve really put in the effort with the firm. The blue pen is so that everyone reading it knows that you’ve put in that effort.
After that, format it properly – consistently with your CV’s style, says Jeff Su – and ask as many people as humanly possible to proofread it and give their opinions. And especially if you’re applying to Goldman Sachs, triple check your word count. People have been put aside for less.
The Goldman Sachs cover letter
Goldman Sachs has its own cover letter format. Farré, who worked there, calls it a "personal statement" rather a "cover letter", but it generally fits the same criteria - except that the firm has a hard 300 wordcount limit (most banks usually expect one page, of around 600 words).
We have a whole article about applying to Goldman Sachs here, but the cover letter is probably the most unique part of the application. At 300 words, you won't have any breathing room - it'll have to be the most dense piece of writing you've written in your life. There's no special requirements for it compared to other cover letters. But don't expect ChatGPT to do it for you, either.
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