A resume is a summary of your skills, abilities, and the value you bring to the role — it can help a recruiter or hiring manager easily understand why they should hire you. And if you’re searching for a financial analyst role, your resume should include your job duties and what you accomplished, which could be a lot of information!
For some, writing a financial analyst resume (or any resume) can feel overwhelming, especially when having to tailor the resume to every job application. Enter ChatGPT to help you figure out where to start and give you some actionable suggestions for your resume.
This guide will help you leverage ChatGPT to write a financial analyst resume that’s unique to you and explains why the company should hire you.
Using ChatGPT to Write Your Financial Analyst Resume
Having ChatGPT write your financial analyst resume isn’t a one-and-done deal. It takes a lot of back and forth to get a final product that’s worthy of submission. So, while following these steps may seem like a lot of work, in the end, it is worth it!
Forage Find
Think of your chat as a conversation and use the same chat while writing your resume, instead of starting a new one for each rewrite. This helps ChatGPT understand what you do and don’t want more quickly.
Step 1: Ask ChatGPT to Outline a Financial Analyst Resume
I asked ChatGPT for an entry-level financial analyst resume. I purposely used a broad prompt, knowing the output would be nothing but hallucinations. But this allows ChatGPT to generate an outline I can use to build my resume. If I’m stuck or don’t know what might go on a financial analyst resume, ChatGPT’s version can help me figure things out.
Overall, it’s not too bad. I appreciate that ChatGPT limited my experience to internships, which is often the case for entry-level financial analysts. And some of the bullet points under those internships are decent. For example, saying I “collaborated with cross-functional teams to develop and implement process improvements resulting in increased efficiency and reduced costs” is an excellent way to highlight my soft skills and is a near-perfect example of using the STAR method to describe how my work impacted the business.
However, ChatGPT included several things you wouldn’t include on your resume, like an objective and your full address. It’s also interesting that ChatGPT placed the education section at the top of the resume instead of the bottom. While there’s nothing wrong with that, most recruiters and hiring managers would expect to find that after your skills and experience section.
>>MORE: 8 Old-School Career Tips You Can (Largely) Ignore Now
One thing that jumped out was the message under “references available upon request” (another item you wouldn’t include on your resume since it’s assumed you have professional references ready to go). ChatGPT told me to use this output as a guide and to tailor it to my unique professional story.
Excellent advice, ChatGPT!
Step 2: Add a Resume and Ask for a Tailored Update
With an outline in hand, you can start writing your financial analyst resume. And, at this point, you’d want to tailor it to the job you’re applying for. While ChatGPT’s outline can help you do that, you can take the initial output a step further.
How?
Input the job description or job posting you’re applying to and ask ChatGPT to rewrite the resume and tailor it to that. (Please note: I did not include the original job posting in this screenshot for privacy reasons.)
Not bad. ChatGPT used the first resume as a guide and tailored it to the job posting. If you compare the two objectives, you’ll see they’re similar, but the second one is more customized to the role. The job requires one to three years of experience, and the second objective says I have two years of experience (not too much, not too little, but just right!).
ChatGPT also does a nice job weaving in the requirements for the role. For example, the position requires “advanced Excel and modeling skills; ERP and BI or comparable systems knowledge.” This objective says I’m seeking an opportunity as a financial analyst to leverage my “expertise in financial modeling and budgeting, and proficiency in Advanced Excel and ERP systems.”
Not bad, ChatGPT.
Step 3: Drill Down on Bullet Points
Of course, this rewrite isn’t great, either. As ChatGPT points out (again), it’s just an outline and doesn’t include any unique details about my abilities or accomplishments. Many of the bullet points under the jobs are just summaries of my duties and don’t explain the value proposition of hiring me. This is to be expected, though. I didn’t tell ChatGPT anything about me.
So, while I could stop here and use this as a rough draft to personalize my financial analyst resume, I can leverage ChatGPT’s abilities and ask it to rewrite specific bullet points:
You’ll notice this prompt is pretty specific, and that’s the key to using ChatGPT for anything. The more specific your prompt, the better the output (usually). In this case, I prompted ChatGPT to include either metrics or outcomes of my work. ChatGPT went the extra mile and included both!
But the rewrite is much too long for a resume bullet point, an outcome we see over and over when we ask ChatGPT to rewrite something. This would need a lot of editing and paring down before you could use it on a resume. But it does have some great ideas on how you could structure your bullet point to highlight your skills, how you use them, and what the results are.
One other tip for this bullet point: Instead of instructing ChatGPT to “describe one improvement I made and either include metrics or outcomes of my work,” I could have included the specifics up front, which likely would have resulted in a more personalized output.
However, if you don’t know how to phrase your improvements, metrics, and outcomes or you’re having trouble identifying what to include, this particular output has some great suggestions that could help you figure out how to explain it on your financial analyst resume.
Step 4: Get Even More Specific
While the output is pretty decent to this point, one more way to use ChatGPT for your financial analyst resume is to ask the bot to tailor the output to specific asks on the job posting. This allows you to create a hyper-specific point on your resume (or cover letter) that explains why you’re the perfect fit for the role.
The prompt is as specific as you can get. Plus, “identify what’s driving variances between budget and actual” and “develop improvements on driver-based inputs” is right from the job posting.
And the output is decent. It’s long and might work better on a cover letter. But, again, if you don’t know where to start or need to generate ideas, this is a great rough draft for you to work with.
Step 5: Add the Finishing Touches to Your Financial Analyst Resume
As noted above, asking ChatGPT to rewrite its output results in a second (and third and fourth) version that’s far longer than the initial output. In some respects, that’s OK. This expanded version gives you a lot of great ideas to work with. But you can’t use any of those outputs as is. The first one is too general, and the rewrites are too long (and, in this case, include hallucinations).
But you can take the best parts of each output and combine them into something amazing!
Forage Find
ChatGPT’s output is only a guide. No matter how specific the prompt or detailed the output is, it’s up to you to make the final product yours!
Let’s go back to the first version of this bullet point: Analyzed monthly financial statements, identified variances, and collaborated with stakeholders to develop driver-based improvements.
That bullet point is good but not great, so I asked for a rewrite and then a second rewrite. Using the first bullet point ChatGPT produced as an outline and pulling in essential details from the two rewrites, I could create a bullet point that looks like this:
Collaborated with cross-functional stakeholders to identify variances between budgeted and actual to [What you did. Example: reduce carrying costs] by [State the outcome. Example: 20%] and [What you did. Example: improve inventory turnover] by [State the outcome. Example: 15%]
While this eliminates a lot of the output, the streamlined bullet point does a far better job of demonstrating how you use your skills to solve a problem. It’s OK that this bullet point doesn’t identify using Excel. You would include that in your skills section, cover letter, or even something you’d chat about during the interview.
Step 6: Check ChatGPT’s Work
While ChatGPT did a phenomenal job generating an outline for my financial analyst resume, it needs to work on resume formatting.
For example, in both resumes, ChatGPT listed off skills and how I used them. That’s fine, but the skills section usually consists of the tools you know how to use and the abilities you possess. It’s a “quick hit” of your hard and soft skills, and it usually looks more like:
Skills
Financial modeling, Excel, problem-solving, budgeting, expense management, forecasting, data visualization
You explain how you use these skills in the experience section of your resume and on your cover letter.
That said, ChatGPT’s explanations of how I used my skills are excellent, so don’t ignore them. You can use those as inspiration as you write your resume and cover letter and during your interview.
ChatGPT also needs to learn some basic grammar rules. For example, you wouldn’t say “2 years” of experience. It should be “two years.” And, as a rule, you don’t capitalize team names or duties, like “Accountant and Tax,” or “Collaboration and Communication.”
Interestingly, these were not capitalized in the job posting, so we have no idea why ChatGPT did this!
The Final Output
Though it takes some experimentation and practice to get things right, using ChatGPT to write your financial analyst resume can be an excellent time-saver and fantastic way to help you get “unstuck” when writing yours. Just remember it’s an inspirational outline, and you have to make the final product unique to you.
Looking to save even more time? Learn how to use ChatGPT to write your financial analyst cover letter.
Image credit: Canva
