Hi everyone, I am a PhD candidate in an engineering field. I plan to graduate in 4-5 months. I made interview preparation for investment bank quant jobs and applied to major investment banks quantitative analysis positions about a week ago. Today, I talked to a good friend who works for a hedge fund. He claims that you can not achieve much by applying to banks via their websites. He claims that headhunder route is the way to go. Can anybody else give me advice on this? I might switch to the headhunter route but I don't want to take wrong steps. I have real trouble finding aheadhunter I can trust. I have no idea how to do that.

I know very little about quant hiring but I'll utter one of my favorite callous phrases, because it couldn't be more true in our society:Front doors exist to provide laughs for the people behind them. My completely uninformed advice would be to find a headhunter or prepare for a long haul.

talk to dcfc and ask your good friend who he uses to get jobs

I think your friend is correct. I got burned once by submitting my resume to a bank, and the resumes get put into a database and as far as I can tell, no one ever sees them again.If you e-mail your resume to the job openings on monster.com or dice.com, the HH's will find you. Finding one that you can trust then becomes a human relations issue in which you have to trust your instincts about people. One thing that I've found is that it becomes rapidly clear which HH's are useful and which one's aren't. The other thing I've found semi-useful is to contact career services of the school that you are going to.

Thank you for the responses. As far as I understand, HH route seems to be better. One last point though; the top investment banks these days visit my school and give presentations about their PhD type openings. In these presentations, they say that they will interview us on october-november and offers will be made in december. It seems like there is a structured process to hire quants. Is this all an illusion? Why are they making all this effort to come to schools?

OCI (on-campus interview) is different from front-dooring aka resume-spamming. OCI is reputable and works out for a lot of people.

I don't know why people think they can afford to be skeptical of HHs. If you're looking for your first quant job, you desperately need them to be your best friends, good or bad. Just spam them out to as many HHs as you can. So long as one gets you the job, who cares?!

QuoteOriginally posted by: bluehonourThank you for the responses. As far as I understand, HH route seems to be better. One last point though; the top investment banks these days visit my school and give presentations about their PhD type openings. In these presentations, they say that they will interview us on october-november and offers will be made in december. It seems like there is a structured process to hire quants. Is this all an illusion? Why are they making all this effort to come to schools?Take this chance. It's going to be a lot less painful to go this route than any other one.They make this effort to come to schools because its not much work for them, and they get lots of eager recruits.

Hi Twofish, Thanks for your response. When you say 'take this chance', do you mean apply to on campus interviews or headhunter route?Sorry, just trying to understand.

Some banks websites are tragically bad to the point where you think that they have been hijacked by hackers in order to stop anyone working for them.JPM comes to mind. Their system's tragic defects include keeping me on their system years after I applied for a job with them and sending me mails saying "you are being considered for job X", where X is very far from my skills (as are most jobs Then rejecting me for a job I didn't apply for and no rational person would have considered me for. It seems to have gone a little quiet recently, either it's fixed, or more likely has crashed into some catatonic state.We're a pimp, you can trust us, or not. It's worth searching these forums when you consider a HH, you might avoid some pain.I have to declare an interest, since with one large bank we're doing some recruiting which involves online registration.Onlibe can work, it should work, but your optimum is to do both. Generally the better jobs tend not to be accessed by online sites, and many managers never even look at the databases constructed this way.

QuoteOriginally posted by: bluehonourHi Twofish, Thanks for your response. When you say 'take this chance', do you mean apply to on campus interviews or headhunter route?Sorry, just trying to understand.Both, but you'll probably find that the on campus interviews are much useful to you. Career services in a university is a basically an in-house head hunter, but their interests are more aligned with yours than independent HH's. Basically, if the HH doesn't find *you* a job, it's not a bad thing to them as long as they find someone a job. On the other hand, if career services in a university doesn't find you a job, then that calls into question what they are there for.