I appreciate you all spending your time (which I'm sure is much more valuable than mine) to give me advice. I am job hunting in London and I imagine the UK graduates siginificantly less than 1000 physics PhD's (let alone fully theoretical) per year so sometimes I wonder how these jobs can be so competitive when supply can't be that much greater than demand.Although there are different messages from different people, I think I can distill the advice to something like "get a good headhunter". However up to this point I probably haven't wasted my time, as the IB's I'm applying to are in London and therefore my direct applications might eventually get to someone who can do something with them... hopefully. If my summary is incorrect, please feel free to illuminate my ignorance.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DReadmy direct applications might eventually get to someone who can do something with them... hopefully.wrong.

Don't give up on these quant-grad-schemes totally, they definitely do hire from them. From my experience, expect to wait between 1 and 4 months for first round interview invitations.

Of course dont give up! if you have a strong CV, dont worry they will call you back even after 6-9mths!!They just need to have some open position and they will call you back!Also sometimes the process is long for GP around 2 month from 1st interview to the offer! they want smart and geek pure Quant!gd luck man , they are lot of opportunity in my Hearphone, I heard they hire in GS,JP,ML,MS,... its the big recrutement ever!

QuoteOriginally posted by: richardlmDon't give up on these quant-grad-schemes totally, they definitely do hire from them. From my experience, expect to wait between 1 and 4 months for first round interview invitations.What happened was that most of the banks were under super-duper hiring freezes for most of the last year, so that any CV's they got were just thrown into a filing cabinet. It was only late last year that banks started hiring anyone so when the hiring freezes got lifted they started going into the filing cabinets. It's not typical to wait 1 to 4 months for a first round interview.

QuoteOriginally posted by: pipih2008Of course dont give up!At the same time don't sit around waiting for something that has may never happen. Set out more resumes. Call more head hunters. Look for jobs in medical physics, oil and gas. Attend conferences. Just keep pounding pavement, until you get something.Quoteif you have a strong CV, dont worry they will call you back even after 6-9mths!!They just need to have some open position and they will call you back!If they have an open position and that morning a HH calls them with a bright candidate, then that other candidate is going to get the interview. The other problem is that resume writing (and it's a resume not a CV) is a particular skill, and most new Ph.D.'s are often horrendously bad at it. Even if you are the perfect candidate, there are a dozen things that can and will go wrong that keeps you from getting to the screening interview.QuoteI heard they hire in GS,JP,ML,MS,... its the big recrutement ever!What happened was that new hiring was frozen for about a year, and now it's unfrozen, people are trying to get rid of the backlog of work. Hiring isn't great right now, but it's not too bad.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DReadHowever up to this point I probably haven't wasted my time, as the IB's I'm applying to are in London and therefore my direct applications might eventually get to someone who can do something with them... hopefully.Hoping is just a waste of your time. The good thing about a HH is that they can provide closure. If you send in a resume, and someone says NO!!! This is a great thing, because the HH will be able to figure out why they said NO!!! and you can move on to the next target. You'll probably get about a dozen NO!!! before you get a YES. The other thing is that the internet provides even more ways for your resume to get lost. The person that makes the critical decision could be based in NYC and making a business trip to Tokyo. The thing that you have to remember is that the employer doesn't care if you get a job or not. If the employer has a stack of 12 resumes and they accidentally delete six of them, it doesn't matter to them, since in the end they'll probably find someone that can do the job anyway.

Thanks for the positive comments pipih and richard.Twofish, when I said "hopefully" I didn't mean I was planning on doing nothing, I just meant "hopefully I haven't wasted the time I spent on those applications". I expended quite a lot of time and effort to sell myself and it would be a shame if that use of time was completely pointless.I am sending out further resumes, although I would always call them CVs, I am ignorant to what the difference is apart from the cross-atlantic cultural naming conventions. The problem is this, I currently have no contacts within the industry so the only potential routes to entry I have are through company websites and HH online adverts. This is problematic because in some instances the HH adverts seem to be CV catching nets and nothing else. Although, I have had 1 interview through a HH so far this just consisted of a 1.5hr test (I understand this is the companies practice and no reflection on the HH) and therefore I could learn little apart from what specific knowledge that company wanted. I will be keeping in contact with that HH so I should get more oppurtunities.In regards to my CV, I would like to think it is quite well written but ultimately how am I to know? I took it to the University careers service and discussed it with them (they said it was good and the phrasing was correct) but I beleive this is probably close to useless given that they know nothing specific about quant jobs. The HH didn't mention anything I should change, so that is currently the best criteria I have for judging it's suitability.I beleive I am beginning to sound defensive and that is not my aim as I appreciate you sharing your knowledge and experience with me. My plan for the moment is to just keep on learning as much as possible and send my CV wherever looks appropriate.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DReadTwofish, when I said "hopefully" I didn't mean I was planning on doing nothing, I just meant "hopefully I haven't wasted the time I spent on those applications". I expended quite a lot of time and effort to sell myself and it would be a shame if that use of time was completely pointless.Job hunting can be frightfully inefficient. If you spent time getting your resume together, then even if someone loses it, then you can reuse the resume for something else.QuoteI am sending out further resumes, although I would always call them CVs, I am ignorant to what the difference is apart from the cross-atlantic cultural naming conventions.The difference is that a CV is what you send for an academic job, and it's usually about 25 pages listing everything that you ever did in your entire life. A resume is absolutely, positively no more than two pages, and only is a very brief summary of what you did. CV's are meant to be read. No one reads a resume. A resume is designed to be scanned.The style in writing a resume is very, very different than a CV. QuoteThe problem is this, I currently have no contacts within the industry so the only potential routes to entry I have are through company websites and HH online adverts. This is problematic because in some instances the HH adverts seem to be CV catching nets and nothing else.That's because they are. Again job hunting is extremely inefficient, so you really have to be sending out hundreds of resumes to get any good chance of getting a lead. Also, if there are no jobs, then there are no jobs. If you sent out your resume eight months ago, you probably wouldn't have gotten any interviews at all.QuoteIn regards to my CV, I would like to think it is quite well written but ultimately how am I to know?If you are sending out dozens of resumes to HH and no one is calling you back, that's a bad sign.QuoteMy plan for the moment is to just keep on learning as much as possible and send my CV wherever looks appropriate.My personal experience is that this doesn't work well, because you never know what the real job requirements are. The way that I dealt with this (which seem to work) is mass spamming of anyone that seemed to have a job offer.

The CV/Resume thing is just a linguistic difference then, here what you call a resume is a CV and what you call a CV is an academic CV.I guess I will have to try and get past my stereotypical British reserve and start spamming my CV to people even if I am not a perfect match.

You should have more than one CV, you can't know precisely what employers are looking for, so each application should emphasise different aspects of your abilities.Also this process helps you drill down through your skills, and I would expect not only benefits from diversification, but also you will end up with a better average CV through the thought process.I don't know if DRead has read my posts on the evangelical nature of IB online recruitment, but don't expect it to work. It's possible that your CV has been caught up in the rapture that some systems experience, where CVs are simply lost. Be also aware that evangelical s/w has real issues with synonyms, as in it knows the truth.For example, you might have a deep understanding of matrices, and mention that word in your CV multiple times. But if the buzzword in linear algebra, then you are forsaken.

Thanks for the advice Dominic. So far I have been tweaking my CV a little for each different application but I should probably be altering it to a greater degree in each case.I have been reading the forums for a while now (I don't like to post somewhere until I get a feel for the culture of the community) and so have indeed read quite a few of your posts. It is a shame that synonyms are such a problem for direct applications, because if I were to pad my CV with buzzwords to get it through the first round of HR bureaucracy, whoever's desk it ends up on will realise it's lack of depth. Anyway, this system isn't going to change so I just have to work around it.It is an interesting situation I'm in at the moment. I originally thought the difficult part of this process would be acquiring the knowledge/skills necessary to do well at interviews and therefore succeed in the job. It now seems that with the right books and a reasonable investment of time this is quite doable. I didn't realise that even with what I think of (although I could be mistaken here) as a strong CV, getting to sit down in front of someone and show them I have those skills would be quite so difficult. I suppose my misconception is down to the naivety of a wannabe quant.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DReadI didn't realise that even with what I think of (although I could be mistaken here) as a strong CV, getting to sit down in front of someone and show them I have those skills would be quite so difficult.You are astrong candidate. But you won't get any good interviews without a headhunter. Not in this market.