I had earlier applied for a position in an AM firm in NY but didn't contact the hiring manager as I applied through the firm's website. A few friends discouraged this approach and suggested me to get in touch with the hiring manager esp if it's a lateral hire position. And now I am planning to apply for a new position at a different AM but unfortunately I don't have the division's hiring manager in my network. I didn't strategically work towards developing my network in this direction. After some Googling and scraping on LinkedIn I managed to find the firm's hiring manager for the division I am planning to apply. Now I am confused if contacting the hiring manager through LinkedIn request would be equivalent to cold-calling since I'd never meet this person. Is there a better approach to contact the hiring manager? I can call up the firm and ask the operator to connect me to this person but that's cold calling again. If anyone has ever been in this situation please share how you approached this scenario.

I thought someone might have faced this quandary earlier and went out of their comfort zone to tackle it and then share their idea/approach here.

As an occasional hiring manager in this space I can tell you that being tracked down and subjected to a personal sales pitch out of the blue is highly unlikely to make me look more favorably at you as a candidate than if you had merely submitted an application through the channels created for this purpose. If you have a genuine relationship with somebody that I know and trust and you can make that person put in a good word for you, that is different. Alternatively, if you happen to have done interesting research in a relevant area and send me an email with a copy of the paper along with a suggestion that you are available for an interview, that is also not a bad idea. But merely being able to figure out who the hiring manager is and cold calling him (or her) is not going to improve your chances for landing a quant job. A sales job may be a very different story....

Thanks bearish. You'd very well put in words my uneasiness towards this approach. I was not feeling right and comfortable with the approach of cold calling or introducing myself out of blue. I am also a bit terrible in developing my network esp those that matter when you contemplate a switch. I realized that people in my network are largely of my "type", as the idiom goes - birds of a feather flock together.

QuoteOriginally posted by: jointyI realized that people in my network are largely of my "type", as the idiom goes - birds of a feather flock together.Yes that's what lets the pushy loud mouthed ignorant over-confident sales people make all the money and let the quanty mathermatical programming nerds(*) keep the chump change.(*) Speaking as one, from experience.