4 ms·

Don't they also care a lot about pedigree? I heard that they only hire from Top 10 colleges and companies like Google and Facebook. Paraphrasing an acquaintance

Don't they also care a lot about pedigree? I heard that they only hire from Top 10 colleges and companies like Google and Facebook. Paraphrasing an acquaintance from Citadel - "You don't find us, we find you."

hft09876 6y ago
It's true that most of our recruiting is focused on a small set of top schools. But it's not because we think those schools magically make people amazing. We just have a small recruiting team, and the easiest way to find good people to interview is to let somebody else (i.e. the school) do most of the filtering for you. We're happy to interview people from elsewhere when we have reason to believe they'll be successful, but it's hard for a small firm to build the capabilities to find them.
- calabin 6y ago
  To add onto that, firms like Citadel still do cast a wide net even if their targeted recruiting is primarily at top tier schools. They advertise in common business classifieds like Crain's, for example. Firms like this also employ a wide number of third-party recruiting services and internal contractors, I know at least one. If you can impress one of these third-parties you can get in the door without a degree from Stanford. It's true about not caring about if you write whatever language that they do - what I've found is that most firms are generally interested in your combined intuition for markets, math, and analysis. If you "get" market mechanics, have a solid grasp on mathematics, and have the creativity and skills to apply those skills in an innovative way, they could care less what your primary programming language is. For example, if you have the market intuition to understand the common underlying drivers between RBOB gas and WTI crude, are creative enough to come up with a new form of analysis, and have the math skills to take that idea from conception to delivery, they really don't care if you have to learn CPP to integrate your intelligence and creativity into their infrastructure. Source: Work in/around the industry building data processing for trading firms, funds, etc. Also received a couple of prop shop offers.

hft09876 6y ago

It's true that most of our recruiting is focused on a small set of top schools. But it's not because we think those schools magically make people amazing. We just have a small recruiting team, and the easiest way to find good people to interview is to let somebody else (i.e. the school) do most of the filtering for you. We're happy to interview people from elsewhere when we have reason to believe they'll be successful, but it's hard for a small firm to build the capabilities to find them.

calabin 6y ago
To add onto that, firms like Citadel still do cast a wide net even if their targeted recruiting is primarily at top tier schools. They advertise in common business classifieds like Crain's, for example. Firms like this also employ a wide number of third-party recruiting services and internal contractors, I know at least one. If you can impress one of these third-parties you can get in the door without a degree from Stanford. It's true about not caring about if you write whatever language that they do - what I've found is that most firms are generally interested in your combined intuition for markets, math, and analysis. If you "get" market mechanics, have a solid grasp on mathematics, and have the creativity and skills to apply those skills in an innovative way, they could care less what your primary programming language is. For example, if you have the market intuition to understand the common underlying drivers between RBOB gas and WTI crude, are creative enough to come up with a new form of analysis, and have the math skills to take that idea from conception to delivery, they really don't care if you have to learn CPP to integrate your intelligence and creativity into their infrastructure. Source: Work in/around the industry building data processing for trading firms, funds, etc. Also received a couple of prop shop offers.