Getting your resume read???

[vikramsj]

Hi,

It seems to me, that employment routes are very limited these days. Online resume submissions through company websites, and job related pages (career-builder, monster, etc.) seem more often than not like a dead end. And most recruiting agencies hardly ever respond. That being said I just wanted to get a feel for how people are going about their application process. For those employed, what was your experience like, and what route did you take to getting your resume picked up? Thanks

 

[Eugene Krel]

i printed my resume on hot pink paper.

 

[Sanket Patel]

i printed my resume on hot pink paper.

I used paper scented with the delightful essence of rare flower found only in New Guineau.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

The last two approaches may get a chuckle out of the HR people. But seriously, when was the last time anyone sent in a paper resume?

I read that you experience a lack of career help at Columbia MAFN program so you are in fact playing with the Law of large numbers. You send hundreds of resume out and it will yield some result that gets closer to the expected value the more you send.

It never quite works out for most people I talk to. You can't carpet bomb people with resume. You work in individual basis with recruiters, director of your program to target potential employers. They will send in the resume on your behalf and this will bypass a lot of gatekeepers. Getting your resume into the hand of the hiring manager is the name of the game. You play a random game if it gets to HR people.

In that case, a hot pink scented paper resume may work on a good day.

 

[vikramsj]

Thanks Andy,

I'm guessing that a lot of people experience the same difficulties. My whole point in this post was that when all your individual resources are tapped out, what else is there to do.Working with professors and recruiters to target employers sounds like a nice plan on paper, but from personal accounts (not just my own) it seems that those routes more often than not slip through the cracks. Many students especially international ones experience difficulty trying to break into the industry for the first time, especially when university assistance is limited.

In the bear market perhaps, neon scented paper resumes are the way to go.

 

[goodstudent]

The last two approaches may get a chuckle out of the HR people. But seriously, when was the last time anyone sent in a paper resume?

You can always make a pdf with pink background =]

 

[DominiConnor]

Andy is right, I haven't had a printed CV in quite a while.

Thus I think that if you want to push harder, that is what you ought to do

When conventional techniques aren't working, you either stick with in the faith that they will work, or you try something else. Since I habitually use faith as term of abuse, I don't suggest you rely upon it.

There are human factors issues here. It is very easy to avoid reading an email, but pretty much all physical mails addressed to the right person do.

Also, some resumes do get printed out, and occasionally that renders them unreadable, worth checking.

Of course, the visual optimization is different for an A4 shaped delivery than to an LCD.

For any direct communication you need to show precision, not be just part of the junk mail. Avoid terms like "your company", use the name, try to show that you've some idea what they need and how this might be you.

Expect to fail.
I have vastly more information than you, and miss quite often, using only public data, you can expect 90% of such approaches to be thrown away once the target realises what it is, without even consciously reading it at all.

The 10% is not all that bad, since you get to make a pitch, and that needs to be short, punchy and relevant to the reader. You need to understand the relationship between what you want to say, and what they want to hear.

As for the automatic systems, being a newbie it's something you just have to deal with. Recently a manager used the word 'despair' when describing his relationship with the pile of evangelical **** that his firm uses, which means that the prior probability that he will pay attention to a directly submitted resume is higher than his HR department would like.

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

Okay, so if we're newbies and we can expect to fail...then what do we do? It's not like there are a zillion firms all posting openings on the internet. Most of these firms are hidden by clowns like your generic incompetent recruiter or whatever all posting ridiculous requirements which are likely unmet unless you were a compsci undergrad that just so happened to want to do quant finance going into your master's, or are just completing your PhD and want to be a quant or whatnot.

Other than that, everyone wants experience.

But here's the kicker:

Has anyone ever asked any one of these position posters how the heck they expect kids to actually get experience they can put on their resume, if nobody is willing to hire them? Do they expect them all to come from rich families who will pay some ridiculous NYC rent for them while they work unpaid internships for 3 months?

What's the in here, Dominic? Right now, it seems even a 4.0 in a quantitative master's is useless.

 

[GoIllini]

Okay, so if we're newbies and we can expect to fail...then what do we do? It's not like there are a zillion firms all posting openings on the internet. Most of these firms are hidden by clowns like your generic incompetent recruiter or whatever all posting ridiculous requirements which are likely unmet unless you were a compsci undergrad that just so happened to want to do quant finance going into your master's, or are just completing your PhD and want to be a quant or whatnot.

Other than that, everyone wants experience.

Agreed. Most job requirements are pretty unrealistic. You want 5-7 years of Java experience from someone who is going to spend most of his day writing scripts and earning $70K/year in NYC? I want a pony.

But here's the kicker:

Has anyone ever asked any one of these position posters how the heck they expect kids to actually get experience they can put on their resume, if nobody is willing to hire them? Do they expect them all to come from rich families who will pay some ridiculous NYC rent for them while they work unpaid internships for 3 months?

What's the in here, Dominic? Right now, it seems even a 4.0 in a quantitative master's is useless.

How old were you during the last recovery? I was a freshman in CS at the tail end of the dot-com bust, so I still kind of remember some of the rules:

1.) Lots of experienced people get laid off during a recession- 5.5% of the work force this time around, in fact. (More like 10-15% in finance).
2.) The experienced people who got laid off in a recession, who are the safest bets, get the first jobs to open up during a recovery.
3.) Then companies start hiring nephews and neices of employees. Uncles and Aunts want to make sure their relatives are being productive.
4.) FINALLY, companies are forced to hire college grads who don't have relatives- like you and me.

Right now, we are still in stage 2. Unless you're a financial programmer (which means you are in crazy demand right now), there's still a fairly long line of laid-off MIT PhDs, 20-year quantitative veterans, and likely even traders who profited off the crash who are ahead of you in line. Hopefully, the line will clear up in the next year or two, but in the meantime, you may want to brush up on your programming skills. After 2003, the only consistent trend in the job market is that firms need qualified developers who are legally allowed to work in the US.

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

Oh wow. So what happens to all the #4 stage people? Are they just expected to sit around eating blueberry muffins or take menial bartending positions or whatnot, that doesn't really give them any experience as to where they want to go?

Or do they go back into the incubator for another 4 years for a PhD?

 

[Joy Pathak]

Financial Programming FTW!

That's what I am concentrating in!

 

[vikramsj]

I agree...what sort of approach must one take in order to break into this industry, aside from getting extremely lucky.

Oh wow. So what happens to all the #4 stage people? Are they just expected to sit around eating blueberry muffins or take menial bartending positions or whatnot, that doesn't really give them any experience as to where they want to go?

Or do they go back into the incubator for another 4 years for a PhD?

 

[DominiConnor]

Ilya, you should exect each attempt to fail, but the cumulative probability is useful, even if the marginal is tiny.

I said it that was so that you would not try it once or twice, find that it fails and deduce that it can't work.


Part of the "in" is to accept that this is not going to be easy. I went to a high school where more boys grew up to be professional fighters than went to university, and I learned that a good fighter is not so much a man who can hit hard, but someone who can be hit hard without going down.

The 'in' is to stick out. If you've done things that many others have done then you need to identify things that catch someone's eye.

That's hard because of the lack of feedback, so you have to try diversity.

Although I often plug C++, I'd like to move beyond that, and suggest that maybe you want to get a bit obsessed by probability. Although a decent MFE will leave you mildly competent in this area, you can always get better, and there are worse things to put on your resume than you are excellent here...as long as it is true.

The other thing I suggest, is a process I describe elsewhere here on QN.

MFEs are pretty general, but products and markets are very specific.
So pick something like (say) interest rate futures, and go deep into them.

The exchanges and some of the banks produce nice guides to products and structures. That will get you started on detail like the nature of what 'physical delivery' means for bonds, etc.

Then hit Bloomberg & Reuters news and try to understand what exactly the articles mean when they cover your target area.

Of course if everyone on QN does the exactly same thing, then my advice is devalued, so try to pick different areas guys.

There is risk associated with the higher expectation, you may pick a set of products that are not hot at this time, or it may turn out that your personal skill set does not match well this area of business.
Take that on the chin, and try again.