How to Get a Referral at a Quant Shop
Quant recruiting runs on internal referrals and trust, not application portals. The honest path is finding one person who already has a reason to vouch for you and making the ask tiny.
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A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick a quant & trading target:
Why quant firms hire through referrals
Firms like Hudson River Trading, Jane Street, Two Sigma, and Point72 get thousands of applications for a handful of desks. A referral is a colleague putting their own credibility on the line, so recruiters read those resumes first and often route them straight to a phone screen.
The person you contact is usually not a recruiter. It is a working trader, quant researcher, or software engineer whose bonus and reputation depend on the people they bring in. That means your job is to make vouching for you feel low-risk, not to sell them on the whole firm.
How to make the ask easy to say yes to
The mistake most people make is asking for a coffee chat with no context, or dumping a resume with 'let me know if anything fits.' Both push all the work onto a stranger. Do the opposite: name the exact team and req number, and hand them everything they need.
- Lead with the shared thing. Open with the school, former team, or repo you have in common, not the request. A shared Georgia Tech HPC lab or a former stint at the same trading desk is why they will reply at all.
- Name one specific role. Point to a single open req (Core Developer, Algo Trading, Quant Researcher) so they know which internal link to use instead of guessing what you want.
- Attach a 30-second referral kit. Send your resume plus two lines they can paste: what you build or trade and one measurable result. They forward it as-is.
- Give them a clean out. Say 'no worries if the timing is off' so a no costs them nothing, which paradoxically makes yes more likely.
Finding the right person to ask
The hard part is not the message, it is finding someone at HRT or Point72 who actually shares something with you and works close enough to the role to refer you. Scrolling LinkedIn by hand for alumni or ex-coworkers at a firm burns hours and you still miss most of them.
This is the part FindWarmIntros handles: you enter the target firm and it surfaces the current employees you share a school or past employer with, ranks them by how strong that overlap is, and drafts the opening message around what you actually have in common. You still pick who to contact and send it yourself. The tool just replaces the manual list-building so you spend your time on the conversation, not the search.