Use an Alumni Tie to Get Referred at a Quant Firm
Cold applications to Hudson River Trading or Point72 die in a resume screen. A colleague who shares your dorm or your old desk can put your file in front of a hiring manager in one Slack message.
Find Your Warm Path →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
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 the tie does the work, not the pitch
At firms like Hudson River Trading and Point72, referrals get read and cold applications get filtered. The person forwarding you is spending their own credibility, so they only do it for someone they can place: a fellow alum, a former teammate, a name from their old group. The shared tie is what makes them willing to spend that credibility on a stranger.
So your first message is not a pitch. It is proof of the tie. If you both did the same masters program or worked the same trading desk two years apart, say that in the first line. The tie is the reason they open the message; the ask comes second, small and easy.
How to turn the tie into a forwarded resume
The goal is a referral, and the fastest path is making the forward effortless. Structure the outreach so the person can help you inside their next coffee break.
- Lead with the overlap. Open with the exact shared thing (same lab, same graduating class, same former firm), not 'I admire your work.' It tells them in one line why you, specifically, are worth a reply.
- Ask for the referral, not a call. A 30-minute chat is expensive; forwarding a resume is cheap. Say you are applying to a specific team and ask if they would be comfortable passing your file to the hiring manager.
- Hand them the blurb. Write the two sentences they can paste: who you are, the role, and why you fit. If they have to compose your pitch themselves, they stall.
- Name the team. 'The systematic equities group' or 'the low-latency dev team' lets them route you internally instead of dropping you in a general pile.
Finding the right person to ask (where FindWarmIntros fits)
The bottleneck is usually not the message, it is knowing who at the firm actually shares a tie with you and which of them sits close enough to the role to matter. Scrolling LinkedIn for alumni who happen to work at Point72 is slow and you miss the past-employer overlaps entirely.
FindWarmIntros is a free tool that does the finding-and-ranking part: you give it the target firm and your school or past employers, and it surfaces the real people inside who share a tie with you, ranked by how usable each path is, then drafts the warm intro. You still send it, but you skip the hours of guessing who to send it to.