How to Break Into a Prop Trading Firm
Prop shops like HRT hire from a tiny pool and ignore most cold applications. The honest path is one trader or engineer who shares your school or old firm and is willing to flag your name internally.
Find your warm intro →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 cold applications fail at prop shops
Firms like Hudson River Trading, Jane Street, and Citadel Securities get thousands of applications for a handful of seats and screen hard on signal: elite competition results, strong CS or math pedigree, and internal vouches. A cold application with no referral usually dies in an automated first pass before a person reads it.
A referred candidate is a different object entirely. When an insider submits your name, a recruiter has a reason to actually open your profile, and your resume is read against a specific person's judgment instead of a keyword filter. The referral is not a formality; it is the difference between being screened by software and being read by a human.
How to find the right insider and what to say
You are not looking for any employee. You are looking for the person with the strongest, most specific overlap with you, because shared context is what makes a stranger spend 30 seconds helping you.
- Rank by shared thread, not seniority. A junior trader who took the same algorithms course two years ahead of you will reply faster than a managing director who has never heard of you. Same school, same old firm, same competition, or same research niche beats a big title.
- Lead with the overlap in line one. Open with the thing you share (a professor, a former team, a Putnam or Kaggle result) before you mention a job, so the reader knows why you specifically messaged them.
- Make the favor cost 30 seconds. Ask one concrete thing: a short call, or whether they would submit your name through the internal referral portal. Attach your resume so saying yes is one click, not a research project.
- Prove one hard signal fast. Prop shops care about demonstrated ability, so name a real proof point (a trading competition placement, a fast solution to a known problem, shipped low-latency code) instead of adjectives.
Let a tool do the finding and ranking
The slow part is not writing the message; it is finding which of the firm's traders and engineers actually share your school or a past employer, and figuring out who is worth contacting first. Done by hand, that is hours of LinkedIn cross-referencing.
FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking step for you: you name the target firm, and it surfaces the real people there who overlap with your background, ranks them by how strong the shared thread is, and drafts an intro you can edit. You still send it and build the relationship, but you skip the tedious search and start from a warm list instead of a blank one.