Writing a Quant CV

A quant recruiter or hiring manager screening applications spends, realistically, under a minute on a first pass of any given CV — long enough to look for a small number of specific signals, not to read every line. Writing for that reality means front-loading concrete evidence rather than a list of courses taken or tools used, since "proficient in Python" or "studied stochastic calculus" is a claim, while "backtested and documented a mean-reversion strategy on five years of futures data, achieving a Sharpe ratio of 1.1 after costs" is evidence — and evidence is what gets a second look.

The strongest quant CVs tend to organize around projects rather than courses: a strategy replication, a Kaggle competition result, a piece of open-source contribution, a research paper written or a coding competition placed in. Each entry should say specifically what was built, on what data, and what the measurable outcome was — a number, a rank, a link to working code — because specificity is what separates a candidate who did the thing from one who read about it. Coursework and GPA still matter, especially for candidates with no work experience yet, but they belong lower on the page, condensed rather than expanded.

Tailoring, not padding

A CV built for a systematic HFT firm and one built for a fundamental hedge fund should not read identically, even for the same candidate — the HFT version should foreground low-latency coding and market-microstructure detail, while the fundamental fund's version should foreground economic reasoning and valuation work. Padding a CV with unrelated coursework or vague soft-skill claims to fill space tends to dilute the entries that actually matter; a shorter CV with three strong, specific project descriptions reads better than a long one with ten thin ones.

What this means in practice

Because quant hiring pipelines are relatively small and specialized compared to general tech or finance hiring, a referral from someone already inside the firm often does more to get a CV read carefully than any wording change — but the CV still has to hold up once it's actually opened, so the two efforts (networking and CV quality) are complements, not substitutes.