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Reviewing quant recruiting firm/headhunter

Joined
5/2/06
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There are just more shady people out there to scam than to help you find a good job. As most of us are hitting the job market shortly, it's a good idea to share experience about firm/headhunter you have good/bad experience with.

I have heard nothing but horrible stories about Huxley Associates.

Anyone else we should look out for ?
 
I know the stories about Huxley but my boss hired 2 people using Huxley and they are great.
 
There are just more shady people out there to scam than to help you find a good job. As most of us are hitting the job market shortly, it's a good idea to share experience about firm/headhunter you have good/bad experience with.

I have heard nothing but horrible stories about Huxley Associates.

Anyone else we should look out for ?


What do you mean by "horrible stories"?
 
I think it is appropriate to name the "good" and the great headhunters you know or recommend, but I would urge posters not to get into the "bad and the ugly" as a headhunter's reputation is an important asset that they will defend.

It would be ashame for QN or some financially strapped students to be slapped with a defamation lawsuit by one of these outfits. :cry:
 
We definitely wouldn't want that ;)
The chance of any of our students having to go through headhunter to find a job is small so the chance of them getting a bad experience is even smaller.

I disagree with that. I've only had a few interviews in my life, and most of them were through headhunters. You just happened to be one of the lucky ones to find a job through school contacts [as I understand] :) We need to have all sources available to us. If Huxley Associates or any other headhunter will connect me with a company for a possible interview, that would be great :)
In my job search, I use all available sources: schools, the Internet, and headhunters.
 
I think maybe a better angle for this thread might be "how do you tell a good headhunter from a bad headhunter when you get them on the phone?" The horror stories I hear always seem to be about large companies, and when someone singles them out in a forum, someone else always posts a response saying "I disagree, I had great luck with them." I suspect it's just a function of it being a large recruiting company.

I know "Paul and Dominic's Guide 2.0" has a couple pages specifically on using headhunters. I think there's another thread on this forum describing how to get it.
 
Recruiters tend to work only people with known, marketable skills and experience (experienced hired or strong PhD). For freshly-graduated students, the most feasible path is through school and personal contacts, as the people in this category would have to rely on selling his or her potential/personality to the hiring managers.
 
Although a large % of QNers will be taken directly by banks, some will deal with HHs, and that is why our Guide has a section on dealing with us pimps.

Frankly as newbies you are more easily lied to, since your ability to spot being fed a line is compromised by this being a new game to you.

Yes, some HH firms names come up more often than others, and the story about a certain firm sending so many CVs it caused technical issues is true.
Some firms send your CV to firms without your permission, and I have personally seen a CV from a current employee arrive as if he were looking for a new job.

This can be very expensive.
Bonuses are driven by your future value to the business unit. If your manager thinks you will quit after getting this bonus, his rational action is to drop it to zero, and use it on more "loyal" staff. This is not a theoretical postulate of agency economics, but a real thing that happens.

Also your CV may get "improved", or as we say at P&D "fucked with".

Happened to me. Whem I last had a proper job, we needed an absurdly specialist skill, and a CV from an eminently qualified candidate appeared. I noticed something odd, that this person had been at one same employer as me. I would have remembered him, and about a minute later I realised that I was looking at a version of my own CV, so screwed that I did not immediately recognise it.
My CV had "acquired" experience I did not have at employers I had not worked at. They had also made the dates inconsistent.

One member of my team at a tier one bank was discovered to have done time in prison for theft. He had left that time in his life empty and hoped people would not notice. The HH had kindly filled it in with a bogus job.

But the killer is that when such stories come out, no one is surprised. There are >5,000 agents in financial markets, some bad eggs are inevitable, but we call ourselves pimps partly because we think violent drug abusing criminals who sell sex wholesale enjoy a better reputation than the sector we work in.

I hear far worse cases than make to Wilmott.com, and have seen a few directly.

A particularly bad trick is to claim that you will be in a different bonus pool or area than you really will be in. That is easier to pull because a "quant" may be working for a different group than the one you get paid from. One of our guys called this having a "daycare boss".

That can alter your cashflow by a factor 2, and dramatically affect your career path.

P&D don't name names (yet), but this is our nuclear option. The button is wired up, and I have the pro bono coordinator of one of the top 5 firms on the planet who has expressed the desire to defend with extreme prejudice free speech bulletin boards.
 
how to spot the bad headhunters

How exactly do I spot the bad headhunter? Is it a bad practice to send resumes to too many HHs and if these HHs send your resume to a firm without permission, will the firm never call you because of it?
 
Why are u specific about Huxley Associates? Also your comment is based not on your own experience and you started this thread and you mentioned that you and your friends don't need a headhunder to find a job.
 
Spotting a bad headhunter is quite tough. One other firm who now often gets viciously bad comments worked with me back when I had a real job, and I have no complaints from that experience at all, even though they are generally thought of as the worst.

I can't think of anything better than googling, that's a noisy data source, but there exist no objective data at all. I'm not even going to claim my own views as objective.

There's a reason for that...
Recruitment firms have been a major source of revenue for most finance sites, and more than one editor has been quite explicit that they would not be allowed to run stories or surveys that upset them.

As it happens, not only does P&D not spend any money on advertising, but the structure of our business means we actually make some

The thing you guys want, (and can't have) is a list that not only says who the good HHs are, but who are voted the worst. The technology is pathetically easy, get a list of HHs, and score them 1-10. Print the mean and variance.

Won't happen.
 
You know what, just because they tick me off by spamming the bejeezus out of job boards:

Huxley associates
Global Quant Recruitment (GQR)
Eka Finance

It's like nobody else can even get a job posting in edgewise because these people monopolize the entire internet on just spamming more or less the same exact opportunities on every possible known web site! It's infuriating!
 
Spam is indeed a problem, I run the quant group on LinkedIn and I have to delete 4-5 people per day.
 
I like this idea but I can see all sorts of problems with it.
 
Verification issues; recruiters are going to give each other very low ratings; etc.
 
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