I just started looking for quant job this week. I adopted the following approach:

1) I contacted one HH in New York a friend of mine recommended, he invited me to visit his office, made some corrections to my resume and promised to contact later. If he’ll get me some interviews good, if not I don’t care. Thanks to many useful posts on Wil**t and this forum I have a list of about 20 HHs people recommended. If he doesn’t get back to me in a week, I’ll contact the next one in my list and so on, but I’d rather start slowly and see what happens.

2) I applied to a couple of dozens jobs advertised on Bloomberg, since several people told me that’s the best source for job ads (but got no responses so far). There’re several more websites people recommended, like efinancialcareers.com, careerbuilder.com, etc. But there’s no way I’ll be able to keep up with ads there. Moreover does it make any difference whether you contact HH agency in response to some particular job ad or just do it out of the blue?

3) I’m going to apply to graduate programs at major i-banks (I’m interested in trader trainee positions as well, not only quant jobs)

4) If nothing works out till January 2005, I’ll apply to Master in Fin Math programs in the vicinity of NYC and continue looking for jobs till September 2005 (I’m getting my theor. physics PhD this Fall). Of course if I get accepted to those programs and also find a job, I’ll choose a job

5) I try to network as much as I can, but I’ll be extremely busy in Fall doing 9am-5pm internship at mutual fund, taking some finance courses and also teaching…

I’ll appreciate any comments or suggestions as to my approach (my e-mail is in my profile)

jungle wrote: also remember a lot of the jobs advertised on bloomberg don't exist...resume fishing. 

Thanks, I got the same impression. Some of the ads have all these weird yahoo, gmail e-mail addresses. I sent quite a few e-mails just to see what happens. One HH advertised like 15 entry-level jobs (actually I’ve heard many good things about that guy). I've sent him an e-mail with my resume and job numbers I was interested in, and in a couple of days he sent me some standardized e-mail, saying “it’s being a long time since I contacted you last, but if you know of anybody looking for entry level job please forward this e-mail to them”. I mean that’s perfectly fine with me, since he even put my first name on top  of the e-mail , but isn’t that extra step unnecessary since he already had my resume?. I mean I have a good understanding of how all these bureaucratic systems work but I expected something more customer friendly for a typical HH shop.

I probably won’t respond to Bloomberg job ads anymore. I don’t really care how many people have my resume as long as they don’t start doing something stupid with it (like sending it to the companies without asking for my permission) and I don’t want to deal with more than 2-3 HHs in the beginning. I’m under impression that almost all the ads are phony. How then replying to an ad is different from contacting an agency which posted it, besides that you don't spend time searching the web?

Energetic wrote: Could you publish it here (together with the sources of recommendations where possible)? Sooner or later almost everyone will need help. I hope DW won't mind

 
I don't want to post their names on public forum, but if somebody is interested please e-mail me. I'll be happy to share. You can also look it up on Wil***t, there are several threads in Career Forum where people share their experiences dealing with various HHs and agencies

Energetic wrote: I don't understand why but whatever. Please e-mail to me. My e-mail is in my profile.

I don't feel comfortable displaying other people's contact info on the web, especially taking into account that I don't even know most of them. I've sent a list to everybody who contacted me