CV. Curriculum Vitae. Résumé.

It’s a fairly important part of your professional toolkit, if you’re looking to make a career switch anytime soon. There’s been some volatility around the pros and cons of a CV over the years, and we’ve been party to the general discourse on this topic for a collective 30+ years, so we’ve seen our fair share of these documents in our time… The good, the bad, and the downright ugly!

1 page? 10 pages? Picture? (hard no, #justsayin’)... Links to company websites…? There are a lot of variables at play as to how best to present yourself. The one thing we think is true though, is that one-size really doesn’t fit all… So we put this together as a sort of ‘guiding principles’ doc to outline those essentials, nice to haves, and definite “do nots” when it comes to presenting the collection of your life, professional and personal experiences and achievements to best demonstrate yourself to a potential new employer.

This guide has specific pointers for those working in the Quant Finance industry, but has some general best practices too.

Let’s start with the basics….

I’ll assume you’ve got your name and contact details on there… so, what’s next?

Layout & Content

Firstly… Who came up with the 1-page rule? Let’s just clear that up quickly – Assuming you’ve studied for an undergraduate degree, post-grad, and in some cases a doctorate, and have worked for a couple of years in a fairly technical industry, you’ve probably got a lot to talk about! Don’t restrict yourself to a single page, at the expense of actually demonstrating your collective experience, skills and knowledge. Sure, there’s a balance (maybe aim for 2-3 pages as a rough guide) but free yourself of this initial restriction so that you can actually present some useful info on yourself to give prospective readers more tangible insights into your profile.

Your CV should focus (in detail) on the last c.5 years of your work and/or academic experience. It’s useful to summarise any relevant experience you have before that, but realistically the last 5 years is the best reflection of your expertise and knowledge. Your next role is likely to be one which leverages your recent experiences to the benefit of your next employer, and in return offers you the opportunity to gain additional skills and experience. Prior experience you can start to truncate and be more selective on what you write about. Anything that you think would be relevant to your next role and interesting for the prospective reader to know about you, put that in. Anything that is superfluous to this is just taking up valuable real estate on the page.

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Key Point: If you write it on your CV, be prepared to talk at length, and in depth, about it. If you don’t feel confident that you can demonstrate a strong understanding about a topic or project, take it off… This applies to professional and extra-curricular points - E.g. if you’ve got “Poker” on your CV for a trading job but you can’t tell someone how to calculate EV from pot odds and counting outs, they’re probably going to think you’re blagging it…

Summary / Overview:

Start with a short summary of your experience and interests (these can be bullet points). Think of this as a snapshot – your strengths and core competencies in a nutshell. Leave off the adjectives… “honest”, “team player”, “motivated”… As if anyone would offer up “lazy”, “selfish” etc…! Stick to tangible facts, things that actually mean something and can offer a quick window into your profile, and summarises your experience quickly. It’s a TL:DR basically, so keep it direct and concise.

University / Academics:

• If you were still studying 5 years ago this is an even more important section, but equally in this industry, academic achievements can still come into play after 10+yrs of experience, so definitely include it regardless of how long ago it was.
• Cover the fundamental information around your academic achievements, namely: Degree, University, Course, your Grade, your Thesis/Dissertation title (if relevant), and in some cases it’s useful link to any relevant thesis/publications, and potentially mention who your supervisor was for a Masters/PhD research. (Sometimes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know!)
• You can include school grades too, and follow the same logic as for your degree (if relevant).
• Add any additional information about your time at University, e.g.
  • Were you a Teaching / Laboratory Assistant?
  • Did you receive any awards / scholarships / merits?
  • Were you in the top 10/2/1% of your year? Were you on the Dean’s List?
  • Did you receive any prizes or commendations for your work?
  • Any other high performance achievements?
• Companies are also interested to understand which modules you elected to study, as this shows what area of your degree you found especially interesting. For example, electing to do a module on modelling with R or Python vs a hardware module are quite different, even though they could both be part of the same wider degree course.
• If you have completed any courses (CFAs, AWS certification, etc.) then also include these with dates and grades (if relevant).

Role / Responsibilities:

• You want your proficiency to resonate in this section. If you are an expert in a particular area, make it clear!
• Firstly, give an overview of your team and the system / platform / application / strategy it’s responsible for (high level – just to set the scene!).
• It is difficult to write about everything you’ve ever done, so think of the most interesting projects you’ve delivered that you could discuss in detail during an interview.
• There may be some confidentiality clauses and NDAs preventing you from going into specifics – that is absolutely fine, no one is expecting you to breach your contract! So think high level about how you achieved something without giving away trade secrets. For example:
  • Deployed perf to identify performance bottlenecks in the European Market Data System, built in C++. Researched and implemented efficient data structures and multithreading to improve the performance of the system by 5x.
  • Constructed systematic trading strategies for FICC products using Python, covering idea generation, data sourcing, backtesting, and strategy launching / production, including (for Linear products): multi-factor in Global Equity / Global Rates / G10 FX; Index rebalance in major equity indices; Sentiment long short in Equity; Calendar effect arbitrage in G10 FX.
• Select projects or responsibilities that are most relevant to the role you would like to do in the future / are applying for. For example, if you are mentoring a couple of grads in your team, but you want to stay hands on and don’t want to go down the management route, it is still useful to include this but don’t have it as your primary bullet point.
• Potential employers will also be interested to know how your role and responsibilities evolved during your time at the company, for example:
  • Were you promoted?
  • Did you get the top grade in your annual review?
  • Were you given responsibility for a project end to end?
  • Anything that signals progression and recognition for your work is great to highlight.

• Remember, focus on your personal contribution and achievements, not the wider teams.
• When describing your experience, focus on what you have personally contributed to the platform / team. Sometimes it is useful to think of FAB (Fact, Achievement, Benefit) – what was the problem, how did you solve it (from a technical perspective) and what was the impact on the platform / business.

On the Quant Trading side, as much info as you can include on the below will help to provide a decent window into your expertise and potential fit for a team/group:

• Summary of your research and/or trading strategies
• If applicable, whether your trading strategies have been (a) simulated / backtested only, or (b) traded live in production (if the latter, how long trading has been live)
• Your role on the team, and what tools or components you have experience building
• Capital Allocation, Leverage, and Book Size
• Return % (please specify whether % of GMV or ROC%)
• Annual PNL (or Average Daily PNL)
• Max Drawdown
• Sharpe Ratio
• Target Volatility
• Holding Periods

Tech Specific

So as an Engineer, what else are Hiring Managers looking to see on your CV? There are some important details specific to technology that are important to incorporate:

• One of the first things we want to understand is what technologies, frameworks, operating systems, etc. you have worked with, so it is useful to have a summary of these on your CV – this can be bullet points. Don’t list everything you’ve ever used / a scripting language you used for a week (or if you do, make it clear that this was the case!).
• Ideally, you also include a short summary of the technologies you’ve used in each role as this can help Hiring Managers to clearly see your proficiencies.
• Also, if you’ve delivered a tool or some infrastructure to help your team or the wider business that was outside of your ‘core responsibilities’ definitely include this on your CV.
• If you are active in the technology / Open Source community, then link to accounts with any of the following (following if you have some open material on them):
  • GitHub or GitLab
  • Kaggle
  • Own website or blog
  • HackerRank
  • StackExchange or StackOverflow

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Extra-curricular / personal projects:

Last but by no means least! As a general rule, include anything you have done over the last few years outside of work that demonstrates both your passion for your craft and/or a bit more about you as a person.

• Your membership to a meetup group, standards committee, etc.
• Attendance to any conferences e.g.CppCon, PyCon, etc.
• This is typically more relevant if you have recently graduated, but if you competed in any Hackathons, Olympiads, etc. this is great to include.
• Participation in coding competitions, Leetcode competitions, Kaggle competitions, etc.
• Writing blogs or building your own website, game or app.
• Being a mentor / instructor for, or member of, any tech organisations     e.g. Code First Girls, Women in Tech, Makers Academy, etc.
• Also, describe any hobbies, interests, sports you play, any voluntary work you’ve done or achievements outside of work you’re proud of – it’s nice to show a bit of your personality too

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Hopefully this provides a solid framework to use. Of course, every firm is different, and every role has its own nuances, so in that sense it’s good to create a ‘template’ version of your profile, which can then be amended / consolidated depending on your understanding of the specific requirements for the role / team / firm you’re applying to.

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