StatGuy2000 said:
1) However, many large companies (many financial firms in the US fall in this category) have large HR departments. You would think that within the recruitment division of HR you could find at least a handful of people with some limited technical capabilities who could devote themselves solely for helping to recruit technical positions.
Anyone that has technical skills and interest wouldn't be working in HR.
The people that do end up doing technical recruiting are technical people (and part of what I'm doing here is recruiting and marketing work). But if you are a physics geek, you *might* be willing to volunteer to do interviews, review resumes, and give talks, but you wouldn't want to do it full time.
The other thing is that recruitment is a small part of HR's job. A lot of what HR does is policy development and enforcement. For example, every major company probably has had a ton of meetings trying figure out what the policies should be toward social networking. If you are a multinational company, you have your hands full keeping up with the laws and policies of every country you are working in. And then there is a lot of routine paper shuffling.
After all, the role of HR is to ensure that the firm can fill a given position with the best possible candidate
No it isn't. Despite what companies say, they aren't interested in the "best candidate." They are mostly interested in someone that is good enough and not incompetent. This is important for interviewing because you aren't trying to convince the interviewer that you are the best, but rather that you aren't the worst.
This is why no one cares much if resumes get lost. As long as someone decent fills the position, it doesn't matter much. Also there is a cost issue. If you find someone that can walk on water, they are going to demand $$$$$. Finding someone that can walk on water is pointless if you just need someone that can swim really well, and will do it for less $$$.
If the positions requires specific qualifications, such as a physics PhD, you would think that HR should be able to find candidates without necessarily needing to know "what" these candidates can specifically do (the interviewers can handle this aspect of things).
Except in finance and software, very few of the jobs require a specific qualification. For example, suppose we were interested in time series analysis. If you give me a stack of resumes of astrophysics Ph.D.'s and someone mentions that they have some experience observing white dwarf pulsations, at that point I flag that resume, because I know that someone that has this experience likely has deep knowledge of time series analysis.
Someone from HR cannot do this. The best that they can do is keyword searches with instructions to forward all Ph.D. resumes to our group, and even then no one has a particularly strong incentive to make sure that resumes don't get lost. This is really good. If you had a company that cares a lot about credentials, and you ask them to hire a C++ programmer, they'll just look for someone with a CS degree, and dump physics people.
I find it really curious that those who work in financial firms could get in trouble for putting your resume online in LinkedIn.
Different industry and different culture. One reason for this is that people in banking have a very strong secrecy culture. Good thing too. I wouldn't want to put my money in a bank that would give out my credit card numbers and checking accounts balances to anyone random person that asks.
Also much of the reason I go along with what HR asks is that I think the reasons for not posting resumes are legitimate. One thing I like about my job is that I'm doing pretty cool research in which even a three to six month lead can mean lots of $$$$. The competition will figure out what we are doing (often by hiring our people), but if it takes them an extra month or two to duplicate what we've done, that can be super-critical.
One thing I hear of constantly is the importance of networking, but it seems to be that financial firms seems to go out of their way to make this very difficult.
Sure. That's why it is so important. Networking in finance is *painful* which is why it is important.
The thing about "network like hell" is that it's not throw-away advice.
Which leads me to wonder this, how are graduate students in physics or math interested in working for finance supposed to know who to apply to or where to send their resumes or CVs (including knowing which headhunter is reputable)?
Start with efinancialcareers.com, dice.com, wilmott.com, and phds.org. That will get you to the headhunters, and the headhunters will get you to the companies. Also, you likely will meet up with disreputable headhunters, but trying to figure out who is disreputable is part of the challenge.
You had suggested simply spamming resumes left and right, but that's difficult to do if you don't even know which companies are offering what positions.
You know why I tell people to read Kafka.
Exactly. Spam the headhunters.
(4) On a related note to question (3), what does YOUR firm do to find suitable candidates for technical positions?
Mostly through HH. Some through talks at local universities. Some direct inquiries. Personally, I think it's best if you go through the HH route. The reason why is that you have only a 5% chance of getting hired, but if you flip a 5% coin enough times, you will get a hit. If you are in the 95% situation where you don't get hired going through a HH will get you feedback, and if you have a good HH, he will prep you for the next set of interviews.
