Millennium executive on the art of the hedge fund tech CV & interview

Getting a job in technology at a hedge fund is no easy feat, but there are ways to change the odds in your favour. Speaking on the TTP Podcast, Millennium's head of corporate technology trade lifecycle & securities data, Donal McCarthy, revealed how to make your CV "pop," and what hedge funds are looking for in a job interview.

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The most important question in a hedge fund interview

McCarthy said he has a favourite question for candidates that's open-ended by design: "Tell me about your favorite project."

For the right candidate, McCarthy said that question is "worth 50 other questions I could have asked," because of the detail and passion it elicits. "You can tell when someone knows what they're talking about because they won't stop talking about it," he says. "You'll have to stop them." This should lead to a more dynamic conversation as your answer reveals "a lot of things to drill in on along the way."

On the flipside, McCarthy said the question easily weeds out poor candidates. If candidates say "I worked on something for blah blah blah, and they're done in 30 seconds," he can immediately cross them off his list. 

McCarthy said your project should be "deeply technical," and you'll get bonus points if it wasn't something that was assigned to you. He advised that you look at your current processes and ask yourself: "what is the one thing you could really improve if you just had the time to do it?" He said if you improve a stressful aspect that "nobody would ever touch because they were all afraid of breaking it," you'll stand out. "The very fact that you would do it to start with is an indicator that you would be successful on the buy side because you've taken the initiative, and you've done something."

How to stand out with your hedge fund CV

Going into the proper detail on these kinds of projects is difficult to do, but McCarthy said "that little bit of commentary would actually really help in general." That means actually writing it yourself, not using ChatGPT.

Another way you can impress is by showcasing work on open-source projects, which McCarthy said is "a way to make a name for yourself," and will "pop" your CV. He gave examples of committing to the Linux kernel, or a "major Apache project." 

Open-source work isn't just loved by Millennium; banks have been thought use open-source software to find top tech talent for more than a decade. In some cases, banks have offered tech jobs to people with no degree because of the quality of their work in open-source. (You'll have a hard time doing the same at a hedge fund)

McCarthy did say, however, that this is a "double-edged sword." He says that he will look at the GitHub repositories of applicants and if "there's a bunch of rubbish code in there or there's no code in there, it undoes the story a little bit." Include your GitHub at your own risk.

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