Are online quant job ads BOGUS ?

[Andy Nguyen]

We all know there are so many websites out there that carter to the quantitative inclined. My question is has any one had any successful experience with these ? Have you gotten a job EXACTLY like advertised ?
I have heard many comments that those jobs are bogus. You may get contacted by recruiters who try to sell you other jobs.
My experience was along that line. A few year ago, when I was really green with this whole quant job thing, I posted my resume on most major job site and all I got is emails from far-flung people who told me that my "C++/admin/teaching experience makes me a perfect candidate for an office assistant/developer/network administrator/database designer/java programmer/etc job"
When I emailed the headhunters for those jobs, they all lead to nothing or something totally unrelated to the job posted.
I have long removed my resume off those sites and still occasionally receive those kind of emails.

What are your experiences like ? Have you had any luck with those quant job boards ? Are those job ads FAKE to trick naive people like you and me ?

 

[Yuriy]

I've had a few calls from headhunters, but mostly, as you said, I get e-mails about "great positions of admin assistant" in many places

 

[joe_bradley]

I don't know if they're fake. There certainly is a lot of "fishing" going on though.

First of all, avoid the big sites. Even the more specialized, reputable sites have their problems. I've recently given Dice a shot since I've had good luck with them in the past and they do have quant jobs (even though they're mostly an IT board) and I'm getting exactly the same sort of thing Andy described. Recruitiers putting lipstick on their pig of an IT job. I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I posted to Monster.

As far as, say, eFinancialCareers and more specialized sites, it really depends on the recruiter posting to it. For the postings for junior positions (there aren't many), the job descriptions are unusually vague, and I do wonder if the poster is just trying to get resumes. Fortunately, some recruiters are better than others, and usually it's quite obvious which recruiter posted the ad.

I've spent months on these sites, and for my efforts, I've found exactly two recruiters that would actually work with me to get quant jobs. And even they occasionally hand me duds.

 

[DominiConnor]

Sadly, it is often the case.
In this spirit of openness, that's why we do the Guide...

Given that we have Wilmott.com, the biggest of the quant websites, it would be easy to hose out job adverts. Actually, since part of my background involved far too much work with Markov Chains, I could easily write some JavaScript to randomly create plausible bogus ads, and show them to millions (ok, thousands) of quants.

But since we're trying to market to smart people, I'd expect that approach to crash and burn.
Also it seems to me that lying is an inferior way to start any relationship.

We do the Guide to get people introduced to us in a positive way. I'd guess 75% of those who got their first job in the last year has had a copy, though sadly we haven't yet got 75% of the market.
One entertaining number came out of our research was that (very roughly) 12-13000 people read Guide 2.0, which is of course a periodical (there have been 9 full revisions). That makes me the editor of the most read periodical in quant finance (Risk has only 10-11K readers, but rather better art on the cover).