Post by Diederik Fokkema

Every organization I worked with, found it challenging to recruit the right analytical talent. The problem is usually a mix of visibility and a sluggish process. A PhD student finishing a thesis on stochastic PDEs or large-scale optimization has exactly one hiring season where they are genuinely open to industry. During that window, they talk to the people they met at conferences, the firms whose names appeared on workshop sponsorships, the companies whose researchers showed up at poster sessions. If your organization was not in any of those rooms, you are not in the consideration set. You are competing for the same candidate six months later — on LinkedIn, with a job ad, against twenty other firms who are likewise invisible to the research community. I have led quant teams at various employers. I have co-founded TopQuants, which now connects over 1,000 quantitative finance professionals in the Netherlands. The pattern is always the same: the institutions that have a steady pipeline of strong analytical talent are the ones that are present where PhDs actually are — before they graduate. The institutions that struggle are the ones that recruit from job boards after graduation. This is not a secret. It is just easy to defer. #ICIAM2027