Hedge fund Citadel’s top man in London has this advice on getting a job there

If you’re looking for a job at hedge fund Citadel in London, particularly in the equities team, you may well encounter Drew Gillanders. He’s not the archetype of the monochrome hedge fund professional in black trousers and a dark gilet, and he’s not unapproachable. Speaking to students at London’s Imperial College last week, Gillanders was gently personable and casually dressed. His demeanour belied the fact that he’s one of Citadel’s key people as it grows its London office.

Gillanders is a gatekeeper for Citadel’s jobs in London. “I interview a lot of talent,” he told the assembled students last week. “This includes everyone from external portfolio managers [PMs] to interns.”

Gillanders said Citadel spends a lot of time interviewing, and that much of what it’s seeking to elicit in interviews is behavioural. “When we hire, we take a long time to understand how people will react both in a draw-up when they’re making money and in a draw-down, when they’re losing it,” he said.

Demonstrating intense curiosity about markets and performance drivers will probably help create a good impression. Gillanders said curiosity has always been one of his defining features. “At a very young age, I was the kid who always wanted to know how the world works. That evolved into wanting to understand how business works.”

Citadel is one of several large multistrategy hedge funds, but Gillanders said it’s distinct from its rivals.  “We have a huge central team.  When you come to Citadel as a PM you will build your own team, and the central team will support you grow.”

While some funds have a reputation for imposing strict short term risk limits, Gillanders said Citadel is different. “We can take a longer-term view. We have the ability to take more duration than other funds by virtue of being market neutral and factor neutral,” he told the students. This makes Citadel distinct: “Some of our peers have a more centralized risk function where if you’re down 2% you have capital taken away from you. This means that you’re having interactions with the risk function when you’re 85 basis points down, and so you’re playing not to lose rater than to win. Your returns in this case will likely be no more than 2% because you never let winners run and you cut losers very tightly.”

Getting a job at Citadel, particularly out of university, isn’t easy. Bloomberg reported last year that Citadel and electronic trading firm Citadel Securities received a combined 69,000 applications for their 2023 internship programs.

If you don’t get into Citadel the first, or even maybe the second or third time you apply, Gillanders suggested you might want to be patient. And if you do get a job there – or anywhere else – and are frustrated at the speed with which you then progress, Gillanders advised against making any rash moves. “Young people are often in a hurry. This means that when you have a problem with your performance or are in a fallow period, you often want to change firms. Sometimes this can be right, but one of the most powerful things we experience as humans is compounding — and one of the things that destroys compounding is interrupting it,” he said.

Success is about accretion, not jumping from job to job. “Take a longer-term view. You need grit and resilience,” Gillanders advised, gently.