In an industry where tech giants entrust automated portals, recruiter chains and faceless hiring systems, Citadel is doing something that virtually nobody in its position believes: the company’s chief technology officer is answering his own phone. Not to call senior hires. Not negotiating with veteran engineers. He’s calling entry-level job-seekers — the new grads who are weighing whether to go into Wall Street, Big Tech, a start-up or grad school. And he is doing it because the firm does not want to be the slightest bit behind in the talent race.
In the quantitative finance world, the fight for youthful technical talent is savage. Citadel is no longer just competing with hedge funds — it’s in competition with Google, Meta, Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI and Stripe and a cluster of start-ups whose engineers are the subject of manic bidding wars over sky-high salaries, remote perks and the prospect of “changing the world.” So when a 22-year-old software engineer is juggling job offers, Citadel knows one thing for certain: The firm cannot afford to be passive.
That’s why the CTO steps in. He phones them himself, sometimes late at night or in between strategy meetings, to talk through their decision. Not to hard-sell the firm. Not to sell a corporate pitch. But about what they want, what they fear, and the type of difference that they hope to leave in their first couple years out of college. In short: make the most motivated young engineers in the world feel incredibly special before they arrive.
People who’ve received those calls describe them the same way — synonymous with surprise, energizing and unlike anything they’d hear from other companies. If a senior executive at one of the world’s most competitive investment houses finds time to pick up the phone and give you a call, you don’t forget. You don’t shrug it off. You begin to wonder what it would be like to work someplace that takes talent that seriously.
The CTO views it as a reflection of the company’s culture. Citadel has always thought that its most valuable edge isn’t capital, but people. The outcome of everything is shifted by the smartest strategists, coders, researchers and analysts in the room. Markets are unpredictable. Talent isn’t. So the firm is investing where it matters most, and that includes giving high-potential recruits the sort of attention many companies reserve only for executives.
It’s not just the gesture itself that is striking about these calls, but the message. “We’re looking for people that are hungry, curious and who think they can push themselves into problems most twenty-somethings never see,” Citadel says. They don’t staff engineers for support positions — they are hired to work on real trading problems from the first day. They seek out people for whom pressure is an exhilarating challenge, for whom complexity is a playground, who never tire of architecting and building new systems that can handle the fast pace at which they work.
He also uses those conversations to screen for something he can’t always identify on a résumé: momentum. Some candidates have straight As and no spark. Others have middling grades and a mind that’s a little bit quirky — the type of brain doing patterns on the fly, usually before others can. By contacting them directly, he can gauge who will thrive at Citadel and who might be overwhelmed by the intensity of it.
For the candidates, especially when they are closely tied to the event, the phone call is often that pivot point. It does make Citadel real, rather than legendary institution that you read about on the internet. It makes the work matter, and the opportunity a place within you. And when you’re 21 years old and trying to decide where to spend the next chapter of your life, that personal touch matters more than most companies acknowledge.
The approach is also an indicator of something larger: the new college football landscape, as high-stakes recruiting takes on new strategies. In a world in which A.I. is smoothing out applications and algorithmic curation is omnipresent, the highest-flying and most confident firms are doing just the opposite — adding more humanity, not less. Citadel isn’t going to be bid for by a form submission. It’s making sure the people it wants have no questions about how much they matter.
When it’s all said and done, those calls aren’t recruiting. They’re about identity. Citadel is hoping to be the place where the best and brightest wish they had gone not because we found them but the other way around. And when the executive exuding that value is the CTO himself, it sends a statement competitors can’t quite replicate.
And that’s why he still makes the calls. That’s because in the race for elite talent, speed and salary are important, but there is nothing that can beat having the very top say to you: “We want you here.
