How WorldQuant is turning to crowdsourcing to hire quant talent

What does a leading quant hedge fund do to tap emerging talent? Create a human algorithm, of course. WorldQuant, the $7 billion quant fund has partnered with Udacity, an online learning platform, to create a career path for opportunities for qualified Udacity students. Why a hedge fund partners with an online learning platform: The global hedge fund is growing its Virtual Research Center. The VRC, with 1200 consultants worldwide, enables individuals to conduct research to build algorithms that may be used in WorldQuant’s systematic financial strategies. Its tagline is 'talent is distributed globally, but opportunity is not'. Grads of certain Udacity Nanodegree programs qualify for a streamlined interview process for consultant positions. Udacity Nanodegree programs eligible for this partnership include:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Predictive Analytics for Business
• Machine Learning Engineer
• Data Scientist

There are 500 Udacity grads currently under consideration. Generating community algos: The quant community is always on the lookout for new talent. Platforms like Quantopian and CloudQuant provide tools and data to budding data scientists and license the best ones for their own trading strategies. With backing from Steve Cohen's Point72, Quantopian recently allocated the most money ever ($50 million) to a crowdsourced algo. "We are excited to expand the opportunity set for leading talent. This partnership directly aligns with our priorities – empowering global quantitative talent and making high-quality opportunities more accessible around the world,” said Igor Tulchinsky, WorldQuant's founder and CEO.