How to Write a Quant Resume That Clears the First Screen

A quant resume is read for about six seconds, and the top third, the project lines, and the sections you cut decide if it survives that scan.

A quant resume gets a real read of about six seconds on the first pass, and the layout that survives that scan is a single page, reverse-chronological, with the school, GPA, and quantitative coursework sitting in the top third where a recruiter's eyes land first. Everything below that fold has to justify itself in one glance, because the recruiter has usually decided whether to keep reading before reaching the bottom of the page.

One page, submitted as a PDF, set in a standard font at ten to eleven point size, with no photo, no colored skill bars, and no objective statement across the top. Every visual element that is not a word competing for attention costs time the screener does not have, and a resume with graphics or a two-column layout often breaks when it passes through a firm's applicant tracking system, turning a strong candidate into a wall of scrambled text on the recruiter's screen.

Name and contact details go on a single line at the top. Below that, the education block, since a firm filtering hundreds of resumes for a single seat is checking school and GPA before reading a single bullet point underneath.

The education line should carry the degree, expected graduation month and year, and GPA to two decimal places if it is above roughly 3.5, since a missing GPA reads to most screeners as a below-cutoff GPA being hidden rather than an oversight. A line of relevant coursework directly underneath, naming specific courses such as stochastic calculus, real analysis, linear algebra, and probability theory, does more work than a generic Bachelor of Science in Mathematics header on its own.

The strongest internship, research position, or competition result should sit immediately under education, not buried under three lesser entries in strict date order. A screener working through a stack of over a thousand resumes in a single sitting rarely reaches line four before deciding, so the best line on the page has to be visible without scrolling or turning a page.