• The biggest hedge funds are battling it out to attract and retain top talent and outperform peers.
• Business Insider has talked to elite hedge funds to get a peek into their recruiting processes.
• From internships to high-paying tech jobs, here's what we know about their hiring practices.

The battle for talent in the hedge fund world is fiercer than ever — and it cuts across all levels and positions.

With six-figure starting salaries, intense work environments, and the chance to work alongside some of the industry's top investors, these roles are among the most competitive in finance.

Internships can pay over $5,000 a week. Salaries for entry-level analysts and software engineers are often in the six-figure range. Portfolio managers with winning strategies can take home tens of millions.

Business Insider spoke with top hedge fund managers like Citadel, Millennium, and Point72 about how they attract and evaluate talent, and what advice they'd give to anyone hoping to break in.

Here's everything we know about getting a job at a large hedge fund.

Internships

Years ago, the opaque and secretive world of hedge funds might not have been an obvious career choice for most college graduates on their path to Wall Street. However, these investing behemoths are now investing in getting young, diverse wunderkinder, especially mathletes, familiar with their brands as early as high school.

Internships are another talent pipeline for some of the biggest multi-strategy hedge funds, which employ armies of traders and engineers. Programs can be uber-competitive and harder to get into than many top Ivy League schools.

Citadel's summer internship program, for example, has become increasingly competitive. This year, the hedge fund accepted around 300 interns to spend 11 weeks at Griffin's hedge fund or his market maker, working with stock-pickers, quants, engineers, and more. The firm told BI that there were more than 108,000 applicants for the programs, with an acceptance rate of roughly 0.4%.

• Here's how to land a spot at Citadel's summer internship
• Citadel's associate program is a separate internship that puts rising college seniors on track to land a full-time investing role at the $66 billion fund.
• Ken Griffin's advice to interns: Hustle during your 20s and be aggressive when asking for a promotion

We also spoke to Point72 and D.E. Shaw about what they looked for in interns and how to stand out for a potential job offer down the line.

• Here's what it takes to stand out as an intern at Steve Cohen's Point72 and land a job offer
• A D.E. Shaw internship could land a dream gig at the secretive hedge fund. Here's what it takes.

Analyst and investment training programs

In the past, hedge funds acquired investment talent from investment banks. Increasingly, however, the industry's top players are recruiting college students through intensive training programs that can lead to jobs straight out of college.

Creating a pipeline of portfolio managers has been an increasingly popular strategy for hedge funds locked in an increasingly expensive battle for top talent.

• How to get accepted into Point72's ultra-elite analyst training program, whose acceptance rate is less than 1%
• Inside Point72's PM incubator LaunchPoint, where Steve Cohen is known to grill up-and-comers who think they're ready for the big time
• Inside Balyasny's Anthem training program, where aspiring portfolio managers are handed hundreds of millions of dollars to prove they can cut it
• Behind the training programs at Balyasny, which is looking to get ahead in the war for investment talent

Tech jobs and training programs

Hedge funds have long been competing with the finance industry and top tech companies for top technologists. Engineers and algorithm developers are key to helping researchers, data scientists, and traders develop cutting-edge investment strategies and platforms. Quant shop D.E. Shaw also has a unique approach to finding talent.

• Inside Citadel's exclusive engineering program that's helped the hedge fund snap up talent from Google and Goldman Sachs
• Here's how to get a tech job at Millennium, from the programming language to know to the interview questions to prep for

Inside Man Group's popular training program for non-tech employees that teaches them skills to automate tasks and reduce errors in their work

A rundown of some of the gatekeepers to know

The "business development" role is one of the most important at hedge funds, as it specializes in scouting and evaluating investment hires. Knowing these in-house talent scouts and external recruiters is crucial.

• The rise of the hedge-fund talent whisperers
• The talent brokers of quant trading: The headhunters at the forefront of Wall Street's systematic-trading and data-science hiring frenzy
• Try our searchable database of more than 350 Wall Street headhunters to find your dream job in private equity, investment banking, or hedge funds

Other resources and advice

Here's a look at how some firms find and vet new employees, what skills and qualities they're looking for …

• Why quant giant D.E. Shaw seeks out academics, doctors, and veterans to work at the hedge fund
• Citadel portfolio manager explains how he rose in the ranks of the hedge fund and what he looks for in a new hire
• Inside the 5-hour psychological interview that can make or break your career at Citadel, Blackstone, and other finance titans

• Inside the spycraft hedge funds use to vet multimillion-dollar traders, which is edging into murky legal territory

• The biggest hedge funds are battling it out to attract and retain top talent and outperform peers.
• Business Insider has talked to elite hedge funds to get a peek into their recruiting processes.
• From internships to high-paying tech jobs, here's what we know about their hiring practices.

The battle for talent in the hedge fund world is fiercer than ever — and it cuts across all levels and positions.

With six-figure starting salaries, intense work environments, and the chance to work alongside some of the industry's top investors, these roles are among the most competitive in finance.

Internships can pay over $5,000 a week. Salaries for entry-level analysts and software engineers are often in the six-figure range. Portfolio managers with winning strategies can take home tens of millions.

Business Insider spoke with top hedge fund managers like Citadel, Millennium, and Point72 about how they attract and evaluate talent, and what advice they'd give to anyone hoping to break in.

Here's everything we know about getting a job at a large hedge fund.

Internships

Years ago, the opaque and secretive world of hedge funds might not have been an obvious career choice for most college graduates on their path to Wall Street. However, these investing behemoths are now investing in getting young, diverse wunderkinder, especially mathletes, familiar with their brands as early as high school.

Internships are another talent pipeline for some of the biggest multi-strategy hedge funds, which employ armies of traders and engineers. Programs can be uber-competitive and harder to get into than many top Ivy League schools.

Citadel's summer internship program, for example, has become increasingly competitive. This year, the hedge fund accepted around 300 interns to spend 11 weeks at Griffin's hedge fund or his market maker, working with stock-pickers, quants, engineers, and more. The firm told BI that there were more than 108,000 applicants for the programs, with an acceptance rate of roughly 0.4%.

• Here's how to land a spot at Citadel's summer internship
• Citadel's associate program is a separate internship that puts rising college seniors on track to land a full-time investing role at the $66 billion fund.
• Ken Griffin's advice to interns: Hustle during your 20s and be aggressive when asking for a promotion

We also spoke to Point72 and D.E. Shaw about what they looked for in interns and how to stand out for a potential job offer down the line.

• Here's what it takes to stand out as an intern at Steve Cohen's Point72 and land a job offer
• A D.E. Shaw internship could land a dream gig at the secretive hedge fund. Here's what it takes.

Analyst and investment training programs

In the past, hedge funds acquired investment talent from investment banks. Increasingly, however, the industry's top players are recruiting college students through intensive training programs that can lead to jobs straight out of college.

Creating a pipeline of portfolio managers has been an increasingly popular strategy for hedge funds locked in an increasingly expensive battle for top talent.

• How to get accepted into Point72's ultra-elite analyst training program, whose acceptance rate is less than 1%
• Inside Point72's PM incubator LaunchPoint, where Steve Cohen is known to grill up-and-comers who think they're ready for the big time
• Inside Balyasny's Anthem training program, where aspiring portfolio managers are handed hundreds of millions of dollars to prove they can cut it
• Behind the training programs at Balyasny, which is looking to get ahead in the war for investment talent

Tech jobs and training programs

Hedge funds have long been competing with the finance industry and top tech companies for top technologists. Engineers and algorithm developers are key to helping researchers, data scientists, and traders develop cutting-edge investment strategies and platforms. Quant shop D.E. Shaw also has a unique approach to finding talent.

• Inside Citadel's exclusive engineering program that's helped the hedge fund snap up talent from Google and Goldman Sachs
• Here's how to get a tech job at Millennium, from the programming language to know to the interview questions to prep for

Inside Man Group's popular training program for non-tech employees that teaches them skills to automate tasks and reduce errors in their work

A rundown of some of the gatekeepers to know

The "business development" role is one of the most important at hedge funds, as it specializes in scouting and evaluating investment hires. Knowing these in-house talent scouts and external recruiters is crucial.

• The rise of the hedge-fund talent whisperers
• The talent brokers of quant trading: The headhunters at the forefront of Wall Street's systematic-trading and data-science hiring frenzy
• Try our searchable database of more than 350 Wall Street headhunters to find your dream job in private equity, investment banking, or hedge funds

Other resources and advice

Here's a look at how some firms find and vet new employees, what skills and qualities they're looking for …

• Why quant giant D.E. Shaw seeks out academics, doctors, and veterans to work at the hedge fund
• Citadel portfolio manager explains how he rose in the ranks of the hedge fund and what he looks for in a new hire
• Inside the 5-hour psychological interview that can make or break your career at Citadel, Blackstone, and other finance titans

• Inside the spycraft hedge funds use to vet multimillion-dollar traders, which is edging into murky legal territory

• NYC's mayoral frontrunner has a plan to overhaul the city's property tax system.
• It involves an analysis of billionaire Ken Griffin's 220 Central Park South apartment.
• Here's what it could mean for NYC homeowners from Staten Island to the Bronx.

When Ken Griffin purchased the most expensive home in America in 2019, it came with a hidden discount.

The palatial four-floor apartment at 220 Central Park South, which cost the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel nearly $240 million, is taxed at about half the rate of the average condo in the city, data shows.

Now, Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old self-described socialist who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, wants Griffin — and scores of other wealthy homeowners in the city — to pay more. His plan, if instituted, could upend tax bills from Staten Island to Billionaire's Row in Manhattan.

In a policy memo published by his campaign, Mamdani pointed to Griffin's Central Park South apartment as an example of why he thinks an overhaul of the city's byzantine system is necessary.

Without mentioning Griffin by name, the memo called out the taxes charged for an apartment at 220 Central Park South that cost $228 million, what the memo described as "the most expensive home ever sold in the United States." (News reports at the time of the sale said Griffin bought the apartment for $238 million.)

The memo proposed taxing the apartment, and others like it across the city, closer to their actual sales values versus the complex formulas currently used by the city's Department of Finance, which valued Griffin's apartment at just $15 million on his most recent tax bill. Mamdani's memo said this change would lead to an annual property tax bill on Griffin's Central Park pad of $3 million — more than three times what it currently pays. Other New Yorkers could also see their costs rise — or fall — depending on where they live and the sales value of their homes.

A spokesperson for Griffin declined to comment. Records from the city's Department of Finance show Griffin's Central Park property was charged $841,000 in property taxes for 2025/26.

The $841,000 bill means that Griffin pays 35 cents of taxes per hundred dollars of the apartment's sales value. That's less than half the tax burden paid by condo owners across the city on average, according to a 2021 report by a tax reform commission tapped by the previous NYC mayor, Bill de Blasio. The average condo in the city pays 74 cents of taxes per $100 of sales value, according to the report.

Raising taxes on Brooklyn brownstones

Mamdani said the city's current method, which calculates values for condos and coops by comparing them with rentals, "heavily favors luxury and super-luxury apartments."

He said he would embrace reforms recommended by the 2021 tax commission, which suggested NYC use a "sales-based methodology to value all properties." That methodology, he said, would lower tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica in Queens and Brownsville in Brooklyn "while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones."

Tax experts agreed that the current tax system tends to favor tony neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, Greenwich Village, and Park Slope. Poorer and working-class communities in the Bronx and Staten Island have historically paid more as a percentage of the sales value of their real estate, they said.

Sebastian Hallum Clarke, a product manager at Google Maps who has studied the city's property tax system in his free time, highlighted that dichotomy in a blog post. Clarke detailed how a 96-unit rental apartment building in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights paid nearly six times as much in annual property taxes as a single-family Upper East Side mansion, even though the city's Department of Finance estimates similar values — $6.6 million versus $5.5 million — for the two.

"Every dollar in cost for a rental gets passed on ultimately to the renters themselves," Clarke said. It's "a broken system that is just completely unfair in terms of how much tax different classes of property are paying."

Part of the disparity is attributable to state-mandated caps that prevent the city from raising the assessed value on one- to three-family homes by more than 6% per year and 20% over five years.

It remains to be seen whether Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, prioritizes property tax reform in an agenda packed with bold promises, including free bus service, a rent freeze, and affordable housing development. Other mayors have pledged to fix the system only to punt on the complex and politically fraught issue.

"The Dinkins administration did a property tax reform commission," said Martha Stark, a former commissioner of the Department of Finance during Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty, noting how long the system has been under scrutiny.

"I just can't imagine that Mamdani would elevate that to the top of his priority list in the first term," said James Parrott, an economist who was on the 2021 tax advisory commission.