The quant you want has probably never worked in energy

87% of the professionals on the register did not start in energy trading. Origin is counted the same way as everything else here: a person's first substantive professional role, classified on evidence, so a graduate scheme at a trading firm counts as starting inside, and two years in software before converting counts as starting outside, whatever the current title says. Counted that way, the 87% is the single most useful fact the register holds about hiring for a power desk, and most searches are run as though it were not true.

The default search reads rival desks. It is the obvious move: people already doing the job, already trained, no conversion risk. It is also, by the register's own arithmetic, a search of the smallest pool available, the minority who are already inside, and it is the pool where competition is harshest, counter-offers are best organised, and every candidate's employer knows their value to the euro. Desks that only fish there are all fishing the same stocked pond and paying accordingly.

The 87% arrived from outside, and which industries they came from, in what shares, is not uniform: it varies by market and by role family, and the variation is the operational part. A quant search and a trader search should read different outside pools. So should the same quant search run in two different countries. The breakdown of who converts from where, for which role, is register data we work from on live searches rather than publish, but the shape of the conclusion is publishable: for most role families, most of your realistic candidates have never held an energy title, and a search that screens on industry background excludes the majority of its own market before the first call.

Converting outsiders is not charity hiring; it is how this industry staffed itself. The market is young, it industrialised fast, and it has always imported its talent from wherever the underlying skills were being built. What outside hires need is not lower standards but different screening: test the transferable thing, the modelling, the engineering, the decision-making under uncertainty, and teach the domain, which is learnable, rather than demanding the domain and hoping the underlying ability comes with it.

The practical rule for any hard power brief: before concluding the pool is empty, ask whether you have been counting the whole pool or the 13%. The answer is usually the second, and the difference is the search.