Hedge Fund Recruiters: Who are the Top?

Are you a young investment banker looking for a chance in the hedge fund market? If yes, then you want to talk to the top hedge fund recruiters. Such retained firms pick out top talent in the market and link them to their future employers.

Hedge funds provide attractive job opportunities, which include a handsome salary, great perks, and a chance to rub shoulders with some of the best minds in finance.

Set of skills you require for a hedge fund job

As expected, the Hedge Fund recruiting process is overly competitive and selective. You may be successful working at a top trading firm, but even with your tremendous trading success, you may not fit at a hedge fund.

You may have the right educational background and professional body certifications such as CFA, CAIA and Chartered Hedge Fund Associate (CHA). While these are great, they are not enough to guarantee you an entry to swim with the sharks. Besides them, you need knowledge-based skills such as:

• Knowledge of markets, financial instruments, and strategies.
• Excellent quantitative analytical skills.
• Understanding of risk.
• In-depth knowledge of portfolio construction.

How Hedge fund recruiters reach Potential Candidates

The hedge fund market is unlike other job markets where recruiters judge you by your performance and experience. In this industry, the headhunters need to be ahead of time. So they must anticipate your prowess. In essence, they judge you by the experience they believe you’ll acquire, working as a top-ranked analyst at an investment bank or consulting firm. That’s why they may reach out to you in your first year of holding such a position. But even if they don’t reach out, you can reach out to them and tell them what you can offer.

Their recruitment process is hectic. First, you’ll be going through a pre-interview, which preps you for the actual interview with the private equity firm. Remember, these recruiters are gatekeepers to the HF firms, so you want to be careful and take the mini-interview as serious as you do a job interview.

The work of the headhunters is to weed out junior bankers or analysts, who, although having the prerequisite technical skills, can’t hold a conversation. They then pass the resumes of the potential recruits to their clients, who conduct the actual interviews to identify the best. Remember, the headhunters share the resumes of all their candidates to all their clients, so somehow the clients scramble for the best among the recruits.

Top Hedge Fund Head Hunters

These recruiters specialize in a very particular niche – recruiting M&A. Once they identify a potential candidate, they reach out unsolicited; you want to be careful not to delete their email. Such top headhunters include:

• Amity Search Partners
• Henkel Search Partners
• CPI
• Dynamics
• Glocap
• Search One
• Oxbridge

In a nutshell, if you want to land a hedge fund job, you must already have the right education. But that alone is not enough. You must learn more about the industry — network to gain contacts and mentors to guide you. But if you are already working as an analyst either at an investment bank or private firm and you are good at what you do, you may already be on the radar of these recruiters.