Bob Olman is a noted speaker on careers in capital markets and the founder of Alpha Search Advisory Partners (www.alphasearchadvisory.com), a top recruiting firm to the alternative investment community, based in NYC with offices in London and Singapore. This is the first of a two-part discussion with him.

What’s your favorite interview question?

“Give me an example of a trade idea you put on in the past year that you were correct on, and one that you were wrong on; what was the approach and how did you develop your position?”

What is distinctive about working with the very best candidates in the market?

What makes a candidate good is their success in trading their strategy. Working with the very best candidates in the market is a double-edged sword. They are easy to place because their successful track records speak for themselves. If they have been successful, however, they often have very little reason to leave their current employer, as they are typically well taken care of.

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Prime Consulting International (www.pci-search.com) is Stewart Koenig’s NY/CT-area recruiting shop. He recruits technology professionals into the financial world, doing up to 50% of his business with hedge funds.

Tell us about your firm.

The focus is the capital markets arena, both buy side and sell side firms. Hedge funds make up about 30-50% of our client base at any given time. Our functional areas are IT and risk management, from the most senior levels down to support positions.

The hallmark of our candidates is their in-depth understanding of the business, in combination with strong technical skills. We also have a fairly good depth in quantitative developers, again with strong business knowledge, which made our transition into Risk Management fairly easy.

And your geographic coverage?

We are in Westchester, right between NYC and Greenwich, CT. Between the two, we probably have over 50% of the hedge funds in the country within a 30 minute drive. But we have clients located all over the US. We have had a couple of US clients who opened up shop in the UK and have asked if we could help them from time to time.

What persuades people to leave a position, when they’re not actively job-hunting?

Usually it’s a few little things, and a lot more money. The client knows up front that it’s going to take quite a bit to motivate him or her to move. From the candidate’s perspective, it’s a time to move to a better firm, negotiate a bigger compensation package, and gain some extra quality of life perks, like vacation time or some remote working capability. I’ve even seen country club memberships thrown in.

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Ryan Pollock founded Objective Paradigm (www.opstaffing.com) in 2001 in Chicago and was nominated for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. His tech recruiting firm is proven and growing.

How did you get started?

I graduated from the business school at Rutgers University in 1995 with an Accounting degree. Following an internship with Prudential Internal Audit in New Jersey, I accepted a full-time position and worked with the Internal Audit Department. It took me a very short period of time to know that it was exactly what I did not want to do.

I started asking some questions to get transferred to the HR group. I did not really understanding what recruiting was all about at the time, but I knew that it was probably something that was more in line with my interests. I found a technology recruiting company that was based out of New York with 10 offices throughout the country. Shortly thereafter I accepted a position with the firm in mid 1996 working in their New York office. I had some friends out in Chicago and decided to join the firm’s Chicago office.

About two and a half years after that, one of my buddies went to an Internet Consulting start-up company and they offered me a recruiting position. So I jumped on the Internet wave and went to work in their New Jersey office. I stayed there for about 8 months until they opened up a Chicago office and I came back to Chicago. The Internet start-up bubble burst and the market crashed and they had to eventually let me go.

And the firm you founded?

It was January of ’01 when I started Objective Paradigm in my apartment. I was fortunate enough to be able to sustain the firm and gain new clients through the recession in the market. It was about 3 years ago that we really started making a concerted effort to focus on recruiting in financial and capital markets. We now have a staff of 18 people, 17 of which are recruiters.

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Warren Harvey heads the Asset Management group at WorldBridge Partners (www.worldbridgepartners.com), member of Management Recruiters International and a top 25 executive recruiting firm covering many industries.

Tell us how you got to be in recruiting, and why you’ve stayed in it.

I’ve been recruiting for about 20 years, 18 of that here. I was working with a great firm prior to this, Goldman Sachs, but the hours at the time were rather demanding, north of 90 hours per week.

Part of the thought was, if I’m going to work this hard at something, what can I do that would be as close as possible, if you will, to Warren Harvey, Inc. Ultimately I spoke to the recruiter that placed me at Goldman, learned a little bit more about the industry, and decided to give it a try. Turned out to be a good try — I enjoy what I do very much.

Building companies is one of the top rewards. Nothing for me feels better than to have a group, or department, or even a company, start up and bring in some key executives and support staff. It’s nice to hear the performance stories a year later, three years later. You see them written up in Institutional Investor, or the Journal, or something along those lines. It’s just great, and it affords you the opportunity to meet some extraordinarily bright people with great depth, great ideas. You get an education every day on the job.

And your firm?

WorldBridge Partners is a national search firm with 8 offices across the country…soon to be more. WorldBridge is unique in that we’re a client-centric firm that works on a retained basis, or a contingency basis, as well as custom crafted structures to best meet client objectives, and partner with them throughout the process. At the end of the day, most of our work is done on some type of retained arrangement. The real key is getting to know our clients very well. We take extraordinary measures to meet with key executives and the hiring team to fully understand the drivers for any search, the company culture, mission and goals. We’re all about partnering with our clients, and tend to serve as an extension of them.

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Former financial planner Craig Stocksleger is now a recruiter with Comprehensive (www.comprehensiverecruiting.com), an Arizona firm with a strong business in quantitative analytics.

How did you get into recruiting, and what keeps you here?

When I was in college, I was involved in trading my own account, and was fortunate enough to be fairly successful to pay for some of my tuition. From there, it has just always been a hobby to follow the markets, not only the stock market, but the bond markets and structured credit markets. I went on to be a financial planner, stock broker to retail clients. You always felt like you needed to be available 24/7 to your client. I was actually contacted by a recruiter for an opportunity, and I struck up a conversation with them. He told me a little about recruiting and what he did, and it sounded like something that could be very appealing to me. I would still get to work in the financial markets area, but it would allow a little bit more freedom for me and my career, and the compensation potential was also in line with what I was looking for.

The thing that keeps me in recruiting is not only helping people but the wheeling and dealing and negotiation. Also, I have that natural sales background where I like to prospect and strike up new customer relationships.

Tell us about your practice.

Comprehensive Recruiting works the global financial markets. We currently have seven recruiters, and each has a specialty area that they work in which helps them develop an expertise in that particular niche and also helps them develop very strong relationships with both their customers, our clients, and also the candidates that we serve.

So, we work in all areas of the global markets: from foreign exchange sales and trading, fixed income sales and trading, equity sales trading, research. One of our strong franchises is in quantitative analysis; working with PhD quants that support the various trading desks. We also work in risk-management, compliance and operations. Our clients are the top investment banks as well as the buy-side firms and the large hedge firms.

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We spoke to Tom Kellerhals of the Westminster Group (www.wgpeople.com) about his firm’s distinctive niche: placing sales & marketing professionals in asset management firms. A solid half of his work is in alternative investments.

How did you end up in this line of work?

I started my career in, of all places, the grain industry, working for a soybean-processing company in the Midwest. From there, I turned into a commodity broker, got licensed in securities and was a commodity and stock broker for Dean Whitter. I became very interested in managed futures, CTAs, and went to work for Commodities Corporation, now owned by Goldman Sachs, and one or two other large CTAs.

My wife started a recruiting business 13 years ago, and eight years ago I decided to leave the CTA world and become a recruiter. We’re a very small shop — there’s only five people — and we are in a very narrow niche.

Some of the folks that are in the hedge fund world today actually started their careers in the CTA world. As part of that trend, I started recruiting, not only for CTAs, but for global macros and other hedge funds, and then fund-of-funds. Today half of our business is alternate investment shops, including real estate and private equity. The other half is in the long-only world. We concentrate on marketing, marketing communications, sales, and client service. Unlike many folks in the industry, we go out of our way to distinguish between marketing and sales.

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Charlie Panoff is a hedge fund recruiter at Objective Solutions International (www.e-osi.com), an international finance and technology search firm.

Tell us a bit of background about yourself.

I started in the industry when I was 19. It was right as the market started to turn bad, and I did it for a few years. I was good at it, but it was very hard to make money. I was making a lot more money than I ever thought I would at that age, but I wanted to further my education and further my level of experience and knowledge.

So I ended up leaving and going to a large company. I worked for Institutional Investor News for a few years. Then it came time when I reached my peak of earning potential and star power there, and I called OSI because I always had a good relationship with their president, and said, “All right. I’ve learned what I need to, and now I’d like to come back and make some more money.”

Initially, when I was doing this, it was strictly technology jobs and I had to learn a lot. In my time in Institutional Investor, I ended up learning a lot about the financial world. I actually focused on the hedge fund world there — selling their alternative investment news product and their hedge fund daily product and a couple of the Journal Of Alternative Investments, and setting up large access deals, and speaking with lots of different people. I got to meet a lot of people in that world, and took that back to the recruiting world.

I focus on the combination between technology and business, when it comes to hedge funds, and in the private banking world, I recruit bankers with books of business, figuring out what their books are comprised of, and seeing where they would best fit.

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Kathy Graham of Highest Quality Search (www.hqsearch.com) in Chicago discusses the past, present and future of the job market, confidentiality, and managing career trajectory.

How did you get started in recruiting?

They don’t teach Recruiting 101 at college, so generally most of us kind of trip over it and land up in it. I started off in Cleveland and moved to Toledo, where there wasn’t really a lot of opportunities. I went to a search firm looking for a job, and instead they offered me a job. And I wasn’t sure, so they put me on the phone, in the middle of the downturn, with a phonebook, and a half hour later they came back to see how I had done. I had five companies that wanted to talk to me further about positions, so they offered me a job on the spot. And immediately I started work that very first week, and filling the first position I got.

So from day one I was a top award winning recruiter. I worked for three firms before starting HQ Search, and we’re going to be celebrating 10 years in the business this October. I love finding that perfect fit, where someone can really succeed in the job, and where they really provide value at it. They get promoted for our clients. That’s not something someone can teach you. I think it’s more of an art, but that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years, finding “who fits best.”

Very, very quickly I moved over to financial services because I find that whole field fascinating. In fact, I got my Masters over at the University of Chicago in Analytic Finance, Econometrics and Statistics. I think I’m one of the few recruiters who can actually crunch the numbers, and understand the intricate areas of hedge funds. I learned how to do the hedges and the risk management, &c, of portfolios as part of my degree training.

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Bruce Weston of Garrison Associates (www.garrison-assoc.com) describes contingency tech recruiting for the top banks in NYC and how to use recruiter relationships.

Tell us about what you do.

I’ve been in this business six years. I just left a Fortune 500-size firm, and I was referred to this company by a corporate recruiter that I placed. I’ve been here a year, and love it.

One thing is freedom. I can really pretty much do whatever I want. We’re a small firm, so we don’t have any competition internally that a lot of big firms do have. We’re not fighting over candidates or fighting over clients. You know, we just all come to work and we work hard. Where in bigger companies — you have meetings and restrictions and territories, and it limits people from being successful.

The firm’s been in existence 10 years. We primarily are in the finance industry — I’d say 90-95 percent — and about 85 percent of our jobs are on the perm side of things. Five of the main banks: Goldman — for which we’re the number one IT vendor in the New York Metro area — Barclay’s, Deutsche Bank, Alliance Bernstein, HSBC, UBS. And then we have hedge fund clients. I pretty much do every type of recruiting. To me, it really doesn’t matter. I just match needs accordingly, of companies and individuals. But we’re predominantly focused in the finance world.

We just do contingency. I’ve personally done retained in the past, and I really don’t like it. We’ve gotten retained job orders from a couple of the big banks, that didn’t have success with the retained, and we’ll do them on a contingent basis because we’re pretty confident in what we do; and we’ve made very high level placements. And now we get the calls for the retained firms — and they don’t have to shell out the money beforehand.

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Thoughts on the hedge fund career marketplace from Chad Dean of Integrated Management (www.integratedmgmt.com).

How long have you been recruiting?

I have been recruiting for twelve years in various industries, mainly semi conductors. I was going back to school, getting my MBA, and the telecom and the semi conductor market crashed, as we all know, in the 2001 time frame. Through contacts, I met Barry Franklin, who is the executive of the firm and has been running this business for over seventeen years. I ran into him, and it matched up with what I was doing in my MBA and where I wanted to go with my career. I love recruiting; I am always going to be a recruiter.

The bottom line is, you go into something and you want to have satisfaction, right? You want to know you are making the world a better place. My satisfaction in this position is when I make a successful placement, and the company calls me up, and says thank you for finding us this good candidate. And I have the candidate saying thank you, because they wouldn’t be taking the position if they didn’t think it would be something good for them. So for everybody it’s a win-win-win situation.

Barry founded the firm in the 1990 time frame. There are seven currently in the firm. We are 100% contingency. And we are very boutique-y even within Wall Street. We cover mostly front office and mostly fixed income. We don’t get too much into the equity side of things. The hedge funds that we are working with are mostly fixed income hedge funds or alternative strategies. We’re all based in Arizona, and we work New York hours.

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