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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Long hours are the standard within the hedge fund industry. In our survey of hedge fund insiders we asked the participants about their work and personal life balance. Now, we realize this is a subjective measure but, at the same time, it couldn’t be more important to long term job satisfaction. We found that:

• 15% felt they had an excellent work/personal life balance.
• 65% said they were striking an average to above average balance.
• 20% felt the balance was off, that is, below average or poor.

Striking the right work-life balance

Finding that best balance between your personal life and your work life is hard to do and isn’t a one-time effort. Here are some tips based on insights from Mayo Clinic to help you find the perfect balance:

• Keep a log. Track everything you do for one week. Decide what’s necessary and satisfies you the most. Cut or delegate activities you don’t enjoy, don’t have time for or do only out of guilt.
• Take advantage of your options. Work flexible hours or a compressed work week.
• Communicate clearly. Limit time-consuming misunderstandings (this means both talking and listening carefully).
• Fight the guilt. Remember, having a family and a job is okay — for both men and women.
• Recharge. Set aside time each day for an activity that you enjoy, such as walking, working out or listening to music.
• Set aside one night each week for recreation. Put down the crackberry, power down the computer and turn off the TV. Do activities that will rejuvenate you.
• Protect your day off. You’ll be more productive when you return.
• Get enough sleep (not just some sleep). There’s nothing as stressful and potentially dangerous as working when you’re sleep-deprived.

Balance doesn’t mean doing everything. Examine your priorities and set boundaries. Be firm in what you can and cannot do. Only you can restore harmony to your lifestyle.

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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London is positioning to become the financial captial of the world, led by the $100 billion in foreign investment pouring in from the Middle East, India, China and the United States. All this investment activity has fueled a sky-high cost of living in the UK and made finding top performing hedge fund players even more difficult. The 2007 Hedge Fund Search Digest Compensation Study showed that hedge fund employees get an extra week of vacation each year and are making more money (on average) than their counterparts in the US.

With comparable top compensation and comparable benefits packages, searching around the globe to find the best talent is a strategy that is paying off for the top firms.