Working with Recruiters & the Perfect HF Career - Charlie Panoff
Thursday, October 25th, 2007Charlie 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.

