As the Founder and CEO of a niche job board focused on the Private Equity and Hedge Fund space I receive calls and emails on a daily basis asking me about the present job market for these funds.  I wrote an article about the present job market about four weeks ago but in this volatile market it is already time for an update.

Presently, we are still seeing both Private Equity and Hedge Funds hiring although the hiring process is slowing down, resulting in fewer opportunities. We are also entering a time when hiring for experienced professionals usually slows down at these funds.  This slow down is historically due to the funds concentrating their hiring needs on recent graduates and/or preparing for start dates of the 2^nd and 3^rd year analysts the funds have hired from the investment banking analyst programs.

The slow down has historically affected the investment oriented roles more and that is the case this year as well.  Infrastructure roles are still being actively recruited/hired for. In many cases these are the roles we are seeing posted on our website and hearing about through our network of recruiters and funds.  We do not believe this focus on infrastructure roles will slow down anytime soon since the institutional investors are demanding these Private Equity and Hedge Fund firms have strong infrastructure in place. 

We have seen a recent up tick in quantitatively oriented roles and the technical roles which support these quantitative positions.  These new positions have included Quantitative Analyst, Statistical Arbitrage Portfolio Manager and Quantitative Trading Analyst. We have also seen roles for Application Developers roles being discussed and the need for programmers with experience in more exotic languages such as Python being desired.

As the market remains volatile I am sure that the job market will as well.  There is no question that this year whether or not a firm is hiring is a case by case basis.  The funds that can hire are finding this an excellent time for opportunistic hiring and are taking advantage of this opportunity.   

We strongly suggest that all experienced candidates keep your eyes and ears open for the solid opportunities out there. We have found this opportunistic hiring allows highly qualified candidates to find excellent “next step” type of roles. The process is slow however, so you want to start networking now rather then waiting until you want to make a move.  When it is an opportunistic hire the firms must believe in the person 100% and that usually entails numerous meetings and dinners with individuals at all levels.

Bottom-line, there is still a lot of hiring going on in the Private Equity and Hedge Fund industries although it is focused within certain business categories and analytical styles.  The slow down that has occurred in the last four weeks is for the most part, an historical seasonal trend in hiring, but keep in mind the recruiting process is slowing down as well.  We believe overall hiring will remain strong within certain categories and anticipate hiring to pick up at the end of the summer for investment roles as per the seasonal trends.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.