Challenge

Senior management of this high-profile start-up, while highly accomplished in credit and rates, were relatively inexperienced at looking to currency as an asset class. They knew they wanted a top player to join the team, which was comprised of the cream of the crop from the parent organization’s proprietary trading desks (forex was one of the only markets in which the parent lacked a significant footprint in prop trading). But beyond a desire for excellence, they had few preconceptions about the investment style they sought—whether quantitative or fundamental, directional or market neutral—or the professional profile of their desired candidate.  
 

Sextant's Approach

Recognizing the need to cast a wide net, at least until the client’s requirements took on more definition, Sextant pulled together a search team that cut across several practices:

• Hedge Funds to source macro and quantitatively-oriented candidate
• Capital Markets, to source candidates from flow and prop trading desks
• Traditional Asset Management to source into the long-only space

Sextant’s Solution

By showing the client a variety of profiles from multiple disciplines early in the process, we were able to help senior management refine their thinking about this key strategy area and to realize that the optimal fit, in terms of culture and risk appetite, probably shared their prop trading background. As it turned out, the successful candidate (a diversity hire) joined from the prop desk of a rival bank, lured by the strategic nature of the role and the greater risk-taking environment of a stand-alone entity.

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Challenge

The client was a growing structured credit products business seeking access to the most sophisticated institutional investors. The challenges of the search included:

• Identifying the narrow pool of candidates with a unique blend of relationships with institutional investors, as well as experience marketing structured credit products, especially CDO equity.
• Attracting candidates to a second tier commercial bank that was just building out its structured products effort.

Sextant’s Approach

• Targeting select sell-side and buy-side structured credit marketers that had relationships with the target client segment of pension funds, endowments and other sophisticated institutions.
• Discreet sourcing into the pension and endowment communities with existing CDO investments and soliciting recommendations for the top sell-side structured credit marketers. 
• Adopting an out-of-the-box approach by looking at individuals outside of the sell-side at both traditional and alternative asset management firms who had the relevant institutional relationships but lacked the track record in selling structured credit products.  For example, we targeted institutional sales people at the traditional money managers, and marketers and fundraisers at hedge funds and private equity funds who could potentially transition and would consider moving from the buy side into a structured credit marketing role.

Sextant’s Solution

By leveraging Sextant’s multiple practice areas – Private Equity, Hedge Funds and Asset Management – creating a comprehensive, “converged” approach, we were able to quickly navigate candidates with great relationships who existed outside the sell-side and could sell structured credit products.  We also did extensive sourcing into the major plan sponsors who were early adopters of the CDO equity asset class.

We identified and helped our client hire two individuals – one located on the East Coast and one located on the West Coast – with unique experience selling CDOs, as well as a deep rolodex of institutional investors.

 

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Challenge

• West Coast geography.
• An institutional client with an institutional culture and approach to compensation seeking to tap a talent pool comprised largely of hedge funds and proprietary trading desks.
• Specific, narrow requirements in terms of education and familiarity with certain software packages and programming languages.

Sextant’s Approach

We adopted a three-pronged strategy:

1. Aggressively identifying targets and calling into hedge funds and sell-side trading desks.
2. Advertising the opportunity on a blind basis on a handful of academic and trade websites.
3. Networking in the academic research community.

Sextant’s Solution

In the event, we identified the successful candidate—who wasn’t just familiar with modeling stat arb in the requisite programming language, but actually wrote a book on the subject—via the candidate’s dissertation advisor, a statistics professor at a major university. We helped this individual, who was at a successful proprietary trading firm, appreciate the more clearly defined career path and greater long-term potential of an institutional platform.

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