The 2019 rising stars of Wall Street headhunting

Joel Sichel's first blush with Wall Street headhunting came in 2016, and he quickly raced up to speed and carved out a niche as a go-to consultant, especially for big-bank central risk trading operations.

Sichel, a graduate of King's College, in London, started his career in New York working at a nonprofit in 2014. He was looking to gain exposure and knowledge about the finance world when a friend introduced him to a recruiting firm in London called Anson McCade, which he joined in early 2016. After less than a year, he left for GQR, returning to New York to focus on systematic and electronic trading searches for banks as well as buy-side portfolio managers.

Early on he encountered professionals working on central-risk desks, a budding trend on Wall Street in which banks use technology to aggregate risk across dozens of traders so it can be actively managed. He immersed himself in understanding this highly technical corner of trading — which is often staffed with quants, data scientists, and other Ph.D.s, and became a top resource to investment-banking leaders angling to develop or build out their central-risk capability, often succeeding in persuading programmatic traders to ditch the buy-side to fill this growing sell-side need.

Sichel was promoted to associate VP in 2017 and to VP a year later, and he now heads up the firm's systematic trading search practice.

Oliver Cooke got his start in headhunting in London in 2011 at Selby Jennings; now he runs the firm's entire North American operation out of New York City.

After graduating from the University of Portsmouth, Cooke started out his career recruiting quants, before they became among the most coveted practitioners on Wall Street. He moved to New York in 2013 to help launch the firm's US office, continuing to specialize in quant, tech, and risk management talent for banks, hedge funds, and asset managers, primarily in the VP to director level, the firm's sweet spot.

Selby, a subsidiary of Phaidon International, has expanded into covering the majority of front-office searches, including M&A and sales and trading positions, and now has six offices and about 150 employees in the US.

Cooke, who was promoted to managing director in November, still executes searches but spends a majority of his time developing relationships, winning new mandates, and managing the firm. Last year, the firm placed 750 people in the US across 300 clients.

Santa-Cruz native Lindsay Walls Branin shipped out to the East Coast as a basketball recruit for Brown University, where she ended up playing volleyball on top of classes and learning Mandarin. The hefty load of schoolwork and extracurriculars paid off, as basketball connected her with a mentor who helped her land a job not long after graduation in Bloomberg LP's sales and analytics department.

At Bloomberg, her first Wall Street immersion, she developed an expertise in FX and commodities, first providing analytics support to customers and eventually selling the company's terminal service to commodities desks at firms like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup.

After three and a half years at Bloomberg, Branin left for Spencer Stuart in 2014. She joined the firm's financial-services practice, helping recruit portfolio managers, CIOs, and other senior-level sales and management professionals for private-equity firms and hedge funds, among other asset managers. She was promoted to senior associate in 2017.

Brian Palabrica is a senior member of the alternative investments search team at Options Group, the global recruiting firm where he's been rising the ranks for nearly a decade.

After graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009, Palabrica spent a year with famed GOP strategist Frank Luntz's corporate-consulting outfit before joining Options Group in 2010. He started out primarily as a generalist but had a penchant for handling equity-derivatives searches for banks.

Palabrica soon parlayed that experience into relationships at hedge funds, private-equity firms, and family offices, winning new clients and mandates for the firm. He handles a diverse array of senior alternatives searches, and in recent years he's crafted an expertise placing candidates in structured-products, from municipal-bond funds to the red-hot market for collateralized loan obligation (CLO) investments.

He was promoted to executive director in 2018.

Adam Harwood fell into recruiting by accident. While working in college admissions at Pace University, his first gig after graduating in 2007 from the school, he got a call back for a job posting about recruiting for banks.

Intrigued, he pursued the job and wound up at Carrington Fox in 2010, where he started his headhunting career scouting mid- to senior-level talent for sell-side firms and hedge funds.

In 2014, he split for The Execu Search Group to build out a front-office Wall Street recruiting operation at the firm. Harwood, a senior managing director, now runs the front-office group within the firm's financial services practice, managing a team of five while continuing to place traders, portfolio managers, quants, and sales professionals at big banks and top-tier hedge funds.

Alexis DuFresne, a director at Whitney Partners, is a top executive recruiter for asset managers searching for senior talent in marketing, investor relations, and portfolio management.

After graduating from New York University in 2006, DuFresne spent time as a hedge-fund and private-equity marketer herself at EIM and Harbert Management. Several close mentors — and eventual clients — in the fund-management world helped guide DuFresne toward recruiting, and the technical familiarity and know-how she'd developed gave her an edge with clients and candidates when she made the career leap in 2011 with Broadreach Group.

DuFresne continued to mold strong relationships with hedge funds, private-equity shops, and credit investors across the world at The Atlantic Group and Solomon Page before joining Whitney Partners in 2017.

At Whitney, she heads up the firm's marketing and investor relations search practice, helping asset managers build out and restructure teams, as well as senior leadership identify teams and businesses they might acquire.

Jason Schulman is a lifer at Long Ridge Partners. He joined the alternative-investment-focused headhunting shop right after graduating from the University of Albany in 2006, and he's the only nonfounder to work his way up to partner at the firm.

In college, Schulman thought he was headed to law rather than finance. But then he was introduced to Long Ridge founder Michael Goodman, and law-school plans gave way to recruiting for hedge funds and funds of funds.

At Long Ridge, he began building the trust of some of the largest brand-name hedge-fund players in the industry, placing roles from junior analyst all the way up to senior-level investors and portfolio managers.

In the process, Schulman has corralled new business for the firm, now 25 people strong, helping expand Long Ridge's work with funds in long-short equity, distressed credit and special situations, real estate, quant and systematic, global macro, and commodities.

Adam Kahn didn't waste much time before starting his own company. At 27, only a handful of years after graduating from Penn State University, he founded Odyssey Search Partners, a headhunting boutique focused on the alternative-investment world.

Before hanging out his own shingle, Kahn spent time at Options Group recruiting investment professionals for private equity firms and fundamentally driven hedge funds. He carried that expertise over to Odyssey, where his firm of 13 people works with the full spectrum of buyout clients — from middle-market to mega-fund — as well as a diverse array of hedge funds, from long-short to event-driven to distressed-debt to CLOs.

Odyssey had a record year in 2018, according to Kahn.

David Richardson is a principal at Heidrick & Struggles, where he specializes in Wall Street's burgeoning fintech scene, both the startups searching for experienced veterans as well as the institutional giants clamoring for the industry's top technologists.

The Cardiff University graduate is no stranger to the scene. He's been recruiting technology talent in financial services since starting his career as a consultant at The JM Group in London in 2004. He jumped to iKas International in 2006, where he spent six years placing technologists within investment banks and asset managers as well as searching for executive-level tech leaders.

Richardson joined Heidrick's financial technology practice in London as a senior associate in 2012, transferring two years later to the New York office, where he's been ever since.

Now a principal at the firm, he handles an array of searches: C-suite IT, technology, and cybersecurity mandates for banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and insurance companies, as well as executive and board-level talent for rapidly growing, well-funded startups. Over the past two years he's taken a leading role executing crypto and blockchain talent searches for a variety of established and emerging enterprises.

Jennifer Montalvo specializes fixed-income, currencies, and commodities headhunting for big banks, leading the business for Sheffield Haworth in the Americas.

The Bowdoin College grad jumped into financial services headhunting in 2004, landing roles at RSR Partners and CT Partners early on before joining Principal Search in 2006 to help build its FICC practice in New York and London. As the financial crisis hit in 2008, Montalvo was deployed to Hong Kong to build the firm's presence in Asia, returning to New York two years later as its head of global markets in the Americas.

Sheffield Haworth poached Montalvo to head up FICC headhunting in 2012 amid a reboot of the firm's US presence. She focuses on placing regional and global sales and trading heads at the world's largest investment banks, placing dozens of senior management roles in recent years and earning internal promotions in the process. Montalvo was promoted to managing director in 2018.

Ankit Parikh's foray into the world of headhunting came while he was still an undergrad at Fordham University. For two years, in his spare time away from his studies, he worked on research and execution at Options Group.

In 2006, a couple of years after graduation, he linked up with Larry Baum, an ex-FX trading head at Bank of America and Barclays who was running a Wall Street headhunting firm, which eventually evolved into Bay Street Advisors. Apart from a sabbatical to get his MBA at the University of Michigan, he's been with Baum and Bay Street ever since.

Parikh initially specialized in placing fixed-income trading pros for the sell-side, but eventually developed expertise and relationships on the buy-side and in 2018 was named head of Bay Street's asset-management practice.