Hedge Funds In Hiring Mode?

First it was the boutique banks. Then the bulge-brackets. Now hedge funds reportedly have resumed hiring too - albeit at a slower pace than a year ago .

Hedge fund marketing executives are especially in demand, Reuters reports. But operations staff and fund managers in popular strategies are sought-after as well.

Today's favored strategies include distressed debt and credit (of course!), U.S. equity statistical arbitrage and systematic trading, global macro, and even equity long-short.

Firms that have added hedge fund staff recently include Citadel, RBC Capital Markets, Artradis and Tribridge, according to Reuters.

At least one headhunter sees the job-market slack created by the financial crisis starting to disappear. Much of the vaunted talent that exited bulge-bracket banks has been re-absorbed, says Bob Olman, managing partner of Alpha Search Advisory Partners. "It's a little bit harder to get quality people than the first quarter," he told the newswire. There's no fall in the number of unsolicited resumes ... but the quality has dropped."

Some 1,500 hedge funds shut down during 2008, according to Hedge Fund Research, as most asset classes produced negative returns and investors clamored to withdraw their money. Worldwide employment in hedge funds shrank by 6.4 percent or about 10,000 jobs last year. In March, a report by industry recruiterOptions Group forecast another 10,000 fund jobs would disappear in 2009.