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Haven't heard of the other 2, but Mercury and Long Ridge seems like a spam machine. A lot of roles they advertise are public on Google/Glassdoor. Those are also roles where the firm/hiring manager may not want to pay headhunter fees for. Most HFs also have HR reps on LinkedIn or some HR email address that you can try reaching out directly with a quick synopsis of your background and they would hook you up with the right hiring manager if there is an opening; they might also have more specialized roles internally that are not publicly advertised. The specialized roles are where headhunters can be valuable, but each firm would only contract with a small handful of headhunters, so it's unlikely a single headhunter would have true-ins at many different HFs.

For the really big HFs, like Citadel, Millenium, Bridgewater, AQR, Two Sigma, DE Shaw, etc. they have internal sourcers that you can try to find on LinkedIn.

 

Not entirely true. yes these large hedge funds have Business Development teams that will sometimes reach out to candidates, but these hedge funds rely on head hunters/recruiters to filter out ppl for them. Of the large multi managers only 1 or 2 reached out directly to me, while the majority of the opportunities and interviews I got were facilitiated by head hunters. 

 

I don't have direct experience with them but my friends who interacted with these guys basically said that they are useless with no connections. They reach out to you to build a database and nothing else. There were no follow-ups / postings other than a generic response "we are working on sourcing opps".

 

Just to save you all the effort. If you want to work at a MM HF, just reach out to their Internal BusDev team. That's exactly what these headhunters do

 

Honestly, I lack experience with SMs but I imagine networking is a bit harder there. Most of those guys have a stick up their you know what

 

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