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Steve Cohen is going global to recruit for his $11 billion hedge fund

Point72 Asset Management, the $11 billion family-office hedge fund led by Steven A. Cohen, is now looking for the best young recruits internationally.

The firm’s Point72 Academy — a program aimed at training new college grads — has now expanded its recruiting efforts to Asia and Europe with the goal of selecting up to 15 students for its full-time financial analyst and summer analyst programs in 2017.

The Point72 Academy launched over a year ago. It was a revolutionary move for the hedge fund.

Traditionally, the path to a hedge fund job has been to spend two years after college in an investment banking analyst program before making the transition to the buy-side. These days, however, hedge fund recruiting has been facing its own unique set of challenges as investment banking classes have been shrinking and more young workers have been forgoing Wall Street careers for lucrative tech jobs in Silicon Valley. In other words, there’s a shortage of top talent.

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Cohen has even publicly said that “talent is very thin” and that he’s “blown away by the lack of talent.”

Steven A. Cohen
Steven A. Cohen

With recruiting from the sell-side under pressure, some funds have turned to grooming or “farming” their own talent. Point72 in particular has been investing heavily in developing its own talent through its Academy.

“The best talent isn’t necessarily going to Wall Street anymore,” Jaimi Goodfriend, the director of the Point72 Academy, told Yahoo Finance.

“We have to find new and innovative ways in order to attract that top tier.”

Now in its second year, the 2016 class has 12-full-time participants, including two women, up from no women in the inaugural class. The first class received 400 applications. Right now, they’ve exceeded 7,200 applications for the handful of available slots.

“The idea is really to bring in young talent and train them the way we want to in everything from data science to learning how to fail to accounting and finance. For us, it’s really about innovation and finding that diversity of thought and bringing them in and home-growing them in the way we’d like to see them succeed,” Goodfriend said.

Expanding the Point72 Academy recruiting globally will help the fund add to diversity of thought. The fund’s president, Doug Haynes, also expressed that this is one of the key challenges the industry is facing. He added that the “lack of performance is related to sameness.” In other words, the pool of talent tends to come from the same schools and share the same ideas.

Point72, which currently manages the money of Cohen and that of a few select employees, has doubled the size of its London workforce. In the first eight months of the year, the fund hired 31 people in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo offices.


Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

Why Steve Cohen is targeting college sophomores

Billionaire Rubenstein: These 6 traits will help you succeed on Wall Street