New York-based investment bank Jefferies has been on a hiring spree across many of its businesses, especially in the past few months as it picked up several new managing directors. The frenetic hiring activity will slow in the second half of the year, a source familiar with the matter said.
Throughout April, May and June, the firm announced hires in fixed income, Asia equities sales and trading, real estate investment banking, financial institutions investment banking and global equity research. Jefferies picked up talent from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and other bulge-bracket banks.
A spate of hires announced in the spring are the fruits of recruiting activity in January and February as Jefferies was eager to capitalize on investment bankers ready to leave firms after receiving their annual bonuses, the source said. The end of the winter recruiting season prompted Jefferies to scale back its hiring.
The company had scooped up scores of fleeing bankers from larger Wall Street firms in the wake of the financial crisis and had continued hiring in 2010, increasing headcount by 353 employees from early 2010 through early 2011. The firm has said that it wants to compete with the bulge-bracket, and as a result, has stopped referring to itself as a boutique investment bank in recent months.
Jefferies declined to comment for this story.
CEO Richard Handler cautioned in March that the hiring would slow to a trickle, saying that "we feel like, at this point, we're making selected additions as opposed to the whole scale hires that we had historically."
Recent Hires
The firm announced today that Tim Sullivan and Harold DeRolph will join as managing director's in the firm's investment grade corporate bond business in the fixed income division.
Sullivan comes from UBS where he was a managing director in credit trading. DeRolph was at Citadel Securities where he was a portfolio manager for distressed credit and event-driven equities.
The announcement came on the heels of several others this week, including Susan Bonsell will join as an MD in fixed income sales in Dallas and Clifford Lanier will join as an MD and head of fixed income cross product sales. According to the firm, there are nearly 525 professionals globally in the fixed income business.
Results
The hiring appears to have done the firm some good. In March, net revenues were up 31% from the year earlier period, and investment banking revenues were up 21%, while global trading revenues were up 32%. The firm was recently ranked the No. 2 equity broker for North America and the No. 8 equity broker globally by Bloomberg. It was ranked No. 1 in U.S. stock picking in the 2011 Financial Times/StarMine equity research analysis for 2010.
Jefferies will report its second quarter earnings on June 21.
Write to Julie Steinberg