Bank jobs, finance jobs, recruitment in the financial markets, accounting and investment banking. Find jobs, post resumes and browse job market news

While hedge funds like Brevan Howard appear quite content to let managers go if they’ve made a loss of 12% or more, the same may not be the case at all hedge funds in London.

According to recruiters (who wished to go unnamed), some hedge funds make it very difficult for high performing staff to leave.

“There’s one notorious fund where you lose all your deferred stock if they discover you’ve even applied for a job while you’re working there,” says one hedge fund recruiter. “It makes it almost impossible to get out; you’re completely tied in.”

“Some hedge funds are prepared to play very dirty in order to keep hold of people,” says another recruiter. “We had one situation where we’d already placed an employee from fund X with a rival, and were trying to place another candidate there. Fund X called the rival and said that if the move went ahead it would sue for conspiracy to poach staff, and for the removal of confidential information.

“The hiring fund decided that it just wasn’t worth the hassle."

He goes on… “A lot of hedge funds have absolutely no regard for employment law. All the rules that are there to protect employees don’t apply to them. They think they can just buy employees off with a couple of million pounds and that it will be fine.”

None of this sounds nice, but employment lawyers say they’re not unduly troubled by hedge fund cases. This is possibly because partners in hedge funds aren’t employees and therefore aren’t covered by standard employment law.

“There’s no significant employment law protection for partners apart from discrimination,” says Steven Lorber, a partner at Lewis Silkin. “Most of the hedge fund claims we get are related to that, although we also get claims around pay and unfairness in general.”