Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Chris Sullivan · The Emerald Recruiting Group · August 2026
Here is the map. A search firm built on relationships and accountability works a channel with a ceiling in it: in this market it tends to reach whatever already overlaps the network, and stays quiet about the rest. This page is the rest. The US segments that hire the roles you place, who signs inside each one, and roughly how many firms sit there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Hedge funds and multi-strategy managers
The segment that hires in bursts. A new pod, a strategy launch or a departure creates several seats at once, and the mandate goes to whoever is already known when it happens rather than to whoever is best.
Who signs: chief operating officer, head of talent, the portfolio manager or desk head doing the hiring, and the chief financial officer on the operations side.
2,400 to 3,000
US investment advisers reporting private fund business; the few hundred largest carry an internal talent function, the rest run hiring off the desk
Asset and wealth managers
Slower, more structured, and the segment where a preferred supplier list is real and rarely revisited. Getting onto that list is a separate piece of work from winning a role, and it is the one nobody schedules.
Who signs: head of human resources or talent acquisition, chief operating officer, head of investment operations, and the procurement seat at the largest firms.
2,000 to 2,600
US employers registered in portfolio management carrying 50 or more people
Banks, dealers and markets divisions
Panel driven, compliance heavy and slow to add a firm, which cuts both ways: hard to enter, and hard for anyone else to displace you once you are in. The consulting and interim line often opens this door before permanent search does.
Who signs: head of talent acquisition for markets, business manager or chief of staff for the desk, head of risk or product control, and vendor management.
600 to 800
US broker dealers carrying 100 or more people; most registered firms are far smaller and never hire these roles
Trading technology, market data and financial software
The part of the market that buys the same skills for a different reason. They need people who understand a trading business and can also build, and they compete for that talent with the funds themselves.
Who signs: chief technology officer, VP of engineering, head of product, head of talent at the larger vendors.
1,500 to 2,000
US employers in financial technology, trading platforms and market data carrying 50 or more people
Private capital, fund administration and outsourced operations
The quiet growth segment behind the funds. Fund administrators, outsourced trading and middle office providers hire the same operations, fund accounting and settlements profiles, at volume, and they are chronically under-served by financial markets search firms who look one layer up.
Who signs: chief operating officer, head of client service, head of fund accounting, talent director.
900 to 1,300
US private capital managers, fund administrators and outsourced operations providers carrying 50 or more people
Proprietary trading firms and market makers
Small, private, and among the most aggressive payers in the market. They do not publish, they hire opportunistically, and they respond to a specific name rather than a firm brochure.
Who signs: founder or managing partner, head of trading, head of quantitative research, and the recruiter inside the firm where one exists.
Roughly 150 to 250 identifiable by name
no public register separates them cleanly from other dealers; the population is found one firm at a time, which is why it stays open

Where the openings are

1
Search is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A desk launch, a resignation, a fund raise, a regulatory deadline. Those events are visible from outside if someone is watching the whole market, and invisible to a firm waiting for the right person to think of it. By the time a network hears about a mandate, it has usually been awarded.
2
Two buyers who rarely talk to each other. The desk head who needs the person, and the operating or talent seat that owns the approved supplier list. Winning a role and getting onto the list are separate sales with separate messages, and a firm that only ever meets the first one starts from zero at every new mandate.
3
The consulting line has its own trigger and its own budget. A migration, a remediation, a reporting deadline. That work is authorized by a program owner rather than by a hiring manager, on a different calendar, and it needs its own audience rather than a closing line in a message about permanent search.
4
The underworked band sits outside the corridor. The same roles exist in Chicago, Texas, Florida, the Southeast and the Midwest, at firms that hear from a fraction of the search firms a New York manager does. Coverage there is a distribution question rather than a credibility one, and it is the part that a relationship built market cannot solve by working harder.
Built from public US registry data: adviser and dealer registrations held by the market regulators, and employer filings that record sector and workforce size. Counts are banded deliberately. Registration counts include a long tail of very small firms that never hire these roles, so the bands above describe employers at the size where a search budget exists. Sector codes are self-reported, and the trading firm segment is described rather than counted because no public register isolates it.
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