The new team will invest throughout the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The Blackstone Group in January announced it had hired Hong Kong's former financial secretary, Antony Leung Kam-chung, to head a new private equity operation in Hong Kong. New York-based Blackstone is one of the biggest private equity players in the world, with about US$70billion in alternative investments under management, some US$30billion of it in private equity.

Blackstone opened a Hong Kong office last year to focus on its smaller fund of hedge funds business. But Mr Leung and his Hong Kong co-head, Ben Jenkins, will be heading a team investing in private equity, complementing a private equity team in Mumbai, India.

The arrival of some big-name alternative investment managers had made the industry a bit easier to sell to potential prospects, recruiters said.

Sheridan Mather, managing director of alternative investment search firm Pinnacle Asia, said that 2? years ago, when the company approached people and talked to them about hedge funds, quite a few people were quite wary about moving away form the larger investment banks.

'But now people have seen their friends move over to the hedge fund side - and it's not as hard to convince people to move over to funds.'

Like Blackstone, many of the larger alternative-investment fund managers have started to manage a combination of hedge fund investments, funds of funds and private equity funds.

Meanwhile, as the influence of hedge funds grows in Asia in general, headhunters are predicting good opportunities for people with the right credentials.

The size of the market in Hong Kong has doubled over the past two years in terms of the amount of money managed and the number of funds based here. And staff will be needed as more alternative-investment funds set up shop in Asia.

'The main thing to remember is the hedge fund industry is still a relatively nascent industry in Asia,' Mr Mather said. 'It is still very much in its infancy.'

At the moment, most people who go to work at a hedge fund do so as a second career. They already have a firm grounding in corporate finance, normally at an investment bank, in research, analysis or proprietary trading.

Dania Falle, managing director at Hong Kong-based recruiting company Capital Markets Intelligence, said: 'Most of the hedge funds have hired people that they know. But I can see it's going to be something for the future, if the trend follows what's happening in other parts of the world.'

Many of the largest alternative-investment players are now opening offices in Asia. For instance, Citadel Investment Group made a splash in the job market in 2005 when it opened a Hong Kong operation that was reportedly looking to hire as many as 100 people.

Headhunters say Citadel did not grow that large and now has about 60 people. But it has joined a steady flow of mainly US-based alternative fund managers which have expanded into Asia.

Oaktree Capital Management now has a team of 35 people in Asia, and has in the past two years opened offices in Hong Kong and Beijing to supplement established bases in Tokyo and Singapore.

Recruiters say hedge funds may often look for analysts or fund managers with a background in venture capital or private equity, which involves investments in private companies rather than the publicly traded stocks that hedge funds target.

So there is room to move between the two camps.

Stephen Small, who heads primary markets recruiting for Pelham Search Pacific, said: 'People can come from a variety of backgrounds. You can have an equity background, a corporate finance background, a quantitative research background. But these are all highly numerical backgrounds, and fundamentally you must have an ability to sniff out investment opportunities.'

So hedge funds are likely to look to recruit from any related financial field - investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, private equity, even company strategists who have worked internally on helping map corporate expansion.

'Whenever I speak to a chief investment officer or a portfolio manager, they always say 'I want the guy to be smart - we can show them how we invest, but they have to be smart',' Mr Small said.

Large hedge funds in the US and Europe occasionally hire new graduates directly out of business school or even undergraduate programmes. But this is not common in Asia.

The senior managers of Asian hedge funds have typically worked together in investment banking or on a proprietary trading desk, and they tend to recruit former colleagues.

But they often look to hire more junior staff in support roles, where a background in research or analysis is likely to make you stand out. Having language skills that you can apply in Asia may also help, but is not vital, as recruiters say the field tends to be dominated by people who speak English.

As hedge funds in Asia grow, staff will be needed to fill a wider range of roles. Though many alternative investment funds outsource much of their back-office operations when they start, they often bring some of those functions in house when they get larger and hit critical mass.

That may see them hiring staff with backgrounds in areas such as information technology, law, accounting, operations and fund administration.

Hedge funds are supposed to be able to make money in any kind of investment market, whether stocks are moving up or down. But a good investment climate never hurts, and there is a lot of money being put to work in Asia. So the opportunities in alternative investments look good as the industry matures.

'There is quite a lot of liquidity in the Asian marketplace right now, and a lot of principal money is moving into Asia - into hedge funds and private equity,' Mr Small said. 'It's definitely a burgeoning marketplace.'

At a glance

The number of hedge fund companies in Hong Kong and the total amount of assets they run has doubled in the past two years, according to a report from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

There are now 118 hedge fund management companies in the city.

The amount of money they manage has risen by 268 per cent to US$33.5billion as of March 2006, in those same two years.

This is up from US$17.5billion in 2005 and US$9.1billion in 2004.

Total assets in Asian hedge funds rose to US$128billion as of the middle of 2006, an increase of 12 per cent in the first six months of the year, according to AsiaHedge.

The study, released last July, showed that assets rose to US$128billion, up from US$115billion at the start of 2006.