Not long ago, the prospect of Wall Street hiring again seemed remote indeed.

But with the Dow hovering around 9500, capital-raising reaching robust levels and even the M&A markets showing small signs of life following Disney’s $4 billion acquisition of Marvel and Baker & Hughes $5.5 billion deal for rival BJ Services, Wall Street firms are doing the unthinkable and adding headcount.

So much has changed since the calamitous events started to unfold more than two years ago that anyone towards the start of a financial services career should think carefully before just signing on with one of the few surviving behemoths, like Goldman Sachs or JPMorganChase.

The big banks are still trapped in the hopeless funding conundrum of borrowing short-term – through demand deposits or overnight loans – and lending long-term, making them susceptible to rare but devastating losses of investor confidence.

By comparison, major private equity funds like KKR rely on committed, long-term financing and are intriguing places to work.

You might say, ‘Duh! Who wouldn’t want to work for KKR?’ After all, it’s always been the holy grail. But the firm is evolving and given new business lines, a hiring spree and its desire to
be more a full service firm, there’s more chance of getting in.

Not only has KKR moved swiftly in the improving markets to take public its winning recent investments – Dollar General, Avago Technologies – (as well as the firm itself, through a complex merger with a publicly listed European affiliate) but the firm has also created an investment banking division to underwrite stocks and bonds, for its own deals and others. This will slowly but surely start to take fees away from Wall Street.

KKR has correctly realized that there is no reason to cede hundreds of millions of fees annually to Wall Street underwriters when it has the capital, brand – and thanks to a deal with Fidelity Investments – the distribution network to take fees from (and to disrupt) the traditional Wall Street pecking order. KKR has been hiring aggressively to build its underwriting business. Can offering M&A advice be far behind?

This is what makes the firm so intriguing these days: It appears to be at the vanguard of creating a new, diversified, highly-profitable Wall Street bank that acts as both principal and agent, without nearly the risk or regulation of the traditional firms (which is not to say that the firm is without risk).

Indeed a number of firms – among them, The Blackstone Group, Evercore, Greenhill, Peter Solomon & Co. and Moelis & Co. – are rushing to fill the void left by the collapse of the Wall Street banking model. These – plus the traditional firms Lazard and Rothschild that have stuck to their knitting – are the ones worthy of serious consideration for both those just starting out and veterans looking for firms likely to grow by attracting new clients without being wedded to the old flawed funding model.

In the short term this may not be apparent. Goldman, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have benefitted from the troubles of Bear, Lehman and Merrill (although why Morgan Stanley has been unable to make money in the last year or so is a bit of a mystery). But in the longer term, it is the upstart boutiques that are likely to make for a more compelling career in the ever-changing financial services industry.