Highland's massive recruitment effort continues.

The $5 billion Dallas-based alts manager today hired nine people to its sales group for non-traded and mutual fund products in the independent broker-dealer channel.

The new hires include five regional sales directors: Daniel Church; Anthony Hazen; Kevin Helwig; Michael Klisares, and Matthew Selman. Four regional sales consultants were also hired.

All nine will report to Brian Mitts, who heads distribution for Highland in the independent broker dealer channel. Highland plans to launch this business by next week. The firm hired Jennifer Ricci as director of national accounts for this channel.

Highland is just gearing up its recruitment efforts.

"We continue to develop our sales group, as well as our products. By the end of the quarter we will have added 10 additional wholesalers," Highland's president Brad Ross.

Ross, who engineered a sales turnaround last year, said "we are moving down the field pretty fast." The firm has seen positive flows for the past year-and-a-half, he said.

His aspirations are ambitious.

"We are approaching $5 billion, including NHF, doubled assets from two years. We are looking to get to ten billion in two years," he said.

Ross said that the firm continues to refine its product lineup, but "the product we are really focusing on now is our Global Allocation fund, run by Jim Dondero," he said.

  The product was a Wall Street Journal Category King in 2013, Ross said, and the number one performing global allocation fund so far YTD for 2014, earning almost twice that of the average.

"In the global allocation space, we are taking marketing share from competitors," he said. 

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