Wellington Management Co., the mutual fund giant best known for stock- and bond-picking, hired Hamilton Lane Inc.’s Alex Behm to lead its foray into the hot market of buying and selling private equity stakes.

Behm, who previously worked as a deal lead at Hamilton Lane, will build and manage secondaries strategies for Wellington’s evergreen private investing business that caters to wealthy investors, the Boston-based firm said in an emailed statement. He’ll work closely with Mike Trihy, who joined in August.

Wellington is in the middle of a major transformation, embarking on a new marketing campaign and recruiting aggressively from Wall Street banks and alternative investment firms as it seeks to grow in more lucrative private markets.

The firm and other traditional asset managers have been flocking to private markets, a $24 trillion industry by one estimate. They’ve been grappling with outflows and narrowing margins as clients leave mutual funds for cheaper index products.

The secondaries market has become one of the fastest-growing corners in finance as private equity firms struggle to exit investments in their funds, pushing yield-starved backers to offload their stakes. This week, Coller Capital said it raised $17 billion for its private equity secondaries platform while Ares Management Corp. amassed $7.1 billion for a credit secondaries strategy.

Wellington, which manages about $1.3 trillion, has added several new roles over the past 18 months, including a head of private investments capital formation from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and a team that it lured away from Pacific Investment Management Co. to expand in private credit. It also partnered with Blackstone Inc. and Vanguard Group to launch hybrid funds for retail investors.

While the firm only manages about $10 billion of private assets, it has been investing in private equity for at least a decade and has backed startups such as WeWork and Airbnb Inc. Michael Carmen, a Wellington partner who’s helping to lead the expansion, previously told Bloomberg that the firm is executing a 10-year plan that kicked off in 2023 to grow in the asset class.

Wellington launched its ad campaign this week — its first ever in the US — as it seeks to sell existing and new alternative strategies for advisers to wealthy individuals and expand beyond its core institutional client base.