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Angie Herbers, advisory firm consultant and columnist

Practice Management > Building Your Business > Recruiting

Hiring Today Is Tough. Here’s How to Get It Right.

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What You Need to Know

  • Advisor turnover gives firms the chance to hire replacements with better, and clearer, expectations.
  • Be patient, know exactly what role you're hiring for and stick to your intended hiring strategy.
  • To better retain talent, be upfront about the number of clients your advisors or teams are expected to service.

My consulting firm learns a lot about what’s going on in the industry through prospective clients that reach out to us. Firms often come to us because they’re grappling with problems and challenges that, in some cases, turn out to be prevalent throughout the advisory landscape. 

Right now, we’re learning that advisor turnover is picking up steam, well after the COVID-19 heyday of what was called the Great Resignation. What’s happening in financial advisory firms indicates something like a delayed Great Resignation.

Even as wages continue to fluctuate throughout the industry, advisory firms in particular those that didn’t focus on improving their cultures during the COVID pandemic and/or are regressing to pre-2020 cultures are losing advisors. While losing advisors is tough, it’s also an opportunity to replace those vacant positions with roles for which your firm has better and clearer expectations.

As a result, now is a great time for advisory firms to enhance their hiring processes. While there’s no one-size-fits-all hiring method, there are several areas where advisory firms continually make mistakes. 

Here are five areas to watch out for when hiring your next batch of advisors. 

1. Know the job you’re hiring for and stick to it.

It’s not uncommon for a firm to post a job description for, say, a lead advisor — an individual who can work with clients without supervision — and hear back from non-matching, but nonetheless interesting, candidates. 

These respondents might not exactly be lead advisor material, but they might be more suited for business development, for example, or closer in skill level to an associate advisor who aspires to work with clients on their own someday. 

When days and weeks go by without a candidate stepping forward who fits the original job description, some firms often effectively change the position they’re hiring for to accommodate an intriguing candidate’s skills. This isn’t always the best idea. 

First, it’s a sort of bait and switch. When a candidate thinks they are applying for one position and midway through the hiring process you present them with a different position, it can lead to mismatched expectations. 

For example, if an associate advisor applies for what they believe is a lead advisor position, only to find their role is just supporting another advisor, you’ll have an unhappy employee on your hands. 

What’s more, the peripheral hire will take more of your budget than you originally planned for because if you end up hiring two new staff members, you’ll expand your payroll more than you’d planned for. Big firms might have the ability to hire opportunistically and shoulder the extra costs, but small and midsize firms don’t have that luxury.

Be patient, know exactly what role you’re hiring for and stick to your intended hiring strategy.

2. Be honest about advisor capacity.

Based on their service model, some firms have determined that each of their financial advisors should only work with a maximum of, say, 40 clients. Other firms, with a different service model, might put the number at 200 clients. 

Heavy turnover doesn’t necessarily come from the variance in capacity assumptions; it comes when firms aren’t clear with their advisor candidates about capacity expectations. 

To better retain talent, firms should be upfront about the number of clients their advisors or teams can effectively service. The last thing you want is an advisor who’s used to working with, say, 40 clients at their previous firm and then suddenly is expected to work with 100-plus clients at your firm. 

The same is true for associate advisors, those who cannot yet work directly with clients on their own. It’s important that you let the candidate know how much client exposure they are going to get. 

If they believe they will be working with clients at onset and your goal is to put them more behind the scenes to support other advisors in the firm, you’ll have a misalignment of capacity expectations.

3. Pay fair wages.

In today’s robust hiring environment for experienced financial advisors, firms must know what their fair wage is. The goal of every advisory firm should not be to look at benchmarking studies on compensation, but rather to figure out what they can afford. 

Affordability is your firm’s fair wage. From experience, I can tell you that you can find good quality advisors who will accept all sorts of pay ranges. But you’re not going to retain those advisors if you aren’t honest about what you see as the fair wage for hiring them. 

I have seen many firms simply tell an advisor candidate that they’re not suitable for the job because the firm can’t support the wage they’re seeking. 

There’s nothing wrong with saying to a candidate that the wage they want is higher than the wage your firm is willing to pay. The problems arise when you hire based on a wage that’s outside of what you deem as fair and resent the hire for it after bringing them on board.

4. Take no for an answer.

Simply put, when a job prospect declines your offer, respect their “no.” 

We’re seeing firms that receive a “no” sweetening their offer. All this does is illustrate to the candidate that you are desperate, opted to lowball them in the first place, and don’t respect boundaries. 

Remember, candidates who tell you “no” are doing you a favor by saving you from future turnover. 

5. Build a professional culture.

Every financial advisor has a different capacity for working with clients each day. Some have more energy one day and less the next. Some tend to have lengthy conversations with clients and others are shorter and to the point. Some are most comfortable working within a conventional 9-to-5 framework and others are a bit more unpredictable. 

In my experience, the most successful firms see their advisors as professionals. And professionals can set their own schedules, take breaks when needed, aren’t at maximum capacity everyday and so on. There certainly can, and should, be boundaries, but a significant degree of advisor autonomy is essential for firms seeking strong, sustainable growth. 

When a job candidate asks questions about whether they’ll be required to work full time from the office, understand that they’re really asking, “How professional is your culture?” 

At this point in the evolution of advisory firms, the answer should be something like: “We’d like to see you each day, but we also know that the most important aspect of your job is client service. Hopefully you’re taking care of yourself along the way, and we trust you to do that.” 

The bottom line is that if you’re honest with the advisors about the position you are hiring for, truthful with yourself about what you can afford to pay in wages, and respect your advisors’ autonomy and treat them in a professional way, you’ll have a much better chance at hiring great advisors and retaining them. 


Angie Herbers is chief executive and senior consultant at Herbers & Co., an independent management strategy consultancy for financial advisory firms.


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