Raymond James Financial continues to be committed to improving diversity at the company and the financial services industry overall despite recent challenges that included the COVID-19 pandemic somewhat stalling its mentorship efforts, according to CEO Paul Reilly.
The firm started recruiting people of color, women and other potential candidates for the Raymond James advisory training program from colleges, he pointed out during a media briefing last week at the Elevate national conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
The company's Black Financial Advisors Network is in its sixth year, he noted. Because "there aren't enough" experienced Black advisors in the market, the firm realized "we're just going to really have to double down on training and recruiting and getting people from those communities younger in life" interested in the financial services industry.
Another challenge, he said: "Whether it's people of color or women, financial services isn't top of mind for them. That isn't helped by films including The Wolf of Wall Street portraying the industry in a way that "isn't very family friendly, which it absolutely is," he said.
"We realized that we can't rely on experienced people" alone when it comes to recruiting advisors and other job candidates, and that "we've got to get much more into the college recruiting" process and even reach out to students before college to "really to make a difference," in addition to career fairs, he said.
The company has been doing that for a couple of years and "learned what doesn't work so well [and] what works OK," Reilly explained.
Raymond James has a pre-training class that gives people time to pass their tests and the firm then brings them into the company's financial advisor training classes because it's found that the step from school to advisor training is too big, he said.
It's also running financial literacy training in schools, with a focus on "inner-city neighborhoods to get access to people [and] give access to people who don't have access," Reilly pointed out.
At the firm's home office, "people are spending an hour a day with kids and becoming their mentors, and we realized they've never even seen the inside of an office building" and often "don't even know those jobs exist," he said.
However, he said, "COVID was hard because you couldn't get people in the office and it's a mentorship business." After all, he explained, there's nothing quite like "having someone that's overseeing you or watching" to help somebody become effective as an advisor.
"So that's going to take time, but we're committed to it," the CEO explained, noting the firm has spent a lot of money on these initiatives and "we're ramping up all those programs" now. "We slowed them down a little bit in COVID just because we didn't think we could train very well if they couldn't come in the office but now that the office is open, we're back full ramp-up," he added.
Other Diversity Initiatives
"We keep working on" diversity at Raymond James overall and "we're trying all sorts of things," Reilly said. For instance, the company has had a Women's Advisory Council for about 20 years, he noted.
"I think we're really one of the leaders" in the industry when it comes to hiring women, he said.
But "the challenge [with] being one of the top recruiters in the industry is our percentage is a lot higher than the industry percentage," he said. "So it's hard to gain when you're recruiting from a market that's less diverse than your own market."
Additionally, one important goal is to try to "make a societal difference," so recruiting women and advisors of color from other firms "makes no difference" in terms of making the sector more diverse, Reilly explained.
