"I can't find good people to hire." Among advisory firm leaders' most frequent complaints over my 20-year career as an industry consultant, the difficulty of finding the right talent is right at the top.
The "fierce talent for competition" has become a cliché in our businesses, and firm leaders often conclude that the only way to win this competition is to offer candidates more pay than rival firms. But there's a different way to win, one that doesn't involve writing progressively bigger checks.
There are plenty of young professionals and career changers looking for opportunity. As a leader, you can better attract and retain this talent by putting yourself in the candidates' shoes and assessing the prospect of working for your own firm. If you take a hard, honest look, you might find several reasons job candidates steer clear of joining your firm.
They might include:
- New employees are asked to generate business
- Career paths are vague or non-existent
- Compensation rewards are vague
- Professional work takes a backseat to administrative work
- Candidates are expected to be experts in many areas (Read: You are seeking the perfect candidate versus accepting the reality that all people have strengths and weaknesses.)
- There's a lack of culture and community
- Employees aren't trusted to manage their own time
Things like culture, career paths and room to grow are key considerations for job candidates. If working at your organization isn't appealing as a long-term prospect, paying generously won't help with attraction and retention. Money is a small part of the job profile, largely because it's a short-term consideration.
To an extent that many employers don't understand, quality candidates mostly take a long-term view when looking for positions. They want to see an appealing career path. They want to see the ability to grow professionally in a supportive environment.
Candidates will quickly figure out whether your firm has a clear model for career advancement. They'll know if you're going to allow and help them to grow. If you ask new advisors to do administrative work when they're trained as professionals, you're sending the message that you don't trust them to handle important responsibilities and grow.
Business Aims vs. Financial Advice
You might wonder what's wrong with expecting new employees to generate business. After all, that's how most firm leaders started their careers. The problem is, asking new hires to bring in business makes your business sound unappealing. Who wants to work for a company that has a problem winning new clients?
More importantly, new advisors tend to have training and credentials in financial advice. They don't have degrees or experience in marketing and sales. Asking these folks to join your firm and do something that they're not trained to do — and often not interested in doing — is setting them up to fail. And they know it.
Sales jobs and financial advisor jobs involve different sets of skills. Financial advice professionals early in their career need to know they'll be treated as financial advice professionals and not subjected to continual demands that they deliver up their family and friends as clients.
Furthermore, leaders' insistence on hiring advisors who share their enthusiasm for selling doesn't make sense. Why seek to hire someone who is a carbon copy of yourself and your skills? If you're really good at business development, why not hire service advisors for current clients so that you can focus on generating new business for the firm?
There's also the route of training a new advisor to bring in new clients. But it makes little sense from a business perspective to invest time training someone else to do what you have already mastered.
The Right Expectations
Just as firm leaders expect new advisors to sell because that's what they themselves have had to do, many expect new advisors to be as knowledgeable about planning and investing as they are. But of course, it's exceedingly difficult to be an expert in everything from investments to insurance to education planning to retirement planning at the outset of one's career. Expertise takes time to develop.
