Are you currently trying to recruit financial advisers?
If you are, I feel your pain… This is a really live issue for so many of you out there, and is proving a very difficult nut to crack. Your business has been growing strongly in recent years and there are now lots more clients that require an excellent service from you every year – but you are really struggling with the capacity to deliver to them. Hence you need more people, both to service existing clients and to bring in future new clients to continue your growth path.
But great advisers that are available (at the right price) are as rare as hen’s teeth. Here are a few thoughts on how you can position your business at the top of the queue to attract new talent, by identifying the sort of attributes that excellent people will be seeking.
Offer a competitive package
OK, the money is not everything… but it’s always going to be very close to the top of a potential new recruit’s list. Be creative with your package – look for ways that will attract and motivate people. This might be in bonus structures, additional employee benefits and make sure that their rewards are clearly aligned with the goals of your business.
Most excellent advisers will also want to see a path to gaining equity in your business. While this can be a tough pill to swallow for some business owners, if structured correctly it can work well for both parties. What you give away in business equity will be recouped many time over, if the route to gaining a share in the business is designed well. It will also help foster future loyalty to the business. And of course, giving them some ownership may also help with your own exit in time, by breeding your potential successor.
Show a clear career path
Good people want to grow, they’re not moving jobs just to coast along. They will want to progress within your business and will want to see opportunities that they can further their career. You might enable this through mentoring programmes, education support and executive coaching and by showing them a clear path to promotion, higher earnings and greater levels of responsibility.
Have a top class brand and proposition
There are some firms out there that hardly need to sell themselves. Potential recruits know they are top quality outfits before they’ve even met you. These firms have a trusted and visible brand presence, but we all know that this doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from careful brand building and maintaining an excellent and consistent presence as one of the leading businesses in the market.
Central to supporting a superior brand presence is your business proposition. If you want to attract the right candidates, you need to wow them with the quality of your proposition. This includes the services you offer, the tools you use, the processes and the technology within the business, the quality of communication to clients and the careful consideration of every touchpoint with your clients. These potential recruits want to see that their personal drive for excellence is mirrored by that off your business.
Offer a high degree of flexibility and control
Good people want to be left to get on with the job. They won’t want you looking over their shoulder at every stage, monitoring every last thing they do. They will look to you definitely for leadership, for a level of management, but if you are looking to constantly supervise them, this is probably not going to be for them.
They want to have a reasonable and realistic level of control over their own destiny and how they work, while you quite rightly will set out the parameters in which your business and they must operate. They will want a level of flexibility in how they work – again likely not seeking any more than what is reasonable. They want to be treated like an adult.
Great people are happy to be part of a team
While excellent advisers may do a lot of their work with clients alone, they recognise the benefits of being part of a successful team. They clearly see the benefits of collaboration, helping each other grow, having great sounding boards around them and having a bit of craic along the way!
So, it might be worth taking a step back before you rush off in search of the best candidates, thinking about the attributes that you might be looking for in them. Spend time thinking about your own business and how you can ensure it is the sort of place in which great people will want to work.
