While working with advisors and their growing practices across the nation, questions about hiring crop up frequently. After all, successful advisors have growing teams.
Through our years of experience, we’ve identified the critical areas of intelligent hiring to help advisors embrace best practices when adding key staff members.
How to Know When it’s Time to Hire
These are the sure-fire signs you need to consider growing your team:
- If you have limited capacity within the team to take on more due to being overwhelmed with tasks and responsibilities; this is hiring to “catch up” from a work perspective.
- You want to grow the practice but can’t with your current number of team members; this is hiring to be “proactive towards growth” unlike the “catch-up” problem above.
- You have no time to focus on business development, practice improvement, and overall growth as you’re too busy with administrative, relationship management, or general planning tasks.
- You’re consistently dealing with a poor performer on the team that is impacting the practice and/or clients in a negative way.
- You’re seeing under-performance within the team after coaching them without seeing results.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring
These are the classic things advisors get wrong when hiring staff:
- Not performing compensation planning or doing any industry or local market research to create a fair offer, while simply making assumptions off the last hire you made.
- No idea of what role to hire for; just randomly adding more staff.
- Assuming that posting a job on a career job site will lead to quality candidates.
- No consistent interview process among candidates and not utilizing advanced interviewing techniques.
- Not getting the team involved, which helps with embracing new hires.
- Rushing through the process and getting the wrong person, just to place a “body” in the role versus truly finding the best fit.
- Not running a skills test during the interview process; a critical step that few advisors do when hiring.
Why Avoiding a Bad Hire is Critical
Here’s how a single bad hire can bring chaos to your firm:
- First, every bad hire results in a major monetary loss, typically around 30% of their annual salary.
- Plus, consider the time lost by your team for anyone that was involved in the hiring process; calculate their hourly rate and all the hours spent in the process. Yikes!
- Disruption of your team’s culture; this is the most damaging as the above two points are financially costly, yet cultural fallout can serve as a long-term impact not only internally but with clients as well.
- Additionally, other team members may leave due to a bad hire, which may be almost incalculable depending on their relationship with your clients.
Why Go from “Good Enough” Hiring to the Next Level
- First, why is “good enough” good enough? At Ironstone, we have hiring expertise that helps you strive for absolute excellence while creating a structured process that is independently repeatable for all future hires.
- Our proven formula for hiring gets you the very best fit versus “good enough.”
- We teach you our custom process so you can use this system regardless of the type of hire.
- As certified administrators of PXT Select hiring methods and experts in Myers-Briggs, we coach you through the entire process to ensure you navigate the human capital gauntlet successfully, avoiding the pitfalls, strengthening your interviewing skills and running critical skills tests.
- As an external third party, we can also interview your candidates for an additional opinion based in our deep hiring experience.
Enjoy the Benefits of Making a Good Hire
- Getting the team involved in hiring strengthens their relationship with the new hire, positively impacting your corporate culture and morale.
- The new hire fills the needs gap and expands capacity to grow the practice.
- Clients feel the positive impact of the new hire, engendering additional trust with them.
- As an advisor, you’ll enjoy a better work-life balance and feel better about leaving clients in good hands when taking much-needed and well-deserved time off.
How can a Recruiter Help Identify Top Talent?
Sometimes a firm needs a dedicated recruiting team to identify ideal talent in their area. For example:
- Advisors often don’t want to do the heavy lifting or don’t have the time, and a recruiter is an ideal choice.
- The recruiter will proactively fill the pipeline with candidates, vet them and send you individuals for you to continue interviewing.
- Ironstone Strategic Partner Talent Wealth Recruiting has worked closely to help advisors find new recruits, and they often work in conjunction with you to interview the candidates they’ve identified.
- As experts in the financial industry, Talent Wealth Recruiting are former corporate recruiters that have carved their niche with independent advisors like you.
- With their extensive experience, Talent Wealth Recruiting understands the market and the compliance gauntlet, with plenty of knowledge on how to navigate the advisory world.
“We focus on proactively identifying the very best candidate for someone’s needs” said Paul Garcia, Partner at Talent Wealth Recruiting. “While everyone could likely hire “somebody” on their own, unemployment is currently at it’s lowest numbers in several decades so there is not a large amount of individuals even looking at job postings as most are employed.
“The key is to find the excellent employee that is mostly happy at their current job at another company, finding out how their situation can be improved, and enticing that person to join your team.”
“Also, with our years of experience in interviewing we can help identify which candidates will likely be successful and which ones have red flags that we have seen in the past that led to poor performance. With a combined fifteen years focused on recruiting financial services roles, particularly financial advisor support roles, we understand the positions, the job market, and the industry terminology which enables us to identify the right person for your firm more quickly and efficiently.”
Need help with hiring? You’ve come to the right place. Through our strategic partnership, Ironstone will help you navigate the interviewing minefields, and Talent Wealth Recruiting will pinpoint top talent to fill the gaps.
Drop us a line and let’s grow your advisory team successfully!
