In our last video, we discussed why it’s so important for an advisor when they’re considering making a broker dealer or RIA change to find a really quality third-party recruiting firm to help them in. Today I wanted to dive in a little bit deeper and talk about how an advisor can interview a third-party recruiter to try to find the best one. And I kind of look at it this way.
Think about a client coming to an advisor, interviewing several advisors, trying to find the advisor that’s going to best suit their needs. There’s going to be similar questions that should be asked. The first one is expertise. How much time does that recruiter have in the industry? Do they have enough experience working with advisors, leading them through a process to really understand what it takes to place someone at a quality firm?
The reality is you have to be in the industry for a pretty long period of time to understand the width and breadth of the marketplace and all the options that are available out there. And that leads me to my second point is understand the connections that recruiter has. It does an advisor absolutely no good to work with a third-party recruiting firm that only represents a handful of companies. What ends up happening in that situation is the recruiter is only going to show firms that pay the most dollars to that recruiting firm and a recruiter will be completely biased in the firms that they’re showing an advisor. So, ask the specific questions of how many companies that recruiter works with and really understand why they work with those firms and the niche of the types of firms that are out there.
The truth is everybody knows the big firms. We could probably list them off. There’s a handful of them. But there are so many qualities, mid-size and smaller firms out there that are great to advisors, and advisors should really know about. The third thing is integrity.
This is really understanding the recruiting firm’s process. Do they throw out your name to a bunch of firms hoping to be attached to your identity and hopefully get paid? Or do they present options to you and walk you through the process, not talking to a firm or violating any confidentiality before you’re ready to talk to a company? This is a really difficult one that advisors really don’t understand necessarily the process before they’re working with a third-party recruiter. But confidentiality is the utmost important thing to talk to a potential recruiter about because you do not want your name, your identity, and all of the specifics about your business out in the marketplace before you’re actually ready to start talking to firms.
And then the fourth thing is involvement. Some recruiters will just throw out some names to advisor and hope that they join one of those companies. I think before you choose a company that you’re going to work with, really understand do they have a developed process to walk you through identifying firms, interviewing firms, negotiating with companies all the way through the transition phase? Because a transition is very complicated. It’s not just about identifying a company and choosing one.
It’s really about the full cycle process of that move. So, in summary, it’s really important for an advisor that’s looking at their options to choose a third-party recruiter that’s going to represent them well, that’s going to have the experience that they need in order to really lead an advisor through the process that’s going to represent them with integrity and respecting the process and is going to try to identify opportunities that the advisor wouldn’t know about on their own. If you have any interest in exploring your options, give us a confidential call today. We’d love to chat with you.
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