Or insurance agents, planners, brokers, reps, associates, and other sales producers.
In fact, if you’re a financial advisor or other type of sales producer and want to earn some points with your agency director, sales manager, managing director, general agent, branch manager, or complex manager (did I cover all the bases here?), forward this information to them!
If you run a firm or happen to be focused on growing a firm (branch, complex, agency – you get the idea), then the concept of recruiting is important. Real important!
In my work with firms for almost twenty years, I can say one thing for sure. Very few firms have the recruiting thing down. Even many of the top firms struggle with it.
Being an effective recruiting firm is much more than simply attracting people to your firm and hiring them. It’s about attracting the right people to your firm and effectively training them to be financial advisors.
Bottom line retention of advisors is awful in the financial services industry. There is roughly a 10-15% retention rate of financial advisors, agents, and brokers. That means close to 90% of those that are hired fail. The top firms in the life insurance industry seem to be somewhere around 35%.
The best recruiting is with retention in mind.
Recrention! (I just made that up!)
Anyway, here are some questions to think about.
How much does it cost your firm to recruit, hire, and train an advisor?
How many advisors do you hire a year?
How many advisors do you retain in year one? Year two? Year three?
How many advisors do you lose in a year?
Do the math and determine how much money your firm is losing throughout the course of a year.
OK, are you with me?
Here are the 3 Musts of Recruiting that may be helpful for you to be more effective at recruiting and retaining successful financial advisors to your firm!
There MUST be a formal recruiting and retention process in place.
What would happen in your firm if you had a seminar, meeting, or some other initiative that was on the calendar every month? Like every first Wednesday or something like that? A recruiting director or other manager could be responsible for promoting, managing, organizing, coordinating, confirming, and following up on the meeting. Advisors could refer friends, colleagues, prospects, and even clients to the meeting. Provide bagels and coffee and you’re in business! The focus shouldn’t be completely about your firm and recruiting. It might be best to have a speaker that shares a valuable message depending on the audience.
Managers MUST organize a formal hiring committee for their firm.
If a hiring committee was in place with a minimum hiring standard, you would potentially be hiring with retention in mind – depending on the standard. The standard shouldn’t be a “we need to hire 4 more advisors to hit our numbers” standard. Or a standard around a candidate’s network, database, or natural market. The standard should be around experience level, background, professionalism, personality, vision, desire, purpose, intelligence, image, drive, and intention to succeed and help others. What type of candidate would make you proud and make the brand of your firm look good?
Agency training for new advisors MUST be awesome.
This goes beyond an advisor, rep, or broker simply learning about products and services. All firms train on products and services. But I know a lot of advisors that are product experts and don’t have clients to help with all that knowledge. The training should be around networking and how to effectively meet and talk to people in business settings. Think about how successful your advisors would be if they were confident about “working a room” and having a professional conversation with other business people. Do you think those new advisors would be able to generate referrals, sales appointments, and perhaps other recruiting opportunities for your firm?
Of course, there are more than just 3 MUSTS, but this is a great start!
What are you doing in your firm to successfully recruit and retain topflight talent?
