Hire the Best, Avoid The Rest – The Preeminent Financial Advisor Podcast – Episode 60
With all the money that’s in motion these days, many advisors are feeling the pressures that can accompany a growing client list. To ease those pressures, they often hire the first person who is both available to work for them and who they think may be “good enough.” In short, they fill an empty seat as fast as they can.
That’s a big mistake, according to Kirk Hulett, CEG Worldwide’s managing principal of teaming solutions. The better move: Build your team strategically—not by looking for the next available hire, but for the next best hire.
Recently, Kirk shared some of his key insights and best practices when it comes to identifying and hiring potential hires who are going to pay big dividends to your team and your firm’s financial results.
- Be reflective—not reflexive. When advisors hire reflexively, they immediately try to get someone in to relieve the pain they feel. But very often, that pain point is a temporary one that will fade over a few months. That usually leaves firms with a full-time employee they hired too quickly being put in an ill-defined role to address a problem that no longer exists. In stark contrast, advisor who are reflective about hiring think deeply about their business and the talents, skills and knowledge they’ll likely need three to five years down the road. And they do that thinking well before they go out and interview job candidates.
- Identify your desired business outcomes before you post a job. What will success for the business and for the individual look like at six months post-hire? What are the success metrics at 12 months? They may be different than six months. What are the success metrics at 36 months? They will be different than the 12 months. So really think through that deeply.
- Weigh build versus borrow versus buy. Once you’re clear on your future and the business outcomes you need to see from your team, you have a decision to make: build, borrow or buy?
- Build: Do you need to take someone currently on your team and develop their skills to fill a role?
- Borrow: Do you need a temp or independent contractors to get a specific set of skills for a defined period of time?
- Buy: Do you need to go out to the marketplace and hire the talent to achieve your desired outcome?
- Understand the three types of hires—and which you need. If you decide to “buy,” you’ll likely encounter three main categories of candidates:
- Growth hire. These are hires that are, once they gain some level of proficiency in the job, are going to add new revenue or bring in new clients. This might be an advisor with an existing book of business, or perhaps a business development officer who pursues professional alliances for the firm.
- Stabilizing hire. These employees essentially protect the client service and internal systems that you have now. This is going to be a client service associate, an operations or administrative expert, or a compliance expert. Their role is to add capacity and streamline internal systems—to add scale. That means you want to make sure you’re hiring someone who’s not just going to do the work, but actually make the work more efficient and better. If you have one full-time team member who’s doing, say, a hundred units of work, when you hire the second team member you just don’t want 200 units of work. Between the two of them, you want 225 or 250. That’s scaling.
- Capacity extending hire. These are jobs that take your revenue producers—your senior advisors on your team—and helps them be more efficient and effective. It takes anything they shouldn’t be doing off their plate so that they can be meeting with more clients and clients with higher net worths—and doing that more often. These are the associate advisors, paraplanners, investment managers, portfolio analysts—any sort of role that takes that stuff off of the advisor’s plate.
Want more insights? Check out the podcast at the top of this page for Kirk’s thoughts on the biggest mistakes firms make when hiring, how to determine if you’ve reached the point where you need to hire, and how to balance a candidate’s technical skills with their cultural fit when assessing them.
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