Here’s how business advisors find great talent now

Jill Herrick, HR Manager, Skyeburst Wealth Management: For our last three hires, we hired either a long-term client or an intern. This is probably indicative of 90% of our employees in the last five years. Dan Wilson, our managing partner and owner of the practice, has a book of clients. If we have a specific vacancy and he has a client who he thinks will fit the job description, he will reach out and see if there is interest. We will then put the person through our internal interview process and in most cases hire them.

Dan usually has long-term relationships with these people and knows what they do and what field they work in. And if he encounters a fit, he reaches out and has a very honest, frank conversation. It was created absolutely without any problems. I can speak from personal experience because that’s how I joined Skyeburst. I have worked in HR for over 25 years and Dan’s practice had grown enough to need this role and he contacted me.

One person we recently hired was a client who worked in the public school system. She now works in our financial planning team. We just hired an intern, also in financial planning. He has been working for us for about eight months and is graduating from college in May. It was a great way to get to know him and make sure he was a good fit for our organization. Our latest hire works in customer service and is a longtime customer of Dan’s.

Gary Lukaczynski, Financial Advisor, Simmons Point Group of Janney Montgomery Scott: Six years ago, Craig Sherer, a 29-year-old who had been at Newbridge Securities, approached us. I was against it at the time because we were so busy, but I agreed to meet him at six in the morning before we went to the office. I thought he was going to say no because I’m in Long Island and he was in Queens. He actually showed up early and we knew right away in talking to him that he was perfect for us. My partner Michael Oliver and I walked out of that meeting, went to our cars, and I don’t think my car was even in reverse when I called him and said we have to hire this kid. I told Michael I don’t know what I’m going to do with him, but we’ll figure it out. It is an integral part of our business today; I couldn’t imagine not having him on the team.

Matt Gambino was a Janney employee in a hybrid role training program. They were training him to be a customer service associate and then preparing him to be a counselor. He bounced around from person to person in a rotation program, but didn’t really stick with anyone. When we talked to him, we had a conversation about what he really wanted to do. Turns out he really loves research. We were looking for someone to do some research. Now he works directly with Craig.

One of our most important employees was Michael [Oliver]who was chief operating officer at Morgan Stanley
.

I was talking to him about coming with me and he was like, ‘No, I’m the manager. I will never leave.” I kept going back and talking to him about it until finally one day he picked up the phone and said, “I think we should have breakfast; maybe we want to do that.

Casey Bates, Managing Director of Strategy and Growth, Concurrent: Our greatest success comes from leveraging our network of employees and executives.

Some of the best employees we’ve hired weren’t actually looking for a job; they either worked in the past with someone who is now an executive on our team, or one of our employees knew someone who was perfect for a specific role we were trying to fill.

I think using the network of your employees and supervisors is something that gets overlooked a lot in this industry, but it can help you hire someone in a shorter period of time, but also find those who might not even be available on the market. The last three people I personally brought in included Ashley Stoker, who had worked with me at United Capital; she came as associate vice president of consulting engagement and growth support. Most recently, I brought on Matt Unger, who had also worked with me at United Capital for many years. He will lead our centralized wealth advisory services team.

And I brought Kerry McDermott, the newest employee, into developing all of these enterprise growth programs. Joe Mooney, who recently joined us from Fidelity, had worked with Carey for years at Schwab. She has a lot of experience in deploying and developing enterprise growth programs and was exactly the right fit for the role I was looking for.

Rick Myers, Head of Clients and Advisory, Bernstein Private Wealth Management. One of our recently hired wealth advisors came to us from an RIA that had closed a deal not too long ago [done an M&A deal]. They weren’t someone in a very high position in equity, but they had built up a very good practice. They looked into the future and saw that there was no significant positive effect “beyond the W-2” in the company for them. And they looked at the platform that was being built or recruited and said, “Look, there’s a lot of deficits and a lot more work that’s going to happen in terms of integration.” For this particular advisor, at this turning point in their career, that it was a really good opportunity for them to get involved in our business.

Another person who just joined the firm was at a junior level in a larger Wirehouse team. She hasn’t had a chance to demonstrate her ability to go build a practice yet, but she has all the skills we’re looking for. This hire will join us, go through our new advisor training program of around 13 weeks and join us on what is effectively an apprentice pathway.

She will have a year in the role to learn to build momentum, build her network, to begin demonstrating that she can fill her calendar in useful and entrepreneurial ways. And then essentially, in her second year, she’ll have the opportunity to build with the same expectations and criteria for success that a more experienced wealth advisor would have.

Write to [email protected]