Until the financial planning profession begins to become more of a profession of choice for the younger crop of new talent, finding candidates to interview for roles within your firms will continue to be challenging.

As a recruiting firm for financial advisors, the question we are asked frequently is “how do you find your candidates?” The short answer is that a lot of them find us, thanks to our strong reputation as a firm that matches the best candidates to the best financial planning firms!

For your typical financial planning firm that isn’t continuously hiring, though, it’s hard to rely on brand and reputation alone to attract the best candidates.

In this month’s article, part 1 of a 2-part series, we describe how building a solid web presence and adopting various online channels can help you to source your own talent.

Here are four components firms should consider when evaluating their online presence from the perspective of attracting future employees:

• Website - Due to the lack of a popular and widely adopted job board for quality financial planning positions, lots of job seekers simply Google financial planning firms in the location they are seeking to work. Thus, firms that have focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get themselves to the top of the search results are most likely to find prospective hires reaching out (similar to prospecting for clients!). Of course, this requires you to have a website that is up to par in the first place. If your website site is lacking, it is going to be very difficult to get Gen X and Y workers excited about your firm. A good target to strive for is to spend a few thousand for an overhaul, or at least an update, every couple of years.

 

• Industry Media – The top candidates are reading the leading industry publications like Investment News, the Journal of Financial Planning, Financial Planning magazine, and ThinkAdvisor.com. They are looking for thought leaders and firm owners with interesting stories, to whom they can reach out to for potential employment opportunities. Firms that are active in the various industry publications are able to cast a wider net and establish themselves as industry thought leaders, which is appealing to possible new hires (as well as prospective clients)! In other words, getting media exposure isn’t just good for getting potential clients; it can help a firm get better prospective employees, too!

 

• Social media – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook can be very powerful tools for finding future employees. For example, when we post our clients’ open job opportunities, the combined 32,000 Twitter followers of both our New Planner Recruiting (@NewPlnrRec) and Michael Kitces’ (@MichaelKitces) accounts, along with other social media platforms like Facebook, provide for thousands of impressions to potential job candidates. And that does not account for the exponential increase in impressions if they “Like” or “Retweet”

 

• Job boards – These have been around forever, and are popular thanks to the relatively appealing cost-versus-effort tradeoff. The power of the internet makes it possible for firms to have their open positions viewed by a large number of prospective candidates. Unfortunately, though, it can be challenging though to decide which job board to use, because the benefit of the job board is only as good as the candidates that visit it. We have included a chart below to help you sort through some of the more popular options available. Sometimes hiring firms can get lucky utilizing a non-industry board, but we suggest sticking to the industry-specific if possible, even though there is never any guarantee. However, keep in mind, for more experience candidates who are often not actively looking for new opportunities, using job boards will not work because they are not looking in the first place.

 

  

Job Board	Post Duration	Cost	Contact
Career Builder	30 days	$419	www.careerbuilder.com
Monster	30 days	$210-$395 (varying by location)	www.monster.com
FPA	30 days	$100	www.fpanet.org
NAPFA	90 days	$100	www.napfa.org
Craigslist	30 days	$15-75, varies by location	www.craigslist.com
eFinancialCareers/FINS	30 days	$495	www.efinancialcareers.com
Facebook	Varies	varies, cost per click	www.facebook.com
LinkedIn	30 days	Depends on the geographical location. Option to purchase job credits (5 job credits @ $230.00 per job or 10 job credits @ $175.00 per job.	www.linkedin.com
CFP Board Job Board	30/60/90 days	$350/$630/$820 bundle packages include (Five 30 day $1450 or Ten 30 day for $2800)	www.cfp.net
Glassdoor	30 days	$99	www.glassdoor.com
Indeed	Unlimited	Free to post option - provides little post visibility. Sponsor your post - $5-$20 the more you spend the more visibility your post will receive.	www.indeed.com
Snagajob	30	$89	www.snagajob.com
SimplyHired	30	$299	www.simplyhired.com

 

Stay tuned for next month’s article, on what firms can do in addition to these items listed above, to help find candidates for their job opening.

And remember, if this seems like a huge hassle and time drain, we are here to assist firms by allowing them to outsource these burdensome time consuming activities to us. You can view more information about our services, and see some of our other online materials, at www.newplannerrecruiting.com.