HOW TO ATTRACT AND RETAIN THE BEST TALENT IN YOUR FINANCIAL BUSINESS

With expert advice on how to attract and retain candidates, what your employees expect of you, the cost of recruitment as well as how digital recruitment solutions can help, it’s full of information to help you nail your recruitment and get your financial advice headcount to where you want it to be.

If you’re juggling all the different aspects of running a financial

advisory firm, it can be hard to set aside enough time to attract

the best talent. As a specialist financial recruitment agency

representing paraplanners, administrators and financial advisers,

there’s nothing we don’t know about recruiting and retaining new

talent – and in this guide, we share with you our top tips to make

sure you get your recruitment right first time.

THE REAL COST OF RECRUITMENT

A bad hire is a pretty expensive mistake to make. In fact, the REC predicts that a mid-manager bad hire with a salary of £42,000 could cost companies an eye-watering total of £132,500 when you factor in the cost of wasted salary, training, recruiting, loss of productivity and staff turnover. This would be in the region of an entry level financial adviser or a paraplanner’s salary – and considering the average financial adviser salary can be upwards of £60k, it’s easy to see why it’s so important to get your recruitment right first time.If you do hire the right person for the job, there’s also the amount of time involved internally to fill a new position to consider. At Recruit UK, our averages show that for most financial positions, 40 people apply for any given job (including passive candidates that we might approach). If you were to manage the recruitment process in house, screening 40 applicants equates to a lot of hours. The average salaried job takes up roughly 20 hours in screening, or £2,000 if you value your time at £100 an hour. The average screening call takes around 30 minutes, and if 20% of the applicants make it through to interview stage, you’re talking about eight interviews. With each interview lasting approximately an hour and a half, that’s a further 12 hours of work – at least! – at a cost of £1,200 to the business.

You also need to think about the time involved in hiring new staff. Hiring new staff can take anywhere between eight to 12 weeks to get started for paraplanner roles, whereas it can take six to 12 months to hire a financial adviser and for them to be properly up and running. Once you’ve hired the right candidate you’ll also have to think about onboarding, FCA fees, training and other costs such as software licences, office space and equipment. All of this takes time and effort, so it’s really important to get your recruitment right!

2. DON’T BE AFRAID TO BRAG: In today’s competitive financial recruitment market, you need to show your potential candidates what makes your company so special. If a candidate is actively looking for a job, they will most likely be seeing a minimum of eight different companies – so it’s really important that you stand out from the crowd and make it clear why they should want to work with you. How do you do it? By showing your potential candidates what makes your company unique.

You want potential candidates to look at your company and think ‘I want to be part of that’. Financial advice firms tend to have a bit of a bad reputation for being stuffy and old fashioned, so you need to try and dispel that myth. Promote a modern, flexible, hardworking and fun environment and you will not only attract the best financial talent, but you’ll also retain them for longer, too. A good way to do this is through videos and blogs, as well as creating and updating an Instagram and Facebook page to showcase the fun side of working for your business. If you haven’t already got one, make sure you build a ‘work for us’ page on your website too, to highlight all the benefits of being part of your firm.

3. APPEAL TO PASSIVE CANDIDATESPassive candidates – that’s candidates that are already employed but are open to other opportunities - make up 75% of the workforce. This is the ideal type of employee to attract; because accepting your role is a choice, not a necessity, they are more likely to stay with you. Start by engaging through LinkedIn and sharing your latest vacancies on social media to get your company ‘out there’ and in front of potential candidates, and make sure you stay in touch with passive candidates via emails promoting blogs and interesting articles, so when they are ready to look for a new job, yours is the first firm they think of!

With one in five financial advisers set to exit the industry in the next five years – which could total 7,000 advisers leaving the industry in the next half-decade – the financial advice recruitment market is becoming increasingly competitive.

In these challenging times, it’s never been more important to attract and retain the best financial talent. Hiring new workers is never an easy process and can be very time-consuming, but here are a few ways in which you can attract the right talent to your business:

1. SOCIAL MEDIA PRESCENCE A good social media presence will help build the credibility of your business. All too often we see SMEs not investing in the simple things that can help them attract more candidates. Advertising on job boards or enlisting the help of recruitment agencies without a specialist knowledge of the market are all expensive and often ineffective ways of attracting financial talent to your firm. Social media, however, is a great way to grab the attention of potential candidates and get your company name out there – and it’s absolutely free!

With so many people using social media platforms nowadays, you’d be missing out on a massive pool of potential candidates if you weren’t active. Think about the channels you use - for example, LinkedIn is great for connecting with those who are actively looking for new roles, whereas Facebook might allow you to reach passive candidates who haven’t considered the opportunities available. Make sure that all of your posts are engaging and that you keep one eye on your competitors - it’s always useful to see what sort of content they’re posting! Lastly, spend a few minutes each day engaging with others to start conversations and get your brand known.

HOW TO RECRUIT THE BEST FINANCIAL TALENT

4. DIGITAL RECRUITMENT SOLUTIONSThis leads us on to our final point! Digital recruitment solutions often get forgotten, but increasing your online presence is arguably one of the most effective ways of attracting new talent. For example, creating a great online presence with an attractive, user-friendly website with good content and an informative and relevant blog will help to bring you to the top of organic search results. In other words, candidates will find you first when searching for a new role - and the more content you produce, the more authority you’ll build up as a credible business, putting even more candidates in front of you!

You could utilise HubSpot, a CRM system, to keep a track of candidate enquiries. You can also use it to create landing pages for your job vacancies, schedule all your social media posts to all your social accounts at once, and send out emails to your leads all in one place. This helps to create a professional and slick operation; no one wants to work for an antiquated, bumbling business. Using traditional marketing methods such as print advertising will mean that you’ll miss out on high-quality candidates, whereas digital, brand-led marketing campaigns will promote your name and increase your authority in the industry.

HOW TO RETAIN YOUR EMPLOYEES

So, you’ve managed to attract some high-quality financial professionals to your business – great! Now you need to make sure you retain them. Employee turnover tends to welcome bad connotations, probably because replacing employees is often a costly process when you take into account employee compensation and business profitability. Excessive turnover can cost an organisation about 33% of its employees’ compensation package, which includes wages and benefits, so it’s clear to see why investing in retaining your current employees is so important.

The reasons for poor retention rates vary from industry to industry, business to business, but some of the most common reasons include a lack of workplace morale, poor people management, minimal training and development investments, and external factors such as new opportunities, family situations and lifestyle choice. The UK average employee turnover rate is around 15% a year, with the financial services industry coming in at one of the highest at 10.8%. So if you’re struggling to retain talent in your financial advice business, here are a few ways you can boost your retention rates…

1. INVEST IN EMPLOYEE BENEFITSEmployee retention and engagement remain the two most pressing issues in HR today, with approximately 58% of millennials expecting to leave their current job in three years or less. However, with 42% of financial firms seeking to grow and transfer internally to a new management team when their current leaders exit, the industry needs new financial advisers to rise up the ranks and fill the looming adviser gap. Of course, when it comes to retaining your employees, money talks – but these days, it’s about more than just offering a competitive salary.

Benefits such as flexible work rotas, work-from-home days, and a greater number of paid holidays are becoming increasingly popular; they’re a great way to ensure employees’ happiness and productivity. An employee enjoying a good work-life balance will ultimately stay with the organisation for a longer period of time. Open up the lines of communication within your business to see what your employees would value most. Customised hours, healthcare, training and development (more on that below!) – it’s all about showing your staff that you are invested in them and their future.

DIGITAL RECRUITMENT SOLUTIONS At Recruit UK, we are more than just a recruitment agency. We like to find the right person by taking a holistic approach - getting to know you and your company in order to find you the right candidate. We take the time to get to know your brand, and will work with you to determine your USP so we can promote you to the best high-quality talent out there. Equally, we spend time getting to know all of our candidates and can select them specifically for your role if we feel their skills and personality are a good fit, so we can get the right people for the job first time rather than wasting time and energy bringing in the wrong people who don’t last.

And that’s not all – we also offer digital solutions to get your business in front of the right people. Marketing is essential when it comes to getting your brand out there and making an impression amongst candidates. However, employing a marketing professional in house can be expensive - and that’s what we’re here for. From creating personalised blog posts and promoting content through social media advertising to building branded landing pages and sending out scheduled emails to any potential leads, we utilise clever digital marketing techniques to help you attract the very best financial talent.

READY TO ROCK YOUR RECRUITMENT?Each new recruit faces different challenges. However, implementing the advice in this guide will help you to find candidates quickly and build loyalty to keep them for years to come. As there are so many different aspects of recruitment to think about, why not utilise the services of a specialist recruitment company? At Recruit UK, we take the stress out of hiring, lifting the weight from your shoulders so you can focus on your own clients. We take a holistic approach to recruitment, working with you to understand exactly what you’re looking for. As a specialist financial recruitment agency, we’re up-to-date with the latest marketing methods, meaning we can quickly find the perfect candidate for you. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help, contact a member of our friendly team today.

2. PROMOTE A PEOPLE-CENTRIC CULTUREWe can’t stress enough how important it is to set a good reputation for your business. The way people view work is changing - and company culture is becoming increasingly important. Employees today expect to see a more holistic approach to working life where employee general wellbeing is put at the heart of business value. For example, the movement towards working with kindness, collaboration, empathy, instinct and trust is what workers are expecting when they join a new business. In fact, according to a recent Deloitte study, most young people want to work for a company that shares their values - and 50% would take a pay cut to find a company that does so.

3. PROVIDE ONGOING TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENTWe’ve already talked about the importance of promoting training programmes to attract new would-be advisers to your firm, but it’s just as important to invest in your current employees if you want to retain the best financial talent. All employees want to feel as if they are progressing and learning new skills and experiences. In fact, 42% of employees rate having a clear career path and regular opportunities for promotion as the most important factor in job satisfaction - making career development more important than salary.

A number of major financial advice companies offer their own training models and continual learning programmes to support their advisers and help them reach their professional goals. Good examples of this include the St James Place Academy, the Quantum Leap Training Programme at Foster Denovo and the 2plan Adviser Academy, where employees are mentored by senior advisers. During these training programmes, they have the chance to work together and share ideas, as well as attend workshops and regular coaching sessions to get them to where they want to be; whether that is winning more HNW clients, increasing turnover or obtaining additional qualifications.

4. ASK FOR FEEDBACKAnother way to retain existing staff is by putting employees’ best interests at heart and asking for their feedback – after all, job satisfaction is one of the most important ways to keep staff. Open and honest communication is key, so make sure you communicate with them to ensure they are happy – book in regular meetings and have regular one-to-ones so you can keep on top of how they are feeling. Be careful to consider any changes or requests they have to try and make sure they feel fulfilled at work. This will ensure your employees know they are appreciated and that you listen to what they want.

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