Finding the right staff to help grow your business can be a challenge, and a costly one at that.
In this guide, we share some of the common challenges that Adviser firms encounter, together with some tips and practical advice on low-cost recruitment options to help you select and employ the right staff for your business.
Identify the need
A good starting point is to firstly look at your business, and where you want it to be. Look at your long-term plan, your strategy, and how you want to get there. This will give a useful indication on the kind of activities your business must undertake to meet its objectives.
Consider the skills involved, with the tasks required in the coming months and years and start to build up a profile of the critical skills needed from your ideal new candidate, to ensure that they can help deliver value to the business in the coming years. Next, consider the useful and nice-to-have skills and attributes of your ideal candidate.
Together, the critical skills and nice-to-have attributes will help you create a Job Description and a Person Specification for the new employment role being created.
Consider the best fit for your business
It’s important to think about the kind of person that you are seeking to hire, they need to be a good fit for your business, working style and the clients you are working with, in order to be successful in the long term.
At this stage, you may have the decision of taking on an existing, qualified and experienced Adviser, or training up a new person. There are pros and cons of both approaches, with no one method being the best approach, your own individual business objectives will steer you to which is the most appropriate.
For example, fresh candidates with less experience and fewer qualifications may be cheaper to employ, and bring with them a host of new innovative ideas and business practices, but be costly and time consuming to train.
On the other hand, experienced adviser candidates with industry qualifications may be harder to find, may command a significantly higher salary and may come with pre-determined expectations or established ways of working which can make integration into your business more challenging.
It may also be that an experienced adviser could have greater life skills to give your clients better service, with empathy, experience and insight into the goals and problems of certain life stages that would be invaluable to give excellent advice.
Keep aware of FCA regulations
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have rules in place to make it mandatory for advisers to hold specific qualifications and accreditations. Be sure to familiarise yourself in these exacting requirements, talk to your Regional Compliance Manager if you have any queries on the latest regulations in place.
In recent times, the FCA has also added further guidance around what they deem as ‘good practice’ in recruiting, and this also includes longer term considerations such as ensuring an employee can settle within a business, so it pays to be aware of the current FCA regulations on recruitment and how they impact your business, both before, during and after the recruitment stages.
Where to advertise for new staff
There’s a wide range of methods you can use to promote your vacancy, with differing costs attached, and different implications on the kind of applicants you may receive. Here’s a brief summary of a few methods and commentary alongside:
Your shop window – free to advertise in, however the suitable audience will be extremely narrow. Potentially useful for seeking new entrants to the industry and general office/administration roles, the chances of locating a qualified or experienced, practicing adviser via this route is lower than other methods.
Local press – often minimal costs associated and great for employing new starters within the local area, and ideal for giving your business a ‘local’ feel with staff who understand the area and the target market. Again, the available pool of experienced applicants may be limited depending upon where your business is located.
Online – the most commonly used placement nowadays, whether it’s posting across your own website, using recognised employment agencies and recruitment websites, through to utilising social media such as LinkedIn to target existing, experienced advisers currently working within the industry. Costings vary depending on the website, and often there are additional fees you can pay to enhance the volume of audience viewing your job advert.
How and where to advertise online
A solid starting point to promoting your job online is to choose some of the household names within the recruitment industry. Firms such as Indeed, Reed, Monster, Hays, Adecco, Office Angels or Top Financial Jobs all place many candidates into roles within the Financial Services sector, whether it’s office administrators, newly qualified starters or experienced advisers and specialists within the mortgage and protection industry.
These websites offer a mixture of both free promotion of jobs, and paid upgrade packages. On the Indeed website for example, you can place a free job advert, which will be presented to anyone searching for roles with a similar name, similar industry or within a set radius of their desired working location.
The job advert will get the most views once it is posted, but will drop further down the rankings as time passes and new rival jobs are advertised. You can pay Indeed for their upgrade package for a ‘Sponsored’ job advert, and for a period of time, it will always appear top in the search listings, and therefore open your job advert to a much larger audience to maximise the volume of applicants to apply for your role.
Social media is another growth area for job adverts. LinkedIn is currently the best-placed social media network to promote a role on, you can do this for free by clicking into their dedicated Jobs area and uploading details of your vacancy. The filtering systems allow job applicants to search for specific vacancies in their area of interest, so it may be that the quality of candidates applying is increased over other advertising methods.
Furthermore, with LinkedIn, the candidate’s past work experience can be easily verified by visiting their profile to corroborate what their CV, application form or covering letter may be stating, together with skills recommendations and testimonials written by former colleagues.
Checking References
If the adviser is bringing a client bank to the firm, ownership proof is vital.
If the adviser has come from another firm, references should confirm any previous or current disciplinary issues – the FCA expect you to have checked the background of any adviser you have employed.
Integration into your business
Beyond the recruitment process, it is important to ensure that your new employee feels settled as soon as possible into their new role, not only for their wellbeing and quality of service for clients, but also to ensure that your training and development does not go to waste if they leave the business shortly down the line.
It’s key to consider your existing team as well, they will have to go through a period of adjustment to become used to working with your new recruit, and bond as a strong team going forward.
Monitoring and mentoring
With your new recruit, it’s a sensible idea to consider a mentoring programme, whereby alongside the induction, an experienced staff member is allocated to mentor the new recruit and introduce them informally to their colleagues and help make them feel comfortable.
Consider laying out a career plan for them, with training and mentoring as necessary to keep your staff motivated and engaged.
■ Share your company’s vision with them and make them a part of it, so their goals and aspirations can match that.
■ Give them a career path with the milestones of remuneration and self-improvement that matches their goals and life aspirations.
■ Give them a road map of what this career could look like and the clients to achieve these goals.
Recruitment Services from HLPartnership
Recruiting quality candidates can seem like a challenging process, especially if your business is already rushed off it’s feet in the first place. HLPartnership can offer their services to help you recruit the right candidates into your business based on your bespoke, exacting requirements.
Our recruitment experts will be able to talk through your business needs and create effective job descriptions to promote online. We’ll use our dedicated HLPartnership careers website and trusted external recruitment sites Indeed and LinkedIn Jobs to promote your roles, and help filter the quality, talented candidates with the experience to match your requirements.
Talk to use today about how we can help – call our HLP Recruiter Peter Rose at 07795 495 594 or email peter.rose@hlpartnership.co.uk for more details.
