From the September Issue of THE-DASH
Employer Focused Content: The Sabotage
Estimated read time: 4 minutes
So you run a wealth management practice and you have done a fair job of building the team. The team provides you with some leverage and additional perspective to grow the business. Maybe you have a COO or someone who understands the firm better than you do and is an amazing attractor of talent! Many smaller practices do not. It makes sense to have your team members protect your calendar by having them take on the first rounds of interviews when hiring for a new position. This makes pragmatic sense but be sure to assess the “human” risks to your talent selection process. Which candidate experience “sabotage” could your team members be projecting to interview candidates? How many of you have the Beastie Boys song playing in your head?
“Sabotages” we commonly see:
- No attraction power (or not enough for the role they are hiring for)
- No urgency
- Believes they should be earning more and by hiring more, it will stunt their earnings
- Not understanding the role
- Not understanding the value prop of the practice
Sabotage Story 1:
If you own a smaller practice and you are looking to hire an additional advisor (either to acquire their book, to find new clients or to help with high end segmentation) you- as the owner-advisor, should intervene in the interview process very close to the beginning of the process. After a very brief phone screen by your HR/or Ops person, you want to meet the advisor candidates next. We have seen many great operations professionals fail to connect, have the attraction power or properly share what the practice is building effectively. We would even suggest roleplaying the brief phone screen with your operations professionals when you are in hiring mode, especially for advisor hires.
Sabotage Story 2:
Three years ago we were helping a wealth management advisor with a team of four, select a new planner. He selected his “director of operations” to conduct all initial interviews with the firm. That is the right thing to do. The only issue is, this particular person was unhappy in the firm, thought she should be earning more money and was giving off bad vibes to the candidates.
How do we know this?
Lots of candidate feedback:
“I am not sure if I can work with JANE.” “Doesn’t seem like employees are that happy here.”
The director of operations also had the “lack of self awareness” to call us to see if we could help her find another firm to work at because she was underpaid. (Of course we shared we couldn’t help here!)
If you are actively hiring, what potential Sabotage is your practice/firm most susceptible to?