From social media to recruiting top candidates, we’ve encountered a wide variety of top-of-mind topics on The VIP Forum’s discussions board.

In case you missed them, here are the top questions asked by you and your peers over the past couple of months along with The VIP Forum’s recommendations:

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With a new year upon us, many firms are reevaluating their talent management strategy, seeking to ensure they maximize the return on their investments in the coming year. Given continued global market volatility, and the permanent shift of the high-net-worth psyche toward a more conservative and skeptical state, leading firms are recognizing the importance of hiring advisors who will be able to deliver on the expectations and value drivers of today’s client. Gone are the days when asking advisors about their past performance are enough to evaluate the potential of a candidate during the recruitment process. Instead, firms must focus on the behavioral profile of the individuals they hire, ensuring that each new hire’s profile aligns well with the firm’s culture and today’s clients.

Join our upcoming webinar on January 24^th to learn first-hand from ATB Financial about how the firm redefined its advisor recruitment strategy to focus on the behavioral profile of candidates.

Register today.

The News: According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey 33% of wealth management firms experienced an advisor attrition rate between 20-40% over the last two years.

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Thirty-three percent of advisors report they might switch firms in the next two years. Such high advisor churn rates force firms to incur the expense of new hire searches and onboarding many times over. More importantly, advisors leaving their firm may take valuable clients with them, or reduce the loyalty of remaining clients left in the lurch by their departure.

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In efforts to quickly fill frontline positions with tenured advisors who automatically will bring clients with them, firms tend to assess advisor candidates on hard metrics, such as past sales performance or book size, which fail to measure the behavioral attributes and core competencies necessary for success at the firm.  VIP Forum research shows that advisors’ past performance and book size are weak indicators of advisors’ future performance at a new firm.  In fact, advisors who demonstrate behavioral attributes that align with a firm’s culture are not only more productive, but are also likely to stay with the firm longer.

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A recent VIP member poll finds that 78% of advisor recruits in 2011 will come from the tenured advisor forces of other firms. While wealth managers expect poaching high-performing advisors from other firms to result in a quick AUM boost, VIP research indicates that advisors with more industry experience are not more productive than their less experienced counterparts. In fact, average productivity increases with tenure at the current firm, not tenure in the industry.

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The News: A recent poll by Fidelity Investments finds that 43% of executives report that recruiting new advisers or brokers who have existing books of business is their top staffing priority this year. Read More »

VIP Forum research shows that advisors’ engagement competencies – emotional intelligence and need identification skills – drive asset growth in the post crisis.  However, members have expressed difficulty in assessing candidates against these competencies that are essential but intangible. Even after several rounds of interviews, firms often lack clarity about which candidates excel in these areas. As a result, they typically fall back on candidates’ past sales performance or book size to make their hiring decisions.

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