Conventional wisdom holds that recruiting financial advisors from rival firms is still a belly-to-belly affair, especially if you're talking about highly successful producers with an established book of business. You wine them and dine them, you shower them with attention and sell them on the advantages of your firm—you do all the things that successful FAs do when they're wooing well-heeled prospects.

And for the most part, when it comes to stealing a top advisor from a competitor, the conventional wisdom holds true. "Brokers move for one of two reasons—pain or gain," says Keith Craig, senior vice president and national sales manager for Wachovia Securities Financial Network. Still, even when they're highly motivated to switch firms, most good advisors need to be recruited face-to-face by someone they can grow to trust—generally, the manager of the branch where they'll end up working. In other words, like any tough customer, they need to be sold.

Or, better yet, romanced. "It's a courtship process," says Pat Moore, director of recruiting at Advest. "It might take eight months or longer. It's a major undertaking for an advisor to move a book of business and it's not something to flip a coin on."

Nevertheless, there advertising can play an important role in your efforts—and for even more impact, you can look to the growing number of advisor recruiting websites that have sprung up in recent years. When used effectively, these tools can help drive recruiting results.

Traditional marketing: strategic, not tactical

For most branch managers, traditional print advertising may have limited utility when it comes to attracting advisors from other firms. One problem is cost. Jeff Testerman, vice president and co-founder at the recruiting website Brokerhunter, says that a 3x3 ad in his local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, costs upwards of $3,000 for the Sunday edition. "And then you're hoping that someone is going to stumble across that ad," he says.

Joe Lukacs, Horsesmouth contributor and founder of Melbourne, Fla.-based coaching and consulting firm International Performance Group, says that branch managers he has worked closely with shy away from running their own ads, in part because of the requirement that they clear their materals through the firm's legal department. "Any time you put something in writing, you run into compliance issues," he says.

Lukacs also questions whether most successful advisors would ever respond to an ad in their local newspaper. "Branch managers like to recruit stars, and the superstars aren't going to job hunt that way," he says. "The guys they would get are going to be damaged goods either from a production or compliance standpoint."

Moore says he has occasionally run a help-wanted ad at the request of local Advest branch managers, but with few, if any, results. "I can't recall a response to an ad that resulted in a quality hire," he says. "The better financial advisors are getting called all the time. They don't need to initiate the calls. They're hard to find and they know it."

Lukas concurs. He says he is currently working with 22 financial advisors, all of whom produce in excess of $1 million in gross revenue a year—and none of them would have any trouble finding another firm if they decided to move on. "We're getting calls every day from recruiters," he says. "Even half-million-dollar guys are getting calls!"

All this is not to say that advertising can't help drive recruitment efforts, but it's done most effectively at the corporate level, and with certain kinds of prospects—independents, in particular. "Independents own the clients and they own the accounts," says Wachovia's Craig. "They are their own branch manager."

In an effort to reach experienced advisors who might be receptive to the idea of setting up shop under Wachovia's Financial Network banner, Craig advertises extensively in industry trade magazines, and also sends out electronic newsletters to advisors on the magazines' circulation lists. This advertising is used in part to support another crucial element in Craig's recruiting strategy: national and regional symposia where financial advisors can come and learn about the firm's independent arm. Craig says he has a 50% to 60% conversion rate when advisors attend a symposium—and 80% when they also meet with senior management at corporate headquarters.

Getting advisors to attend the symposia in the first place is where an ad campaign comes in. "I'm buying intellectual shelf space," Craig explains. "You want to be on their mind when something happens." Craig estimates he gets 15 to 20 leads a month just from advertising and related communications, and another 60 to 80 leads from the symposia.

Raymond James Financial, Inc. is another firm that relies on national advertising to support recruitment efforts. Bill Van Law, senior vice president and executive director of the firm's Advisor Select division, says he has opened 14 new offices in the last 13 months—and credits his advertising program with increasing advisor awareness. "What advertising has done is support branch managers as they're out there talking to people in the community," he says. "It has opened the opportunity for that conversation."

In the trenches—it's all about leads

Recruiting websites, on the other hand, can be very useful to branch managers themselves as a source of leads and as a direct aid to their recruiting efforts. Lukacs says such websites enable branch managers to "cast a wider net" in search of prospects. "One good person out of that a year would pay for itself," he says. Here are sites to investigate.

1. Brokerhunter, launched in May 2000, maintains a database of 42,000 active seekers, 80% of whom have their Series 6 and Series 7 licenses. Advisors can sign up for free by filling out a detailed and confidential online application that asks for name and address. Firms and branch managers are able to search for prospects by posting an online job opening called a "Smart Ad" that seeks candidates meeting a specific set of criteria. Advisors that have registered with the site are able to respond to these postings, either confidentially or by revealing their identity. Branch managers can also search the site's database looking for candidates that fit certain characteristics—say, all advisors with yearly gross commissions of $250,000 or more who live within 50 miles of a given branch.

Testerman says the cost of a 60-day SmartAd is $345—a small outlay compared to that $3,000 print ad in the Journal-Constitution. The average financial advisor who registers with the site has between two and four years of experience, annual gross commissions of between $150,000 and $250,000, and assets under management of $20 million.

2. Stockbrokershop.com, which has been in operation for approximately five years, takes a very different approach. This is a recruiter- and branch manager-only site that provides detailed information on some 440,000 advisors around the world. The site's database draws on 15 separate data sources to provide recruiters with such information as advisors' home and work addresses and telephone numbers, work history, NASD licenses, and the distance from the advisor's residence to one of the prospective firm's branch offices. The site can even provide recruiters with a map to the advisor's home and a picture of his house. Williams says the site's database is updated regularly to cope with the 30% annual deterioration in the list's accuracy due to advisors switching firms and industry consolidation.

Firms can have unlimited access to the website's database for $120,000 a year. Branch managers whose firms do not have a national contract can order data at an alternative site, Stockbrokershop.net, at a cost of $0.50 per record.

Stockbroker Shop CEO and founder Paul Williams says his site gives recruiters and branch managers an extra edge when approaching successful advisors who are probably getting calls from other firms as well. "We give them enough information to say they know something about this person," Williams says.

Williams makes a good point that all managers hoping to catch some big fish should take to heart. "These are people with big egos who every day call people twice their age and with 10 times their net worth and tell them what to do with their money. They don't want to be part of some recruiting cattle call. They want to be called by someone who seems to honestly care and honestly want them." Whether or not you're using an online database, make sure to do as much advance detective work on potential recruits as you possibly can before making contact.

Testerman has one final piece of advice for managers using a recruiting site: when a high-quality advisor responds to an ad, act quickly. "The follow-up is very important," he says. "You've got to get to that person while they're still looking—because they won't be on the job market for long."

Jack Milligan is a freelance business writer who has spent most of the past 20 years writing about finance. He was formerly a writer and editor with Institutional Investor and editor-in-chief at U.S. Banker magazine. Jack has also been published in Business 2.0, American Banker, Newsweek International, and The Daily Deal. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.

BrokerHunter Facts: BrokerHunter.com is an employment website for jobs within the Securities Industry segment of the Financial Services Industry.

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