Good help is hard to find. 

Advisors who are looking for new employees and leaned on financial services acquaintances for recommendations are finding that their once-reliable network is now competing with them in the same labor pool as are banks, real estate agents, attorneys, car dealers and just about any sector that offers their workers full benefits. 

“Since COVID and people coming back to work, it seems that anybody with any skills is already employed,” said Wade A. Baldwin, CFP.

The 25-year MDRT member from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, posted an opening for an administrative position on a job board last year and received more than 100 applicants. He picked five to interview, but none of them had what he was looking for. 

“So, you hit the desperation point and ask what other avenues can you go after,” he said. 

He became aware of an advisor within his insurance company who had good administrative skills, but probably was going to be let go as she was falling short of the carrier’s sales goals for first-year agents. Initially, he offered her salary without benefits. Then he sweetened the package by increasing the salary, adding a quarterly bonus based on the team’s performance, including the ability to see clients and get in on a commission split, adding a cost-plus plan that covered the 20% of medical and dental expenses her husband’s insurance did not cover, and offering to pay for classes so she could be credentialed as a qualified financial planner. 

“I had to throw everything at it in order to get her to come over and work with me,” he said. 

Mark D. Olson, CFP, MSFS, a 24-year MDRT member from Austin, Texas, USA, also combed through hundreds of applicants after posting a staff opening on a job board. Before he could interview one of his top three choices, he learned that she accepted a job with a florist that was paying salary with full benefits. 

“It was very weird that that candidate would be interviewing with me and a florist,” Olson said, adding that his practice didn’t have a group health insurance plan. “After I lost a person due to benefits, I asked myself, what can I do?”

To win over a candidate who was laid off from a bank trust department, Olson paid him more than his previous staffer and added workplace supplemental health insurance paid by the employee. He also laid out a career path by offering to help his new hire earn a life and health insurance license, get registered to sell securities, groom him to become a paraplanner and finally promising to sponsor him to be an advisor in his office. 

“There’s not a lot of people out there to hire. The good ones are taken unless they’re thinking about jumping ship, which means you have to pay more and have better benefits; otherwise, they’re not going to go,” Olson said.

Where to find them

Assemble a bunch of advisors into a room or at a trade conference during this period when there are more job openings than applicants, and inevitably they’ll ask each other, “Are you able to hire help, and how do you find them?” 

Douglas John Bennett, Dip PFS, found skilled employees by offering part-time positions to people who had left the work force when they started their families. They were grateful for the opportunity to work 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and have the flexibility to leave to pick up their children from school and take them to extracurricular activities. 

“I got a very good bang for my buck,” said the 16-year MDRT member from Crawley, England, UK. “I’ve got people who are happy to be back into work doing things they wanted but with flexibility. We are agreed that I do not run an adult day care center. If they need to leave for sports day or to pick up the kids at school, they just go, and I know we have that mutual respect that they will get the job done. I trust them to do that, and it works.” 

When the pandemic shutdowns restricted opportunities to contact prospects, Erika Silva Velasco, CLI, FSCP, an eight-year MDRT member from Queretaro, Mexico, focused on servicing the needs of her existing clients. But as society reopened, she realized she didn’t like doing administrative tasks and needed help to devote more time to advising clients. So, she hired a recruiter to find an assistant. The recruiter screened applicants and forwarded three finalists for Silva to interview. She hired an assistant, trained her, and now her new employee is handling back-office tasks, which frees Silva to spend more time with clients. 

There’s not a lot of people out there to hire. The good ones are taken unless they’re thinking about jumping ship, which means you have to pay more and have better benefits.
—Mark Olson

“The recruiter has more experience filtering all the candidates, and I am the last step,” Silva said. “I learned my lesson the hard way, because in the past I used my valuable time to handle that process. Now that I know there is someone who can help me. It was easier for me to get to the last step and decide who to hire. That’s why I think it’s important to invest in an expert to handle that process.”

Some advisors avoid recruiting agencies because they’re expensive — placement fees can be as much as half of the new hire’s first-year salary — and occasionally recruiters circle back after placing an employee and lure them away to another employer’s job opening. Rather, these hiring managers encourage their employees to refer potential new hires and monetarily compensate the referring employee a portion of the bonus after a new hire starts and the remainder if that person is still with the company several months later. 

Vetting and testing for job fit

Advisors report that after identifying a prospective employee, they typically conduct an initial 15-minute phone interview to learn how the candidate converses over the phone, since they could be talking to clients and prospects. If the advisor likes what they hear, the candidate is invited to an in-person, second interview and, in some cases, to take a personality or assessment test. 

Bennett follows that protocol and uses the Kolbe A Index, a test that measures a person’s cognitive strengths and instinctive way of doing things, “to get the right people into the right place.” Kolbe measures four action modes — fact finder, follow through, quick start and implementor — on a scale of 1 to 10 and a perfect score for an administrator is a 7, 7, 3, 3. For example, fact finder measures how much information a person needs to start a task. Seven is a good score for an administrator, while someone who scores higher may never have enough data to get going. A low 3 for quick start is an appropriate administrator score “because you want someone who follows process and gets the job done rather than jumping from task to uncompleted task,” Bennett said. 

Hire slow and fire fast is a human resources mantra, but a long hiring process can result in losing good candidates. Jason L. Smith, a 18-year MDRT member from Westlake, Ohio, USA, used to conduct multiple phone and in-person interviews and even required advisor candidates to take off work from their current job and spend a day mirroring an employee that would train them if they were hired. 

“We started to realize in the last year or so when the job market got so competitive that we were losing great candidates because our process was too long and cumbersome,” Smith said. “You really want to take your time and make the right decisions, but with this competitive job market, we had to tighten up our process to make it quicker and give our hiring managers the ability to pull the trigger and then just do a 90-day probationaryperiod.” 

Along with gleaning skills and attributes from interviews and personality tests, Simon John Gibson, Dip PFS, a 24-year MDRT member from Newmarket, England, UK, seeks another quality from applicants: kindness. A kind person probably is empathetic, and that quality is important for a new hire to understand why insurance companies exist and care about what happens to clients. 

“Kindness is magic. I love to see people who put themselves out for other people,” Gibson said. “Someone who has done things with clubs or volunteering, those are great things to see on someone’s CV. If I can find someone who has been involved with young people’s organizations, is a treasurer of their local club or is helping the elderly, I’ll take that over their examination results.”

Process vs. hiring for experience

Should previous financial services experience be a prerequisite for hiring support staff, or can advisors consider someone who never worked in a financial services office but is willing to learn?

Librada Gonzalez, a 11-year MDRT member from Panama City, Panama, faced a conundrum that many advisors pressed for time and challenged with onboarding endure when they need to find a new hire to take on support tasks. Panama’s labor pool is chock full of professionals with administrative experience, but job candidates who worked in the insurance sector are rare. “I try to find people with prior industry experience, so I don’t have to start from scratch and teach,” she said. 

Her practice of 25 advisors includes seven staff members and has very little turnover, but recently a support staffer who had been with her for five years quit. With very little time to train a new arrival, she would prefer to find someone who can immediately handle collections, technology and creating compliance reports. 

“How do you recruit people with no insurance experience so they can apply themselves when they start as I have little time to train them?” Gonzalez asked.

Could a process that a new hire can follow be an adequate substitute for experience? 

Douglas John Bennett contends that the basic phases of the insurance process are filling out the application, quoting the coverage, following up with doctors, getting the policies underwritten and enforcement. All those steps can be detailed in a process, so that an advisor does not need to hire a new staffer with experience.

“Write a process for every single job you have. As it changes, have the staff write the process and get it in enough detail that anyone can follow it. It takes a while, but if a process is practice-driven, you don’t need to have such a high skill level,” Bennett said, adding that process might be better able to substitute somewhat for previous experience in a small practice rather than a large operation.

But even a detailed process can have limits. When Wade A. Baldwin hired support staff for a large captive agency, he saw value in having an administrative employee with basic knowledge about the financial products they were servicing.

“I got real benefit by running my new staff through the new advisor training program, so they learned the processes that we used to sell and administer the product,” said Baldwin. “When the client called and mentioned details about a product, like taking a loan against the cash value of a policy, they had at least some understanding. That wasn’t something they could learn in a week. It has to be absorbed so they could properly service the clients the way I needed. It’s not ‘Check this box and that means that this is what the answer is.’ There has to be an interaction, so the client feels their needs are being understood.”

Gail Singh, FCCA, FSCP, is a stickler for process. The 10-year MDRT member from Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago, earned a certification for quality manager/organizational excellence the same year she became a financial advisor. Yet, even with a detailed process, she realized that if a support staffer is not familiar with all the functions of an office, they won’t know what is supposed to happen next. So, exposing new hires to the different functions of a practice beyond their immediate responsibilities empowers them with knowledge. She also has her administrative staff go through new advisor training. 

“When I hire staff, I encourage them to learn so much about this business and strengthen their skills so that they’re no longer a pencil pusher or a typist,” Singh said. “They grow out of those jobs, so you always have good people with expertise in your company. That is one of the solutions for keeping and retaining them.”

But how can small practices without access to big agency training resources empower their support staff? One way Yuka Nakahara-Goven, MBA, CLU, a 26-year MDRT member from Dallas, Texas, USA, brings her two-person staff “into the business and shows them why we do what we do” is to visit lifehappens.org. They click on videos about how life insurance helped families avoid financial devastation and discuss what they learned from the website, which also includes blogs and literature about insurance products. The weekly training regimen includes one hour of study time with online courses every Monday, a one-hour staff meeting to tackle process issues and time set aside for sharing case studies with the team.

“I share why we are doing this for clients and ask them, ‘What do you think?’” said Nakahara-Goven. “Then all kinds of opinions and suggestions come out by involving them. They don’t have the expertise, but it’s good to get their viewpoint about what they would have done if these people were your clients, yourself or your family. It’s a fun discussion. We spend an hour going over these, and sometimes they have this aha! moment and see that this is why we are doing this. It’s a good exercise to bring everyone in.”