Top advisors can get 30,000 recruiting calls, taking up 310 full work days, over their career

Flashback: Top advisors can get 30,000 recruiting calls, taking up 310 full work days, over their career

There are hundreds of thousands recruiting cold calls made to advisors in the wealth management niche every year. As with most phone prospecting methods, most recruiting cold calls that are made doesn’t result in a conversation between recruiter and advisor. Most cold calls end up in the advisors voicemail box never to be returned. Others are rebuffed by a gatekeeper (like an assistant) or a message is left with the gatekeeper but the call never returned.

But enough recruiting cold calls do find success in reaching the advisor, to make advisor recruiting an attractive gig (or a good transitional career gig) for hundreds of cold callers working in the wealth management industry.

Advisor recruiting is evolving with tele-technology and CRM systems allowing for a call to be made with one click (increasing quantity of daily outbound calls) and local area codes that show up on the advisor’s caller ID even though the cold caller is in a different state (increasing the quantity of conversations).

The more you have in AUM and revenue, the more targeted you become. The more densely populated area you work at, the more cold calls you receive. Sometimes an advisor will get cold calls consistently every day or week, and for others, they come in spurts. What impact does so many recruiting cold calls have on an individual advisor’s time and efficiency?

Advisors that join a different firm or transition to a different model, will generally do so only once or twice in their entire career. Big advisors in the larger cities however, can get inbound recruiting cold calls once or twice in a single morning.

What are the assumptions being used for this infographic?

Over a year, when you exclude weekends, official holidays, and two weeks vacation there are about 250 “work days.” The infographic uses 5 minutes as the average time taken from an advisor per cold call. Some calls an advisor will hang up within a minute, some a few minutes, and some will end up as a real conversation. After the call, it can take a minute to get refocused on what you were doing before you were interrupted by the cold call. Advisors may listen to a cold caller’s voicemail a couple of times to determine if it is a recruiting cold call message or a potential client referral because most cold callers don’t fully identify the purpose of their call.

Advisor averages for all of these variables of course will vary. Advisors at different firms, models, production levels, and in different geographic areas will get different levels of recruiting cold calls.

Of course many advisors that are heavily targeted for recruiting will have assistants that will field many of these cold calls and bear the brunt of the time involved. We can’t account for every variable and scenario, but advisors can easily project the impact on their individual and assistant’s time and effort.

How much time and effort do advisors spend fielding recruiting cold calls in a year, or over their career?

For the advisors who get 2 or 3 inbound recruiting cold calls per day, the time and effort to field these calls can add up, especially over a career.

For the advisor who receives 2 cold calls as a daily average they will get about 500 recruiting cold calls per year. For the advisor who will make one recruiting transition in a 20 year timespan, that advisor (and assistant) will have spent about 105 eight hour work days to field 10,000 recruiting cold calls over those 20 years.

An advisor that gets 3 recruiting cold calls per day is dealing with 750 calls per year, taking 62 hours of time, which is a full 7.75 eight hour work days. Over a 30 year career, this same advisor will have spent 232 full work days devoted to recruiting cold calls and over a 40 year career, 310 work days.

Geez, no wonder some of you advisors are so grouchy when you answer the phone to realize you stopped what you were doing for yet another recruiting cold call.

Where are all of these recruiting cold calls coming from?

Unfortunately (but understandably), the majority of recruiting cold calls are not made by real recruiters who can actually provide an advisor with real value. In fact, there are very few real “recruiters” in the advisor recruiting industry at all, there are however, an army or advisor recruiting cold callers.

Most recruiting cold calls do not come from branch managers, corporate recruiters, third party search firm advisor recruiters, and individual advisor recruiters. The majority of the recruiting cold calling volume comes from various types of appointment setters (with various titles) who aren’t recruiters themselves, but are scheduling calls for the recruiter, so the recruiter doesn’t have to cold call you directly.

Why are there so many recruiting cold calls being made?

The simple answer is because it works. Before there were Do Not Call lists, most advisors built their business through cold calling as well, and some advisors still cold call today to develop business. Recruiting fees and bonuses can be lucrative for the top 20% of recruiting professionals, and recruiters don’t need a very high success ratio to make a good living.

There have never been more recruiting opportunities available to advisors. With many opportunities comes many different types of internal and external recruiters cold calling advisors about them. Advisors are getting recruiting cold calls about options at wirehouses (although less now), regionals, bank broker dealers, independent broker dealers, OSJs, rollups, and direct custodian affiliation RIAs.

Then there are the larger independent firms and platform providers who have caused an uptick in recruiting cold calls in recent years who are trying to bolster the ranks of their individual firms. Of course, there are also the independent recruiters that match for multiple opportunities, models and options based on the advisor’s preference and goals, Advisorbox being one of them.