CheckMate

I don’t honestly remember where I first read that - if I did, I’d give the person credit - but it’s certainly not an original idea of mine.

One of the best ways to accomplish that is LinkedIn.

Like anything that’s got a lotta buzz, is there also a lotta hype associated with it? You bet. And are there some people who should be thankful for LinkedIn because otherwise they’d still be selling Amway? Yep. But, overall, it is a tremendous resource, and one you need to take full advantage of.

If you don’t know about it, learn. If you don’t have a profile, create one.

A great place to start would be this excellent post today at Linkedintelligence from one of the LinkedIn kings (and definitely not one of those Amway guys), Scott Allen. In fact, even if you’re a LinkedIn expert, still go check it out (of course, if you’re an expert, you probably already have).

The latest On Wall Street magazine has a short piece by Donald Froude, the Head of U.S. Distribution at Legg Mason, where he talks about his life and long career.

A lot of it is what you might expect, but the most important part you might not:

“Growing up, I had little exposure to people who invested, so I thought my job would be dealing with wealthy people who wanted to get wealthier. The client who changed my whole attitude was a prospect I had talked to for months. One day, he said he liked what I was saying and what I was trying to do and wanted to come in and meet me.

“Norman” was an older gentleman. He was a single parent; the father of a child who was severely mentally and physically challenged. He wanted to make sure that when he passed away, his son wouldn’t have to be institutionalized. I was stunned. I could see from his face that he wanted to pass that responsibility to me. I realized then that clients weren’t all just interested in material goods.

Norman and I went through good and bad markets but continued to reaffirm our goals together. He was my client for 19 years–until I turned my book over. I felt a strong responsibility to shepherd that money. It taught me how important our job really is.”

And that’s what becoming a financial advisor is really about…

You can read the whole thing here.

Because you can know exactly what you’re looking for and still not be able to find it.

Robert Wilson had a great post on his Job Search Engine Guide blog yesterday called “Are Job Boards in Denial?” in which he performed a very representative simple search for insurance sales jobs and analyzed the results.

It’s well worth going through the entire post with all the supporting data, but, in short, for this simple search much like ones many of us have done thousands of times…

‘insurance sales’ jobs;
within ‘x’ miles of city ‘y’;
posted within 7 days; and,
sorted by relevance.

…he got back 156 jobs - a nice, reasonable size group to work with. On closer analysis, though, only 11 were actually insurance sales agent positions, and they were scattered throughout the larger list in no particular order.

While Robert’s talking about a specific (and unnamed) job board search engine and how it handles searches, my experience has been that what he saw could have happened with any search engine. The expertise of the person doing the search is a big factor, too, but I have a guy who is a master at that stuff, and he’ll tell you there are still many times when he gets bogus results.

Naturally, we post jobs online and do our best to make them findable - it’s a tremendous resource and, of course, we’ll continue to use it. And I’d be the last guy in the world to tell you to give up online searching, but, as great as it can be, it’s still the proverbial crapshoot.

So, keep looking, but also work all the other avenues out there, including recruiters who can connect you directly to the places you want to go.

Welcome to CheckMate, a blog that, as the title says, is focused on winning strategies for becoming a financial advisor.

Seems like there’s a million new blogs every day (well, actually only about 120,000), and adding something useful (not to mention cutting through that noise level) is very tough.

That said, for as many blogs as there are, we haven’t seen any specifically focused on financial services recruiting. Sure, there’s a lotta talk about recruiting from both ends of the process - the people doing the recruiting and those who are potentially being recruited - and there’s also discussion about financial services as a career. But what we haven’t really seen is somewhere with a specific focus on the recruiting and hiring process involved with becoming a financial advisor.

And that’s why we’ve created this blog.

Right up front there are some things we need to be very clear about.

Number one, we don’t claim to be experts on being a financial advisor - for example, the plusses and minuses of this specific investment vehicle over that one, or the secrets of getting new high-net-worth clients, and so on - nor do we need to be to do what we do. If you’re looking for that kind of information, most likely you won’t find it here.

What we are experts on is becoming a financial advisor - we can tell you what firms look for, the state of things in different firms, what we look for as recruiters. We deal with those subjects every day, and have been very successful in getting hundreds of candidates hired into financial advisor positions.

In addition, while we are obviously in the recruiting business and have agreements with specific firms, we will still give you as objective an overall look as possible at the industry and the process. We get paid to recruit, not to write blogs - you will note there is no advertising on this blog, and we receive no compensation for writing it. If that ever changes, we will publicly say so here.

Finally, while we are doing some recruiting in other industries, our primary focus at this point is financial services, and so that’s going to be our focus here for now as well.

But that doesn’t mean we won’t cover other topics, too - it could just be anything we happen to find interesting on a given day.

- Art