CheckMate

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