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Succession planning can easily be one of the biggest hurdles for a Financial Advice business. It’s hard to find the right fit for your team. Harder still to introduce them to existing clients and ensure they both feel comfortable with the transition.

Sam Bonello from GrowUp Financial recently experienced a succession planning challenge in their business. With the introduction of heightened education requirements for financial advisers, Sam had to find experienced financial advisers who could start taking over from current advisers who may look to step out of the business earlier than planned because of their short time frame to retirement.

As many business owners know, the hiring process can be intimidating as it can become a very expensive exercise. As Sam explained, “Our business had used a recruitment agency in the past to fill an adviser support role – someone who could attend meetings with the adviser and take some of the workloads off them. That wasn’t a cheap exercise. From memory, we paid between $10k – $15k to recruit that person, and in the end, they weren’t able to deliver on everything we thought they would be based on the education they had and the way the recruitment brief read. So I was a bit freaked out by the process of hiring again”.

Sam was looking for an adviser who embodied the same values as the company and who would fit with the culture of their business. Sam’s ideal candidate would operate honestly, with integrity and would be thorough in their work.

After interviewing several applicants from different employment and word-of-mouth channels, Sam decided to try the XY Talent Hub. When asked about his experience using XY Talent Hub, Sam said “what I liked about XY was the person who contacted me was exactly what we needed, ready to go and we ended up employing that person. They’ve now been with us for six months and we have both agreed to proceed past the probation period and make it permanent and long-term”.

“This is something I liked about a lead from the XY network. I see XY as a progressive community, and so I figured, the fact that Michael [new team member] found us on that platform and was spending time on XY, he had already started down that road of being the type of future-focused adviser. The chances of that being true for applicants from other avenues were much lower. This brought a lot of peace of mind to leveraging XY for the hiring process.”