Financial advisors thinking of switching firms now have a free online recruiting tool that lets them gather company and job information privately.
Launched Monday, the Advisor Center allows financial advisors to remain anonymous while comparing or connecting with wirehouses, independent broker-dealers, registered investment advisors, custodians and other kinds of firms.
Advisor Center founder and CEO Tom Daley said he wanted to streamline job searching for advisors while maintaining their privacy. “It really came about by looking at the job search task from the advisor’s perspective,” he says. “Before now, the due diligence process was extremely inefficient. Advisors had to go to multiple sources to gather the research needed—all while trying to remain under the radar.”
Daley, who was once senior vice president of East Branch Development at LPL Financial, says the center also gives advisors an unbiased forum where they can evaluate career options without having their identity revealed.
Daley said Advisor Center makes job searching easier because advisors can find information on multiple firms in one place rather than navigating through several company Web sites. “They’d have to navigate five or six or seven different Web sites to get to the section of a particular firm’s Web site that speaks to an advisor looking to affiliate with a firm,” Daley says. “The beauty of the Advisor Center is that a financial advisor can now come to one centralized portal, one Web site.”
Advisor Center stores confidential information that an advisor provides, but the site hides his or her identity. “They only enter it once, and as they do the system automatically masks their identity with a codename,” Daley says. “It provides a profile about you. It doesn’t say you’re with a particular firm; it says you may be a wirehouse advisor in Illinois.”
The Advisor Center offers wirehouses and regional firms, independent and insurance broker-dealers, custodians, financial institutions, RIA firms and branch managers a new way to highlight their value propositions, Daley said.
LPL Financial, Commonwealth Financial Network, Advisor Group, Cetera Financial Group and Pershing and other firms have joined the Advisor Center.
To join, firms pay a monthly subscription fee that has a three-tier pay scale based upon the revenue size. “The key thing is that all of the firms pay some type of subscription fee to participate,” Daley says. “That allows us to make it always free for the advisor.”