Financial advisors thinking of switching firms now have a free online recruiting tool that lets them gather company and job information privately.

Launched in December, 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.

The Advisor Center’s founder and CEO, Tom Daley, says 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 a senior vice president of 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 says the 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,” he says.
“The beauty of the Advisor Center is that a financial advisor can now come to one centralized portal, one Web site.”
The site stores advisors’ confidential information and hides their identities. “They only enter it once, and as they do, the system automatically masks their identity with a code name,” 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.”

He says the Advisor Center offers companies a new way to highlight their value propositions, whether they are wirehouses or regional firms; independent or insurance broker-dealers; custodians; RIA firms; or branch managers.

Among those that have joined are LPL Financial, Commonwealth Financial Network, the Advisor Group, Cetera Financial Group and Pershing, in addition to other firms.

To join, firms pay a monthly subscription fee that has a three-tier pay scale based on their amount of revenue. “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.”