The average financial advisor in the United States is more than 50 years old; only 5% are under the age of 30. With more than half of advisors spending as much time planning their own retirement as they plan for their clients’ retirement, the table is set for a massive disruption in existing advisor/client relationships. 

Even without the pressure of these demographic shifts, a key area wealth managers have struggled with is recruiting and developing new advisors. 

Creating and executing your plan to attract, acquire, and integrate new hires must begin with a targeted strategy that supports your overall goals and accounts for the realities of market condition. Hiring is not simply about filling the role; it’s part of an overall process to build your business and drive success. To increase the likelihood of success, it is critical that we all think about hiring the same way we consider sales methods: aggressive, multichannel marketing, efficient feedback and throughput, automated or automation-assisted decision making, and integrated onboarding.

Here are five ways you can use the power of Salesforce to improve your wealth advisor onboarding process:

1. Integrate your ATS with Salesforce

No matter your target hire, to activate your strategy and identify and attract talent, digital tools and intelligent network mining will play critical roles. An appropriate attraction strategy must include social and mobile/SMS strategies to reach and engage key target resources. 

Your recruiting function may leverage a type of CRM of their own called an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). If you leverage a standalone ATS, most have mobile applications, integrated job postings, and resume management functions. Integrating your ATS with Salesforce could supercharge your recruiting efforts and also pay dividends when onboarding and account planning. Combining your ATS with Salesforce allows you to fully realize the value of your contact data. Former clients and partners could be future employees.

2. Enable an electronic intake process

Allow a candidate to create a profile within the community and reduce the data entry required for your candidate.

Implementing a solution that enables the candidate to upload their resume and have the information automatically pushed into specific fields and objects in Salesforce is a huge timesaver. Allow the candidate to review the mapping before submitting to ensure the accuracy of their data. 

3. Streamline the interview process

Your interview tool should have calendar access for interviewers and online scheduling capabilities. A centralized calendar in Salesforce increases visibility and efficiency when HR departments are attempting to schedule multiple candidates’ time slots at once. Opening up the schedule to allow a candidate to select times that work best for them alleviates administrative burden. 

Consider:

• Sending automatic confirmations via email/text to candidates
• Pre-assigning candidates to specific interviewers
• Optimizing the interview day itself with checkpoints 

4. Automate an efficient post-interview process

Automate the reminder to interviewers to provide feedback after the interview takes place, as well as automating the thank you message to candidates for participating. This should include potential next steps based on interview status, and for instance, could be continued throughout a multi-day, multi-step interview process.

Maintain a scorecard in your database for multiple interviewers and HR to view. 

5. Deliver an Interactive Onboarding Process

Once a candidate has been moved to the offer stage, the company can continue to leverage their candidate community to onboard their new hires. An automated email can be sent to prompt them to log into the community, where they can find their offer letter and other formal new hire documents. 

Create an interactive onboarding journey (e.g., with Pardot or Marketing Cloud) using email and text to help walk your new advisor through steps needed to transition their existing book of business to your firm. Whether simple or complex, introducing automated messaging to take an advisor through the onboarding process is a huge win.

In practice, this looks like:

• An automated email can be sent to give new hires access to a community where their important onboarding documents are located. 
• Tools like DocuSign and Conga can be leveraged to make this process more efficient and streamlined. 
• The onboarding portal can provide access and insight into the status of the onboarding process and status of any account transfers, among other things.

Improve your wealth advisor onboarding process with Salesforce

At Silverline, our deep understanding of wealth and asset management business processes informs how we design and implement our solutions. Our 10+ years of experience developing solutions for financial institutions gives us unique insight into what you need to consider when using Salesforce as a wealth firm.

Our approach to help wealth management firms improve their advisor onboarding process:

• Reduces the cost and timeline of advisor acquisition by leveraging Salesforce as an engagement platform
• Increases visibility for all parties throughout the recruiting and onboarding process
• Ensures effective positioning of your firm’s products and solutions quickly through effective training and reinforcement
• Maximizes the potential for success by routing the right leads to the right advisors and providing intelligent product suggestions based on similar customer profiles

Download our free ebook to learn how we partner with wealth firms to incorporate effective recruiting and onboarding best practices into the Salesforce platform to maximize the potential for success — and the long-term ROI on advisors.