By Steven Clark, Senior Managing Director and President of Search
Having run talent searches for several decades, job candidates have always had career criteria that go beyond compensation. That said, over the last several years, candidates have been able to do more research than ever before they decide to take the first call from a recruiter.
That change is easy to miss if you don’t have frequent at-bats and a highly professionalized process for hiring. You post the role, you brief the search firm, and you wait. What you do not see is the thirty minutes a strong candidate spends before agreeing to take the call searching your firm, asking around, forming an opinion before you have said a word. Brand is the best currency for attracting top talent.
The Role of Brand In Attracting Talent
Before AI, a strong candidate might search your firm on Google before a first call. Today, they are asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity to tell them about you. They are asking what kind of firm you are, what you stand for, who your clients are, and what it is like to work there.
If your website sounds like every other RIA in your market (“comprehensive wealth management,” “peace of mind,” “holistic financial planning”), that is exactly what comes back. You immediately sound generic with nothing that tells a talented professional why your firm is worth leaving a good situation to join.
At our annual conference in April, four chief marketing officers from across the wealth management industry made this point independently: brand is no longer just a marketing strategy. It is a discoverability strategy. The firms that appear prominently in AI search results with a specific point of view are pulling ahead in both client acquisition and talent attraction. The cookie-cutter firms that look like everyone else are invisible to both.
How We Challenge Firms to Get Recruiting-Ready
When a firm engages Gladstone for a retained talent search, the quality of what we can do for you is directly tied to what you can tell us and show us about why this role is worth pursuing. There are three questions we ask every client before we begin sourcing.
- What does success look like in this role in 18 months? This is not a job description. It’s a picture of what changes, what gets built, and what the person will have accomplished. Candidates worth recruiting have their own career trajectories. They want to know what the role is actually for, not just what it requires.
- Why would a top performer leave a good situation to come here? We can’t emphasize this enough. You need your value proposition locked in. This is the question most firms stumble on. “We have a great culture” is not an answer. What specifically is different about how you operate, how decisions get made, how good people get developed and rewarded? If you cannot answer this with something concrete, the search will be harder and slower than it needs to be.
- What does the firm stand for beyond the investment strategy? Candidates at the level we recruit are able to command top dollar almost anywhere they go. They are evaluating whether the organization has a clear identity and whether the leadership knows where it is going. Founders who have done the work to articulate this attract better candidates faster.
Get these right, and we have the foundational language to attract ideal candidates, so we can hit the bullseye. Game on!
What Candidates (And AI) Are Looking For
I’d describe a bad hiring process as viewing the hire as a job description problem. They write the spec, brief the search firm, and wait for resumes. They have not thought through the questions above. They do not have a clear picture of what they are offering a top performer beyond the salary range.
I also see a version of this problem with firms that try to run searches internally. The internal HR team (often talented people) does not have the network depth or the industry fluency to reach the candidates who are not actively looking. In wealth management, the best hires almost never come from inbound applications, as often ideal players are embedded in good roles. Where do you find these people? They come from relationships, from referrals, and from direct outreach to people who are comfortable where they are and need a compelling reason to move.
This is why having a sense of a potent, discoverable brand is critical. When we approach strong, embedded candidates, we need to make sure that what they’re finding when they ask ChatGPT (or any other AI) is compelling and reinforcing.
Convincing a passive candidate to have a first conversation requires two things: a relationship with the recruiter they trust, and a story about the firm that is worth hearing. If either one is missing, the conversation does not happen.
Two Things To Do Before Your Next Search
First, ask someone who does not work for you, like a peer, a client, a colleague from another firm, to look at your website and your LinkedIn page, then tell you: what kind of firm do you think this is, and who do you think works there?
Second, do it yourself. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity, pretend you are a senior candidate evaluating your firm, and run the search a candidate would actually run. Ask what the firm is known for. Ask what it is like to work there. Ask how it compares to two or three competitors you respect. Read what comes back as if you have never heard of the firm before.
What you find in those two exercises is the work that needs to happen before the search brief is written. Firms that have closed that gap attract better candidates, run faster searches, and retain the people they hire. The ones that have not are competing on compensation alone, and that is a race the largest aggregators will win every time.
***Steven Clark is the Senior Managing Director and President of Search at Gladstone Group. He has conducted executive searches across the wealth and investment management industry for multiple decades. Reach him at steve@gstoneinc.com.