By Steven Clark, Senior Managing Director and President of Search – Follow Steven on LinkedIn
Schwab’s 2025 RIA benchmarking study found that 74% of RIA firms had plans to hire last year, and that recruiting staff ranked as the second-highest strategic priority across the industry. The competition for talent is not a new story. What is new is where that competition is actually being decided. It is no longer centered on the offer you can put in front of a candidate. It starts much earlier, with how your firm is perceived as a culture and a brand. By the time an offer ever reaches their desk, that perception is already shaping their answer.
I moderated the Talent Mastery panel at our 5th Annual M&A conference in Philadelphia in April. The panelists (CMOs from Dakota Wealth Management, Modern Wealth Management, Orion Advisor Solutions, and Rise Growth Partners) spent an hour discussing how firms with strong brands operate differently. The consistent thread was something I have been watching play out in executive search for years: the firms winning the best talent have built a brand that attracts top talent before they ever talk about an offer.
Can a Stranger Decide They Like You In 60 Seconds?
Here is something to try before your next talent search. Pull up your firm’s website and LinkedIn page as if you have never looked at your firm in depth before. Read them the way a senior candidate would on a Tuesday night after a recruiter left a voicemail. Ask whether anything there would make a thoughtful, experienced professional feel like your firm is worth disrupting their career for.
Most cannot pass that test. Betsy Perez, CMO of Orion Advisor Solutions, put it plainly on the panel: “This is no longer just a brand strategy. Could your website be interchanged with your top five competitors, and no one would really notice?” Companies with active, intentional brands will have the high ground in attracting and retaining talent.
The question is not whether your firm has “a brand”. You have one whether you intentionally built it or not. The question is whether it is doing any work for you. Serious candidates research you before they respond in places such as your website, your LinkedIn, your reputation in the market, and the opinions of people they trust.
In the time it takes you to dial their number, they have formed a view that will shape how receptive they are to anything you say next. After decades of running high-impact searches across wealth management and asset management, I can tell you the pre-call impression is a real variable, and it moves outcomes in ways that comp packages alone cannot fix.
Most RIA Firms Have Inflated Self Perception
Jennifer Geoghegan, CMO of Rise Growth Partners and former CMO of Colony Group (where she was part of a team that grew the firm from $1B to over $20B in AUM), said on the panel: “Most successful firms do have their secret sauce, but if you look at their website and their communications, it does not show up. What shows up is the generic: ‘We give our clients peace of mind. We provide holistic advice.'”
Spend five minutes on any three competing firm websites. The language is largely interchangeable. The values sections read identically. Those phrases are not wrong, but they certainly aren’t a signal. Candidates who have options hear them as noise.
The actionable question is this: can your best employees articulate what makes your firm different without defaulting to the same language on your homepage? If they cannot, your brand is internal folklore at best. It is not working as a recruiting asset.
The work of getting there is not a rebrand. It usually starts with a harder internal conversation: why are your best people here, and does anything you put into the world actually reflect that answer?
Culture Is a Valuation Factor for M&A
One other note that should certainly be on your radar if you’re an RIA owner: acquirers are now prioritizing talent in their criteria for acquisitions. Specifically, they see culture as the output of healthy talent, both for attracting it and retaining it. During the buying spree of 2022-2024, this was less prominent. Today, the majority of buyers we talk to list it as a priority. The people dimension of a transaction has become the centerpiece of the underwriting, and only 42% of RIA firms have a written succession plan, the lowest level since tracking began in 2019.
When a buyer evaluates a firm’s talent depth, they are asking a version of the same question candidates ask before a first call: Is there something here beyond the founder? A legible employer brand (one that has demonstrably attracted, retained, and developed strong people) is evidence of the answer. A firm that has never invested in clarity about who it is and what it offers its people cannot produce that evidence on demand. It has to explain and argue in the middle of a process instead, with less time and less leverage.
The connection between your recruiting brand and your transaction position is not theoretical. It is a line item.
Before You Engage a Recruiter for Your Next Search…
When did you last read your own website as a prospective hire would? If a senior candidate were to search your firm tonight, what would they find? And would it give them a reason to call back? Can three of your non-principal employees, unprompted, tell you in their own words what makes your firm different? When your next best advisor eventually leaves, what does the firm they go to have that yours does not?
These are not comfortable questions, which is exactly why most firms skip them and go straight to the search. The firms that have gotten honest about what they look like from the outside and acted on it run better searches. Jessie Hughes of Dakota Wealth Management framed what that alignment looks like when it is working: “Brand often feels personal, especially to business owners. It is important for your team to also adopt those values and be able to communicate them.”
Executive compensation packages for senior roles have increased 20 to 30% year over year, and equity has become an expected component at that level. The bidding war is real. The firms consistently winning it, though, are not just outbidding. They are creating a context that makes a candidate want to say yes before the negotiation starts.
If you want to talk through what your firm looks like from the outside (to candidates, to buyers, to the market), we are glad to have that conversation.
Steven Clark has spent multiple decades placing high-impact executive talent across the wealth management industry. He is the Senior Managing Director and President of Search at Gladstone Group, and host of The Hunter Podcast.