Hiring Lessons From the Fiercest Talent War on the Planet

The best advisers are almost never on the market. Tech has spent twenty years solving exactly that problem — and most of its playbook transplants straight into a UK advice firm.

Here's an uncomfortable truth from twenty-odd years of recruiting in financial services: the best advisers are almost never on the market.

They're not scrolling job boards or replying to cold approaches. They're busy, well looked after, and doing good work for clients who trust them.

That's why we've been networking with advisers for years — not pitching opportunities, but learning what would actually make them consider a move: the support they'd want around them, the kind of clients, the culture, where they want to be in ten years. So when we do approach with the right opportunity, they're interested — because it's a firm they're already aware of. They just haven't been actively looking.

Most firm owners can't build that kind of network themselves — and that's not a failing. You've been doing exactly what an owner should: advising your own clients, improving the client experience, chasing new revenue, driving efficiency. All the right calls — and exactly why staying close to the best talent in the market never made the list. It's a full-time discipline, and you've had a full-time job.

But the firms pulling ahead have found a way to have both. And the talent they're securing isn't just "an adviser with a book" — it's the rarer thing: people who raise the standard of client care from day one, and who arrive with ideas about proposition, process and direction that fuel genuinely positive change. Those people exist. They're employed, they're not looking, and somebody knows where they are.

The old model — go to market when you need someone, hire the best of whoever's available that quarter — is creaking badly, and it was never going to find those people anyway. Tech has been fighting the fiercest talent war on the planet for twenty years and solved exactly this problem. Here's what its winners do — and what I've seen work when advice firms borrow it.

1. They're famous before they're hiring

The best tech companies understood something profound: recruitment starts years before the vacancy. Their engineers write publicly about how they work. Their people speak at events. How they build things, what they believe, what it's like on the inside — all of it is out in the open. So when a role appears, the strongest people in the industry already know the company, already rate it, and can already picture themselves there.

Now run the same test on an advice firm. I do this with owners regularly: I open their website and ask what a top adviser at another firm would learn from it. Usually the answer is nothing. A lighthouse photo and the word "bespoke." Everything a serious adviser would actually want to know — how the firm treats clients, what the support looks like, whether the culture is sane, what the firm believes about the profession — invisible.

Here's the opportunity in that: some firms in this sector are starting to do it, but nowhere near at scale — so the bar is still low. A firm whose advisers and paraplanners talk publicly about their work — real content, written by the people who live it, not the marketing brochure — still stands out to a degree that would be impossible in tech, where everyone's doing it.

The best advisers are watching, even when they're not looking. Give them something to watch.

2. They sell the work, not the vacancy

Watch how a top tech firm courts a senior engineer. They don't lead with the package. They lead with the platform: the problems you'd get to solve, the calibre of people you'd sit alongside, the tools, the autonomy, the scope to build something. The package matters — these are commercial people — but it confirms the decision. It doesn't make it.

The best advisers think exactly the same way, and I've sat in enough of these conversations to know what they actually probe:

• What's the paraplanning and admin support — will I spend my time advising, or fighting my own back office?
• What are the clients like, and is there a bank to grow into?
• How much freedom do I get on advice? Is the technology helping or in the way?
• And for the really ambitious ones: where does this go — is there a genuine path to equity, to leadership, to building something of my own here?

Most firms can't answer these crisply, so the conversation defaults to the one thing everyone can talk about, which is the package — and the moment that happens, you're indistinguishable from every other firm at the table.

Write your platform down. One page. The support model, the client proposition, the autonomy, the honest version of where a great adviser could take things. Lead every conversation with it. The candidates who lean in at that page are the ones you want — the ones who choose firms for what they can do there, not just what they're paid there. And in my experience, they're the ones still with you a decade later.

3. They never stop recruiting

Tech hiring managers keep relationships with people they'd love to hire — sometimes for years, with no vacancy in sight. It's not a campaign. It's a habit. A coffee here, a message about something they published there. So when the timing changes on either side, the conversation takes weeks instead of months, and it starts from warmth instead of cold.

Contrast that with the standard advice-firm approach: recruit only when there's a gap, arrive in the market urgent, and hope the right person happens to be free that quarter. The best people are almost never free that quarter. That's the whole point.

The strongest owners I work with keep a short list — five or ten advisers they'd hire tomorrow if the stars aligned. People they've met at events, faced across a deal, been introduced to and thought: one day.

And they've learned what staying in touch with someone who isn't looking actually means, because it's a skill, and most people get it wrong. It is not "just checking in to see if you're open to opportunities" every six months — that's a sales call with a scarf on, and good advisers can smell it a mile off. It's remembering what they told you last time and asking how it played out. It's sending them something genuinely relevant to a problem they mentioned. It's congratulating the chartered status, the exam pass, the client win you saw on LinkedIn — with no ask attached. It's being straight with them when the honest answer is "stay where you are, the timing's wrong."

Do that for two years and you've earned the only thing that matters: when their world shifts, you're the person they think to call.

And their worlds do shift. A takeover, a culture change, a new owner with new ideas — with over a thousand advice firms absorbed or exited since 2022, there is a lot of shifting going on. Now, I'll be honest about the catch: done properly, this is a job on top of the job you already have. Nobody running client meetings four days a week has spare capacity to nurture ten warm relationships across the market — which is exactly why it's where most of our own work lives. Not finding people the week a firm needs them, but having kept those conversations going through the years when nobody needed anything, so we know where the exceptional people are living long before they'd call themselves available. I have watched entire teams move on the back of relationships built two years before any vacancy existed.

4. Their own people are the magnet

Here's the flywheel that makes all of it compound. In tech, the strongest recruitment channel was never the job advert — it's the people. Engineers thriving somewhere tell their networks, and their networks listen, because a recommendation from someone respected is worth a hundred adverts.

Financial advice is even more like this than tech, because it's smaller. Advisers talk constantly — about which firms genuinely develop their people, which ones deliver what they promised at interview, which ones their mate joined and hasn't stopped raving about. Whatever your firm's reputation is in that conversation, that is your recruitment brand. Not the website. Not the adverts. That.

So here's the question I put to owners, and it's the single best diagnostic I know: would your current advisers recommend the firm to the best adviser they know? If yes — make referring easy and reward it seriously, because a referral from a thriving senior adviser is the highest-quality hire you will ever make. If the answer is a pause — that pause is telling you where to invest before you spend another pound on recruitment.

The long game is the short game

None of this is quick, which is precisely why it works — everything quick is available to your competitors too. Visibility, a platform worth talking about, warm relationships, people who'd vouch for you: it takes a year or two to build and then it never stops paying.

You've spent years building the client engine — the experience, the proposition, the efficient machine behind it. That work is why your firm is worth joining. The talent engine is simply the next thing to build, and unlike the last decade of projects, this one doesn't all have to sit on your shoulders. The prize is worth being clear-eyed about: not another CV, but the people who lift client care the day they arrive and bring the ideas that take the business somewhere new. The firms that get those people aren't the ones that run the best process when a vacancy opens. They're the ones that were already the obvious answer before the question was asked.

Tech firms have been doing it for years. There's no reason the best advice firms can't.

Ortus PSR is a specialist recruitment partner to IFA, wealth management and financial planning firms across the UK. Much of what we do isn't filling vacancies at all: it's keeping honest, long-running conversations going with the best advisers in the market during the years when they're not looking — so that when their world shifts, the right firms are the first to know. If you want to be one of those firms, explore our Talent Acquisition & Retention service or get in touch.