💡 Expert Insights: The best candidates aren’t reading your job post

🙋🏼‍♂️ Ask a Recruiter: Should I take the call from a recruiter?

📌 New Career Opportunities

⭐ Associate Spotlight: Christie Burgess

🔗 Connect With Your Recruiter

Post a senior wealth, trust, or fiduciary role, and you'll hear from people who are looking right now. Some of them are good. The problem is who you don't hear from. The person best suited to a senior role is usually not applying for it. They're already placed, doing the work well, with no reason to watch a job board. Reaching them is a separate job, and it's most of the work in any search we run.

A job post only reaches the slice of the market that's searching this week. The latest data reports that 70-75% of the workforce is passive talent — people who aren't actively looking for a job. At the senior end of financial services, that share runs even higher, because the strongest producers have the least reason to leave. Posting a role and waiting for applications turns up whoever happens to be available. The strongest people in the market never see it, because they were never watching. The company that hires them comes out ahead, and finding them takes deliberate outreach, one person at a time.

A high-performing producer who's content where they are won't move for money alone. A bigger salary and a signing bonus used to be enough to start the conversation. That stopped being true. What gets someone like that to take a real call is specific, and it almost never shows up in a job description.

Those questions get answered in conversation. A job post can't carry them. If they go unaddressed in the first call, strong candidates step back, and you rarely get a second chance. Getting that first conversation right is the difference between a search that closes and one that stalls.

If you have a senior role to fill, reach out to the FRI team. We spend our days in conversations with people who'd never answer a job post, which is usually where the right hire comes from.

Q: A recruiter reached out about a role I'm not looking for. I'm happy where I am — is it even worth a conversation?

Our take:

Yes, taking the call costs you nothing. Most of the people we place weren't looking when we first reached out. A good recruiter won't push you toward anything; a first conversation is just a way to find out whether a role offers something your current one doesn't. If it doesn't, you've spent 20 minutes and come away with a clearer read on your own market value. If it does, it's usually something you'd never have come across on your own. These conversations are confidential, and there's no obligation on either side.

➡️ Have a question for our team? Send it our way.

“Before I got into recruiting, I spent nearly ten years in Los Angeles as an Executive Producer in television. Clients are usually surprised when that comes up. It was a chaotic, fun stretch, and a long way from where I am now.”

The producer’s instinct for lining up the right people and keeping a complex process on track is the same one Christie brings to every search.

👋🏼 Get to know Christie on LinkedIn →