Starting out: experience and recruitment

In short yes, firms often seek experience over potential. This is from entry level roles, through preplanning roles, advisor roles and other business roles..

I believe all firms, irrespective of size should adopt some simple steps:

1. Do outreach to local schools and universities to promote the financial planning / advice industry as a great option to consider...this can be combined with financial education.
2. When individuals reach out through linked in or make contact directly then offer time to chat about the industry, the role and your firm, even if you are not hiring at present.
3. Seek ways to attract entry level individuals who have the attitude, the hunger to learn and can grow in the firm, irrespective of their starting point.

Attracting inexperienced advisors and putting them through an Academy type programme is a good idea, although likely to be limited to larger firms. But attracting new people into entry level roles is about investing for the future.

Before we lower the bar, we should be precise about what "potential" actually means. It's a guess about what someone might become, while experience is proof of what they've already done. One person qualifying in eight months shows it can happen, not that it usually does, and the person who pays for a bad bet isn't the firm, it's the client. So yes, weigh potential, but weigh it honestly against that risk. There's an assumption running through all of this, that the barrier is mainly attitude. Some of it is. But a lot of it is real cost and real risk, and no amount of encouragement makes those vanish. A large institution can absorb a trainee who takes two years to become useful. A smaller firm often can't, and when one declines, that may be honesty rather than selfishness. Cheering for new blood is the easy part. The real work is building the scaffolding, shared training, apprenticeship funding, proper supervision, so no beginner is ever left alone with a client's future.

Experience is the wrong bar to set. It tells you how someone handled the world we have come from, not the one we are heading into, and in a fast-changing profession that gap widens. I will take potential and attitude over a polished CV most days. Some of our best advisers and leaders joined with no experience, came through as apprentices, and we now teach them AI alongside the core role. This is not a job for the big institutions alone. Every firm, ours included, has a responsibility to bring people in and skill them for where the profession is going, not only to hire the finished article someone else created. If everyone waits for experience, nobody makes it. The honest problem is that bringing people in has become more expensive, so government should reward the firms investing in both their people and new technology, the way it rewards research and development. A more productive economy needs a more productive workforce, and that is built on the ground, one hire at a time.