Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
We had one of our advisors quit under difficult circumstances. He talked to some local reporters after he quit, and now we look like a terrible place to work. We are based in a small area, and his actions have done some damage to our reputation. One of the recruiters we know is hesitant to reach out to people until “the furor dies down,” as he puts it. We did not do anything wrong. This advisor was a misfit from the start. What can we do to minimize the ongoing problems his departure is causing us?
Name withheld
Dear Financial Advisor,
The problem you have is now that your ex-employee has made the move, most anything you do will look like you “doth protest too much!” Unfortunately it isn’t prudent or effective to launch a he-said, she-said fight in the public eye. Your question brings up some media dos and don’ts, though, which could help you during this difficult time or help you deal with media in the future.
- Get to know local writers and reporters. If you know them and have a relationship established, they’ll call you for a statement or comment before writing about you. You can get to know them by commenting via email or social media on something they’ve written, by offering to write a bylined article or by acting as a source for investment-related issues.
- Be proactive in communicating. Press releases are still used and welcomed by most reporters. If you have personnel changes, you don’t have to announce that a certain employee has quit, but you can talk about exciting changes at your firm and new things you are doing. In other words, direct the attention to something positive and hopefully minimize anything negative being said about you.
- Be clear about your values and your mission in any of your public information. A reporter is likely to look at your website or any blogs you have written to get a sense of who you are and what your firm stands for in the marketplace. If you are defining your image and it’s associated with something positive, a complaining ex-employee might get less attention.
- You mention you are in a “small area.” If you are able to have a current employee write a letter to the editor about how your company is a great place to work, it might get printed. The letter would look better coming from another employee than from you.
In short, it’s always a good idea to have a presence with media folks and a relationship with them. Start to reach out so you can build those relationships for the future. This issue with your ex-employee will go away. It might just take some time.
Dear Bev,
What are the best interview questions to figure out if someone is a good fit for our firm?
Max, Northwest
Dear Max,
I have to start with a few questions for you – pertinent ones like, what’s the job? What’s the office culture? What do you most care about in a hire? It would be helpful to have a little more guidance to know what type of role and what accountabilities the person in question would have.
Without that, let me outline some general best practices in this area that could apply to any role:
- The best interview questions are behavioral ones. Ask questions that get candidates to paint a picture for you. Don’t ask “What was the best job you ever had?” or “Where do you want to be in five years”? Ask things like, “Describe the hardest decision you ever had to make in the workplace and how you dealt with it.” Or “What were the attributes of the worst boss you have ever had? Why was he/she the worst for you?” Or ask them to explain exactly how they worked with certain colleagues, prospects or clients – step by step.
- Ask the same questions phrased in different ways. If you want to get a sense of work ethic, for example, you might pose a problem in one question and ask how they would solve it, and then ask about an ethical dilemma they faced and what they did about it. You can learn a lot by reframing a question and listening for any new information or differences in the answers.
- Instead of focusing only on the duties of what they have done in the past, focus on what they like to do. You can go through each job they’ve had and ask them to identify the things they enjoyed most and those things they would have liked to be able to delegate if they could have done so. Refrain from asking about what types of job they’d like to have or what roles best fit them, because they will describe the job you are interviewing them about. Instead, go back to their histories.
- Ask the top five questions they have for you. What do they need to know before they could decide if certain jobs or companies are right for them? If they can’t come up with five questions, they aren’t thinking enough about whether the situation is right for them.
- Be sure you ask cultural questions. Before you tell them about the firm’s culture, ask them about the types of environment they tend to be most effective within. Ask them to describe their values and motivators. Again, comparison questions can yield a lot of information – “What’s a culture you did not fit within, and why?” “What’s a culture that fit, and why?”
Having a clear job definition, accompanied by accountabilities and expectations for success can help. But don’t make the mistake of asking leading questions so candidates can align their answers to what you want to hear. Ask broad, open-ended questions that require descriptive answers. You should be able to get clear pictures of who the applicants are and how they would fit in your firm. Investigate until you get an objective view.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry in 1995; in 2008 she co-founded Advisors Trusted Advisor to offer dedicated practice management resources to advisors, planners and wealth managers. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate students Leadership & Social Responsibility. Beverly is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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