Is Your Recruiter Smarter Than ChatGPT?
(I’m Mike Gordon, independent recruiter and transition consultant. I help match successful advisor-owners with better RIAs, BDs, and OSJs. You work with me when you want an experienced advocate to guide you through firm research, vetting, and negotiations. I’m the Advisor’s Advisor.)
Here is an experiment. Open ChatGPT, tell it you are a $2.5M producer at a large broker-dealer, that you value autonomy, want better service infrastructure, and are thinking about making a move. Ask it for the best platforms to consider.
It will give you a list. The list will be coherent. It will include firms you have heard of, with reasonable descriptions of what each one offers. It will look like research.
It is not research. It is a reflection of marketing budgets and recruiting spend (not innately bad). It’s the firms that have put the most content into the world, not necessarily the ones that are the best fit for your specific business. Again, that is not a criticism of the firms that show up on that list. Many of them are good platforms. It is a criticism of the process because a list built on visibility tells you nothing about fit, and fit is the only thing that actually matters 3-5+ years in.
Now, to be honest, I’ve had quite a few advisors tell me this is essentially what they think most independent recruiters do. It looks something like:
You tell the recruiter what you're looking for.
They listen attentively, engage in active listening, and you feel like you've had a good conversation.
Then they give you a list of five or six firms to talk to. The list feels like you probably could have googled it or ChatGPT'd it, or whatever you say these days.
They then check in once or twice to hear how the calls went, but by and large you're doing the rest on your own.
Which raises a fair question: if that is the level of service you are getting, why do you need the recruiter at all? The honest answer is that in a lot of cases, you do not.
Recruiters, Like Advisors – The AI Value Prop Test
I am going to guess that a version of this has already happened in your own practice. A client comes in having done their homework, which includes having pulled together questions from a ChatGPT session. The information is not exactly wrong, but it lacks context, nuance, and any real understanding of their specific situation. You spend part of the meeting walking them back from conclusions the internet helped them reach too quickly.
That is exactly what I am dealing with on my end.
More advisors are coming into first conversations with me having already run their own ChatGPT research. I think that is fine. I actually encourage it. The same way you probably tell clients that doing their own reading is a good thing, as long as they are not making decisions based on it alone. The research gets you oriented. It does not get you to the right answer.
A Referral Business We Call Recruiting
A meaningful portion of the recruiting industry is running a referral business dressed up as a consulting practice. They have relationships with a handful of preferred platforms, those platforms pay well to be introduced to advisors, and the advisor gets shown the options that are most convenient for the recruiter — not the most appropriate for the business.
ChatGPT has no financial incentive to steer you anywhere. In that narrow sense, it might actually be more objective than the recruiter on the other end of the call. (At least until ads become a bigger deal.)
The advisors who figured this out are the ones who walked away from a conversation with a consultant thinking: I could have Googled those firms myself. They are right. The recruiter who showed them those firms probably could be replaced by a well-prompted AI session.
What ChatGPT (and Many Recruiters) Don’t Do
Here is where the comparison breaks down. AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. ChatGPT has access to everything on the internet: the recruiting pitches, the press releases, the testimonial videos, the carefully worded descriptions of what each platform offers. What it does not have is what I have: 20+ years of watching what happens AFTER advisors sign.
There is no public database of which platforms are discretely tightening their agreements to limit advisor autonomy. No website that tracks which firms have a pattern of blaming the advisor every time one leaves. No index of which OSJs are delivering on their service promises for a $2M practice and which ones fall apart at $800K. No training data that captures what an advisor told me six months after joining a platform that had the “best pitch”.
You would not tell your clients to trust a ChatGPT session to manage their financial future. The information it draws from is public, backward-looking, and completely indifferent to the specifics of their situation. The gap between what it knows and what you know is exactly the gap I am describing here.
That information lives in relationships and in reps. ChatGPT does not have it. A recruiter who has not been doing this long enough or carefully enough does not have it either.
What I Actually Do
Before I mention a single platform, I want to understand where an advisor sees their business in five, ten, fifteen years. Solo or ensemble? Planning to sell eventually? What does the team look like, and what does that team need to thrive? That vision shapes the list, not the other way around.
Then I vet firms on criteria that are not public. Who is growing in a way that serves advisors and who is growing in a way that serves shareholders? Which agreements have gotten more restrictive in the last two years? What the exit looks like if the experience does not match the pitch… because I read the contract, not just the deck.
I talk to advisors who have been at a platform for three or four years, but not the ones in the testimonial video. I want the honest version of what support looks like when something breaks.
And when the answer is that an advisor should stay where they are, I say so. A model built on moving advisors is not built on helping them. Those are not always the same thing.
Until ChatGPT Can Do That
The recruiting industry should be nervous. The part of it that runs on relationships with platforms and a short list of familiar names is at risk of being disintermediated by a free, widely available tool.
The part that runs on real experience is not going anywhere.
If you want to understand what that level of process looks like applied to your situation, that is the conversation I have every week. Click here to schedule a time with me.
— Michael Gordon
themichaelgordon.com