A realistic timeline for a senior hire in wealth management, asset management, venture capital or financial services more broadly is three to five months from brief to start date. That accounts for a month to six weeks of active search and candidate assessment, a structured interview process of three to four weeks, offer negotiation and acceptance, and a notice period of three months which is standard at senior level and can extend to six months for very senior individuals.

If a role has been open significantly longer than this without a successful outcome, the problem almost certainly lies in one of four places: the brief, the channel, the process, or the package. Identifying which one is causing the delay is the first step to resolving it.

The most common reason a senior financial services search stalls is that the brief was not sufficiently precise when the search began. A role described as a Head of Compliance, a Senior Investment Manager or a Business Development Director covers an enormous range of actual requirements depending on the firm, the strategy, the client base and the stage of development of the business. If the brief does not specify the exact regulatory experience required, the client or institutional relationships that matter, the seniority of internal stakeholders the individual will work with, or the commercial contribution expected in the first twelve months, the search will produce a wide but poorly matched pool of candidates. Interviews will take place. Nobody will quite be right. The process will restart.

The solution is to invest an hour with the hiring manager before going back to market, asking specific questions about what the person in this role needs to have done before, what they will be doing in their first six months, and what success looks like at twelve months. The resulting brief will produce a better shortlist and a faster decision.

Most senior professionals in financial services are not looking at job boards. They are not responding to speculative LinkedIn messages from recruiters they do not know. They are performing well in their current roles, are well compensated, and will only engage with a new opportunity if it is presented compellingly and through a channel they trust.

A standard advertising and inbound approach will return a response that skews heavily towards individuals who are actively looking, between roles, or under pressure in their current situation. Some of these candidates are strong. Most are not the person the firm actually wants. The person the firm actually wants is not aware the opportunity exists.

Reaching passive candidates, those who are not looking but who are the right fit, requires a proactive search: identifying them by name through market research, approaching them directly and having a conversation that presents the opportunity in a way that makes it worth considering. This is what a retained executive search does and what a contingent or advertising-led process almost never achieves for a senior role.

A slower than expected senior hire is sometimes caused not by a failure to find the right candidates but by losing them during the process. This is more common than firms realise, and it tends to happen in predictable ways.

Long gaps between interview stages are the most frequent cause. A candidate who has gone through a first interview and heard nothing for three weeks has, in most cases, moved on mentally even if they have not formally withdrawn. They have either progressed with another process, convinced themselves the firm is disorganised, or simply lost the momentum that made the opportunity feel compelling in the first place. Polling conducted by Fram Search consistently finds that delays between interview stages are the most common reason strong candidates disengage from a hiring process in financial services.

Limited feedback is the second cause. Candidates who receive no substantive feedback between stages cannot address concerns, cannot assess how seriously they are being considered, and will often default to caution. In a market where experienced professionals have options, a process that communicates poorly is a process that loses candidates to one that does not.

The solution is a tighter process with pre-agreed timelines between stages, direct and honest feedback at each point, and a named individual who is responsible for managing communication with candidates throughout.

A search that reaches the offer stage repeatedly and fails to convert is almost always a package problem. Either the base salary is below market rate for the profile being sought, the bonus structure does not reflect what candidates of that calibre expect, or an element of the package, notice period expectations, equity, flexibility or carry, is creating a gap that the firm has not addressed.

Salary benchmarking for senior roles in financial services requires current market data rather than assumptions based on internal pay structures or roles filled two or three years ago. Compensation expectations have moved materially in several areas of the market. A firm offering a package that was competitive in 2021 or 2022 will find that a proportion of candidates who reach the offer stage will decline, not always because the role is wrong but because the economics do not work for them.

If a role has been open for more than four months without a successful outcome, the process that has been running is unlikely to produce a different result simply by continuing. More applications will not solve a brief problem. More interviews will not solve a passive candidate problem. More time will not solve a process problem. What is needed is an honest assessment of which of the four causes above is driving the delay, and a structured response to each.

For senior roles in financial services where the vacancy has already been open for several months, a retained search with a specialist recruiter who knows the market, can proactively identify passive candidates, and will manage the process end to end is almost always the most effective way to resolve the situation quickly. The cost of the vacancy, measured in lost revenue, operational risk, client service impact or management time spent managing the gap, will typically exceed the cost of the search many times over before the role is filled.

Fram Search works with wealth management, asset management, venture capital and financial services firms on senior appointments, including those where an earlier process has not succeeded. If your hire is taking longer than it should and you would like a confidential conversation about the market and the options available to you, we would be glad to help.