The RIA Talent Report · First Half 2026
Every Hire Is a Decision Made Twice
A first-party look at hiring inside independent wealth management: what firms assume about the search, and what the record actually shows.
of the advisors we placed weren't looking when we first reached them.
Built from The Well's own call and placement record, checked against itself before publication. For principals and hiring leads deciding how to run their next search.
The Receipts
Every finding traces back to a record we can point to. Most of it is first-party: our own calls, notes, and closed searches. A small, clearly marked share is licensed industry data, cited on the page where it appears.
Ten Findings at a Glance
What the Record Actually Shows
CFP was listed as a hard requirement, then waived anyway, in most of the hires where a firm first insisted on it.
The posted salary range misses more often than it holds. Most advisor hires close outside the range a firm actually posted.
Median pay does rise with tenure, but the spread stays wide at every tenure band: years in the seat still will not tell you what one advisor is going to ask for.
One support hire changes a solo advisor's practice economics enough to show up in what the practice is worth at exit, not just what it earns that year.
The stated reason advisors give for being open to a move flips over a career: growth drives the early years, and being forced out, a sale, a succession squeeze, a change in leadership, overtakes everything else by the end of one.
The strongest hires in this record did not come from a bigger pool of applicants. They came from reaching people who had no pipeline at all.
Veteran and entry-level advisors want opposite things from where they sit day to day, split almost exactly down generational lines, and both sides are right about their own experience.
Among the searches that do not close, the candidate walks away almost as often as the client says no. Losing someone you wanted is a different problem than passing on someone who was not right.
Search volume is shifting toward the top of the org chart faster than firms are staffing under it, inside a consolidation wave that is not slowing down.
The counteroffer everyone budgets for almost never shows up. Across tens of thousands of recorded calls, notes, and emails, it surfaced only a handful of times.
The numbers behind each one, the exhibits, and the methodology are inside.
Get the Full Report
The RIA Talent Report, First Half 2026.
28 pages. Ten findings, the exhibits behind each one, and the published methodology. Free to download.
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How We Built This
The Methodology
Where a stat could not survive a second check, we cut it.
A small, clearly marked share of the context in this report is licensed industry data, cross-referenced against our own record but never folded into our first-party counts. The full methodology, including where each number comes from and how time-to-fill is measured, is published inside the report.
Your Next Step
Knowing the Pattern Is Not the Same as Having a Plan.
We built The 30-Day Hire from this exact record: a day-by-day game plan for landing a top advisor or leader in 30 days instead of 90.
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Every week a seat stays open costs you revenue and enterprise value, and the advisor who would move your firm forward is rarely the one still waiting at day 60. If you want to talk through what the record means for your next hire, we are one call away.
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