The industry grades its own talent pipeline a C

Roughly 35% of all financial advisers will retire within 10 years, Cerulli Associates projects, and when PLANADVISER convened three retirement-plan executives Wednesday to discuss who replaces them, the grades they handed the industry's recruiting effort ran from a D-plus to a B-minus. Janine Moore, senior vice president and retirement practice leader at HUB Retirement and Wealth Management, gave a B-minus; Rick Sauerman, senior institutional consultant at ClearSight Advisors of Raymond James & Associates, gave a C; Francisco Abril, vice president of employee engagement and financial wellness at HUB, gave a D-plus.

On the "Broadening the Appeal of the Industry" webinar, the diagnosis was less about pay than plumbing. Sauerman argued that money is not what draws people in early, because building a book of business often takes several years; what recruits need instead is training and a path they can walk confidently. Moore, more than three decades into her career, said the reward is watching people she helped early on retire with dignity, while Abril described HUB's approach as national by design—mentorship and internship programs run as a companywide effort coordinated from the chief executive through regional leadership and HR rather than delegated to individual offices.

That distinction is where the numbers bite, because a national pipeline is an operating model rather than a program: it takes a C-suite sponsor, an HR function that hires in cohorts, and the patience to carry trainees through years of thin production. The practices most exposed to the 35% are the ones too small to run that model, which leaves them paying up for experienced hires or selling outright, and Cerulli's decade-long clock is less forgiving than it looks because a recruiting disadvantage compounds annually.

Diversity is where the panel saw the fastest route to a better grade. Sauerman said the industry serves an extremely diverse population of plan participants, that those participants need to feel comfortable talking to advisers, and that diversity is what would move the mark toward an A; Moore was more direct, recalling that she was handpicked as the face of a new kind of adviser and noting the same conversation is still running decades later, because people hire people who look like them.

The succession arithmetic bends toward the consolidators. Practices that cannot staff a successor become acquisition targets, and retirement plan advisories are the roll-up currency of the moment, as this publication has argued. The advice we gave the 2025 Emerging Leaders cohort—get client exposure and network instead of waiting—describes the same shortfall from the recruit's side, and if a webinar panel is still handing out Cs in 2027, the pipeline is losing to the clock.