Bisys Brokerage Services has partnered with a Florida recruiting firm to tap talent for its bank clients.
The third-party marketing firm will direct most of its clients' recruiting needs to Human Capital Resources Inc. of St. Petersburg, said Charles J. Mohr, president of the investment services group at Bisys Group Inc. of Little Falls, N.J.
For client banks, this approach to recruiting should be "much more efficient than dealing with four or five firms," Mr. Mohr said. Bisys Brokerage of Concord, Calif., recently changed its name from CoreLink Financial Inc.
A number of third-party marketing firms, which set up brokerage programs for banks, recruit talent for their clients as a value-added service. Many of the firms have recruiters on staff.
"This way, I fix my costs pretty much. I can also walk down the hall and ask how many people she's hired today," said Robert R. Blagojevich, president and chief executive of IFC Holdings Inc. of Tampa, Fla. IFC Holdings owns two marketing firms-Invest Financial Corp. of Tampa, and Investment Centers of America, Bismarck, N.D.-and has 440 bank clients.
Other firms said they work with a variety of search companies to fill their clients' staffing needs.
"I think there's always an advantage to multiple firms," said Scott K. Davis, a senior vice president of Essex National Securities Inc., the brokerage arm of Essex Corp. of New York. "There might be opportunities to use firms that have a regional strength." Essex Corp. has 200 bank clients.
Bisys has a few recruiters on staff and has used several recruiting firms, but Mr. Mohr said that partnering with Human Capital will let Bisys negotiate "more favorable terms" for its 81 bank clients.
He declined to discuss financial terms of the agreement, except to say that Bisys gets a "substantial discount."
Though the arrangement benefits CoreLink, it could make other marketing firms wary of using Human Capital to recruit investment representatives. "Who's he going to put in priority?" one company executive asked.
Paul Werlin, president of Human Capital, said he was not concerned about losing business from other marketing firms. "It's a big country," he said. "Also, everybody's looking for slightly different things."
Separately, Mr. Mohr said in a recent interview that CoreLink is close to adding several bank clients, including "two or three major banks that are significantly larger than their biggest client." Though its largest client, Citizens Financial Group of Providence, R.I., has $17 billion of assets, CoreLink's roster consists mostly of banks with less than $3 billion of assets.
