Family office leaders describe persistent hiring pressure for investment, tax and trust roles

Family offices looking to hire still face a competitive market, and the cooling in the nationwide job market has not changed that. FO Pro, The Family Office Professional, reports that offices searching for investment, tax and trust professionals are working against three forces at once: new family offices forming, longtime staff retiring, and private equity-backed firms bidding for the same people.

Tony Tagliapietra, chief investment officer and vice president of shareholder services at the Michels Family Office and chief executive of RIVER1 Asset Management, tells the publication that the competition for talent remains one of the biggest challenges facing the industry. The market, he says, is still very competitive, particularly for experienced investment professionals, accountants, and tax and estate planning professionals.

That list is not arbitrary. Investment, tax and estate planning are the seats where a family's capital and its legal exposure sit, and the judgement they demand accumulates inside the work itself. An office hiring into one of those roles is rarely buying potential; it is buying the demonstrated ability to run a portfolio or structure a trust without a long apprenticeship, and that is the scarcest thing in this market.

The shortage is not uniform. Brian Schultz, a CPA who leads the tax practice at Plante Moran Wealth Management, tells FO Pro that the difficulty probably depends on the type of position. The constraint he names is narrower than the job title: many family offices want candidates who have already worked in one, which, in his words, makes the universe pretty small. An answer that varies by position and by office rules out treating family office hiring as one market with a single dynamic.

That preference explains why the squeeze resists the ordinary remedy. A market short of junior analysts can hire them and train them up. A market short of people who have already sat inside a family's affairs has to wait for them, because there the credential and the experience are the same thing. Every office insisting on prior family office experience is drawing from a list its peers are drawing from, and posting an opening does not lengthen it.

Wealth and estate planning is one place that demand shows up clearly. Michael Marquez, president of Bessemer Trust, describes a lot of demand for help creating dynastic trust structures in different jurisdictions — arrangements meant to support a family's growing needs and to move with it as it evolves from one generation to the next.

The jurisdictions carry weight in that description. Trust planning that crosses tax and legal regimes asks for fluency in more than one set of rules, which suggests the adviser Marquez describes is harder to find than a strong estate planner working in a single regime. The estate planning is the entry ticket; the multi-jurisdiction experience is the premium, and his account puts both in one brief. His phrasing also implies tenure, since a structure built to accompany a family from one generation to the next is a mandate measured in decades rather than a seat filled for a season.

The demand side is fed from more than one direction. Eric L. Johnson, who leads the U.S. family office tax practice at Deloitte LLP, tells FO Pro that the past five to seven years have brought what he calls an explosion in the number of family offices being created. Part of that, he says, reflects wealth accumulation in the United States; part reflects the transfer of wealth from the Baby Boomer and Silent generations to Gen Xers and Millennials.

Both causes point the same way for staffing. Accumulation creates families that need an office; a generational transfer creates families in the middle of a handoff who conclude they need one now. Neither reverses on a short horizon, which is why the publication pairs the formation wave with retirements and private equity bids rather than treating any of the three as cyclical.

Johnson's vantage point sits outside any single family. The executive describing the formation wave leads the family office tax practice at a Big Four accounting firm rather than running one office's affairs, which suggests the pressure is visible across the advisory market and not only inside individual offices.

The window he cites is short. If the creation wave dates to the past five to seven years, many of the offices now hiring have existed for less time than the experience their job descriptions ask for; a candidate with prior family office experience would have earned it at an older office, and the older offices are where the retirements are happening. The formation rate sharpens that mismatch rather than resolving it.

Creation is not offset by closure. Schultz tells the publication that more family offices are forming all the time and that the rate of creation is faster than the rate at which existing offices are unwinding operations, which means the potential demand is growing on that count alone. The article notes that some offices may shrink or cease operations altogether, but that this happens less frequently than creation and expansion.

A formation rate that outruns attrition adds seats without releasing anyone to fill them. Each new office needs its own investment, tax and trust bench, and the people it wants are the ones the rest of this account describes as hard to find. A closing office returns a handful of professionals to the market; a forming office adds demand that did not exist the year before, and the two do not trade evenly.

Even if family offices had the candidate pool to themselves, it would already be strained. FO Pro reports that private equity-backed firms are bidding for the same investment, tax and trust professionals, which puts family offices in competition with buyers presumably working under different compensation constraints. Competition of that kind usually surfaces in pay, though the reporting attaches no figures, so whether offices lose candidates on price or on something else is unconfirmed.

Retirement pulls from the other end, and it removes more than a headcount. The people leaving are the ones who hold an office's memory of a family's preferences, its past decisions and its outside advisers, and that is not a body of knowledge a replacement inherits on a start date. The cost of a departure is felt well after the seat is refilled, which suggests an office that plans for succession only at the moment of a resignation is planning late.

Read together, the four sources describe the same pressure from four seats: a family office chief investment officer in Tagliapietra, a wealth management tax practice leader in Schultz, the president of a trust company in Marquez, and a Big Four family office tax leader in Johnson. Their agreement on direction matters more than any single number, because a shortage visible from all four positions is not one employer's bad luck or one city's market. The investment seat appears in Tagliapietra's list but not in the specific demand examples the other three give, which run to tax, estate and trust work.

The rate Schultz cites governs how long this lasts. If creation keeps outpacing unwinding, demand for experienced investment, tax and trust people grows whatever the national labor market does, and each new office joins a queue that already includes its peers. If formation slows, the pressure eases without a single office changing how it hires. FO Pro reports that its sources also describe the approaches that have helped them hire, and those are the part of the story no formation rate can supply: whatever the aggregate does, a given office still has to fill the seat in front of it.