Wilmington’s Northwestern Mutual office is expanding, in terms of both personnel and physical space.

Northwestern Mutual plans to add 10 financial representatives and 15 financial representative interns this year, said Lyndsey Stainback, the firm’s chief recruiting officer for Wilmington. The effort is part of Northwestern Mutual’s nationwide goal to recruit a record-setting 6,400 financial professionals in 2014.

“This is a high-turnover business,” Stainback said. “Our goal is to hire the right people at the right time and invest to make them successful producers early.”

School-year interns are almost all recruited from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she said. Some summer interns are students at other universities but reside in Wilmington during their internship.

Northwestern Mutual has consistently ranked high on Vault Career Intelligence’s list of top internships, Stainback said. For 2014, it ranked 6th nationally on the list.

The Wilmington office covers a region that stretches from Myrtle Beach to Danville, Va.

As it increased its number of representatives, and they, in turn, hired support staff, the Northwestern Mutual offices in the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney building at 1111 Military Cutoff Road were getting cramped, Stainback said.

She said the firm leased ground-floor space for seven veteran representatives and their staffers, then reconfigured its existing second-floor space to accommodate newer hires and make the space more efficient.