This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.
It is no secret. Insurance has a talent crisis. Not that people who work in the insurance industry aren’t talented – oh boy. But that there aren’t enough people sticking around, and those who have stuck around are largely preparing for impending retirement.
It is known that sales are high among consumer-oriented producers. An often-quoted industry statistic states that more than 80 percent of agents leave the company within a few years. Insurance employees in in-house positions typically experience greater stability, but turnover is increasing, moving from less than 10 percent to nearly 15 percent.
In some industries, high sales are neither surprising nor do they threaten the long-term stability of that industry. Many of our retail and hospitality services are based on the assumption that turnover will be high and training must occur quickly.
In contrast, insurance is an industry where learning the language, government regulations and their variations, and even understanding the basic operations can take years. Someone with decades of industry experience has the kind of institutional knowledge that will protect their company from mistakes that cost real money in lost productivity or actual government fines.
So how can the industry as a whole prevent our most valuable and knowledgeable assets from literally disappearing out the door?
An innovative approach aims to keep insurance in insurance
Longtime industry experts Brett McKenzie and Nick Lamperelli have joined forces to create the Keep Insurance In community, https://insurance-nerds-unite.mn.co/, bringing together insurance experts from underwriting to marketing to operations and infotech brings together. The Keep Insurance In website provides members with a forum to discuss current insurance and news topics, shared office hours, and a community for job sharing with resume building and mock interviews.
Although it’s months old, the community already plans to provide a forum for Spanish-speaking insurance professionals, as well as a book club and job board.
The project emerged from a partnership between Brett McKenzie, chief strategist and founder of CoVerse Communications and CMO of Indemnity Lab LLC, and Nick Lamperelli, managing partner of Insurance Nerds and co-founder and CEO of The Insurance Advocacy Forum of Florida.
McKenzie said the demand actually started with her insurance communications company CoVerse.
“We launched around the fall, at a time when a number of well-known organizations and insurtechs were laying off thousands of people and we were inundated not only with resumes but also with people looking for a different type of support than what we wanted to provide.” McKenzie said.
CoVerse triaged and helped insurance professionals build resumes after decades of working at employers they were planning on retiring from. McKenzie spent many hours calling contacts to match job seekers with potential employers or coaching them through the interview process.
“Every time I looked at my phone or LinkedIn on my laptop, I saw dozens of people going 30, 60, or 90 days without a job interview,” McKenzie said.
She recognized that the people who came forward were in a real situation of struggle and need, but that was not what CoVerse was designed to support. Still, McKenzie was unwilling to let talented, experienced insurance professionals simply leave the industry. Through the collaboration of her Insurance Nerds, McKenzie teamed up with Lamperelli to find a solution.
The kind of low-gain, high-contact community they saw as necessary was too broad to rely on a single organization. Combining CoVerse’s resources with the Insurance Nerds braintrust and community input, Keep Insurance In emerged as a forum for insurance job seekers.
“I was made redundant for the first time just a year ago and this is a kick in the teeth. When you’re at your lowest point, you have to interview again and present a resume and LinkedIn profile to the world,” McKenzie said. “Nick and I both know what that feels like. We wanted to create a community where people can talk to others who are going through the same thing and remind them that it’s not really you, it’s the company that got into this situation, and that’s a sad consequence .”
Stay assured: The community is accepting members
One of the first initiatives of the Keep Insurance In community was consultation hours, which Lamparelli and a pilot group hold almost daily. Office hours may include interview tips, discussions about current insurance news, software demos, or training. Recently, a planned Excel skills session turned into a discussion about modern recruiting practices. The Excel meeting was postponed until the next morning.
While continuing education and cross-training are certainly a key benefit for the office hours group, Lamparelli said the main benefit of the morning office hours is engagement.
“It’s so easy to get off to a bad start when you’re not working,” Lamparelli said. “The worst thing you can do is not have a routine, wake up later and later and then soon wake up and not shower. You need to maintain this routine even when you’re not working. You have to wake up like you’re going to work, like you have something to do and something to do.”
Lamparelli said that by setting office hours, the job seekers he works with often share their own metrics to boost their self-esteem and maintain a schedule. He said setting and achieving goals can help people maintain self-confidence, even in the face of career setbacks.
“They know there should be plenty of opportunity in our industry, especially as hundreds of thousands of people retire. “They know there are enough opportunities that everyone should end up in the role they’re suited for,” McKenzie said. “Continuing education and cross-training, as well as learning how to use AI, makes someone a better professional.”
Other ways to close the talent gap
While Keep Insurance In has a job board, the community is not yet recruiting recruiters.
“We strike a balance between being able to connect people to jobs and making people feel safe, authentic and vulnerable in a supportive environment,” McKenzie said.
But that doesn’t mean they’re unaware of the role carriers and agencies play as employers in the insurance industry.
“We all know we will lose 50 percent of insurance professionals to retirement in the next 10 to 15 years,” McKenzie said. “But we are also losing younger talent who are not yet of retirement age due to layoffs and a lack of flexibility in work-life balance, as well as some of the challenges that the pandemic environment has brought.”
Insurance companies are grappling with the same issues faced by other employers, such as increased employee demands for flexibility and better pay. Sponsors can refuse to allow their employees to change roles if the position is not a good fit for them. And many insurance companies lack employees with highly transferable skills – think of someone who conducts operational risk assessment for a school system or manages security vulnerabilities at an IT company.
Another problem with attracting and retaining insurance talent is a problem of its own making and unique to the insurance industry.
“Insurance has a bad stereotype. We don’t come into contact with insurance until later in life, so we’re told a lot about it, and these stereotypes are long-running and usually have some basis in truth. The industry itself has not covered itself in glory,” Lamperelli said. “I’ve had a pretty exciting career and done some things that were extremely interesting and stimulating, but you never hear about how exciting insurance can be.”
Lamparelli and McKenzie agreed that part of the revolution in insurance employment will inevitably come with further technological transformation.
“Technology has changed insurance professions – flipping through a handbook to value a homeowner’s policy or doing business on floppy disks… these are uninspiring ways of working,” Lamparelli said.
To check out McKenzie and Lamparelli’s work, explore the Keep Insurance In community. Or if you’re interested in how AgentSync can help you make insurance careers more rewarding (and basking in glory) for your internal compliance and operations teams, your producers, and your adjusters, get started with a demo today.
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2024-04-25 10:00:55
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