2019 Insurance Recruitment Trends

Adrian Dixon

January 8, 2019

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Have you been wondering what the insurance recruitment trends for 2019 will be?

No one can truly predict the future, but what can we broadly know about the bigger trends of 2019 in terms of insurance industry hiring? Here’s a few key takeaways:

The industry is graying

That means people are retiring, en masse. Industry publications have called it “a talent crisis,” and David Coons of The Jacobson Group has called it “unlike anything we’ve seen in the past.” You’re even seeing an Insurance Careers Movement now, which is dedicated to getting more young professionals interested in long-term insurance careers.

Screening-in vs. screening-out

When insurance didn’t have a talent shortage, the most popular approach to sourcing (as in many industries) was “screening out,” meaning looking for flaws within a candidate so as to remove them from the process and winnow down the number of people you’re presenting to a hiring manager. Now, however, the focus is more on “screening in,” meaning proactive engagement with younger professionals to educate them on the breadth of careers within insurance and try to set them up with longer-term job stability. That’s a pivotal change to the approach recruiters are using.

“Proactive engagement”

That can only come with time invested in a relationship, and unfortunately recruiters don’t often have that time. That time can be created, however, by using AI-driven screening to reduce top-of-funnel activity for recruiters. Then they can spend more time on building out those relationships and convincing young professionals of the value of an insurance career. If all recruiters are doing is screening/sourcing/scheduling, there’s no way to build the type of proactive engagement that helps you overcome an industry talent shortage.

Increased flexibility

How do you get a younger influx? You offer more flexibility.

Increasing middle manager salaries

The North American economy is largely up, and insurance is a relatively recession-proof business anyway (people need insurance regardless of the broader state of the economy), so the “boom time” is seeing more middle manager hires, which tend to decrease when times are more lean.

Cognitive computing

… may come along and replace some underwriters. Hey, we know all about the power of smart machines.

Candidate communication

If you’re going to get the “A-Players” among the younger set, you need to communicate well. That’s been shown in virtually every survey about recruiting millennials and Gen Z, because communication issues are often where the ball drops and employer brand is affected. How do you scale communication, though? One approach is training your recruiters to, well, communicate better. That’s not likely to work for a host of reasons, up to and including human limitation. A common focus at the moment is chatbots, which can at least help with top-of-funnel communication and pipeline status updates, leaving human recruiters to be more focused on, again, building out relationships.

Make your systems talk to each other

Bad candidate experience comes from disjointed processes, i.e. systems that don’t speak to each other and thus run the candidate in circles. You avoid this with better integrations, meaning having the right software partners and the right full-stack engineers in-house.

The bottom line

400,000+ insurance professionals are retiring in the coming years, and you simply can’t hand all their knowledge and industry context to machines (at least not yet). You’ll need to entice, convince, and ultimately recruit and sign hundreds of thousands of human beings for these roles. Know the trends, understand where the market is going, and use tech to make it all a bit easier. Let us know how we can help.