Find Tomorrow's 'Gems' and Bring Them Into Insurance, Webinar Panelists Advise
January 26, 2013 by N/A
OLDWICK, N.J. – The talented young stars of tomorrow’s insurance world are waiting to join the industry, but companies need to ramp up their efforts to identify, recruit and train them, and to find better ways to keep them in fulfilling careers.
That was the consensus among the five panelists who participated at the Best’s Review webinar, “Attracting and Developing Tomorrow’s Insurance Stars,” held Wednesday, Jan. 23.
Each speaker acknowledged the industry is having trouble getting the message to today’s college students that insurance offers myriad opportunities for long careers.
“Companies need to recognize that most parents don’t say ‘Gee, I hope my son or my daughter grows up to be an insurance executive,'” according to James P. Arnold, chief administrative officer for FirstComp, a unit of Markel Corp.
Companies need to go where they can find students with the skill sets to become insurance executives, Arnold said. Insurers must find ways of “picking up on [students’] passions and showing them how they can apply those passions to the insurance industry,” rather than waiting for students to “come prepackaged” to the industry, he said.
One panelist who’s navigated the college-to-insurance job maze noted that industry-sponsored internships were key to his transition from classroom to employment.
After two internships, Munich Re’s Specialty Markets Underwriter Kevin Johnson said he had no doubts that insurance was right for him. “It gave me the chance to figure out how many opportunities there are in this business. Insurance has every functional area of business, from marketing to finance, plus some extras” that are insurance-specific. “You can read all about it in a textbook but until you get on the job and see how much goes into an insurance operation it’s eye-opening,” he said.
Noelle Codispoti said more internships would benefit the industry’s efforts to recruit talented young people. As executive director of Gamma Iota Sigma, a national fraternity for students in insurance and risk-management programs, Codispoti said the contact these students are getting through internships “is a little lacking.”
Gamma statistics show that while 80% of insurance students who are ready to graduate have had an internship, most go to seniors. Underclassmen have significantly fewer internship chances, even though they want to know much more about industry opportunities, she said. “The more we can pick that up as an industry, the more we can provide students with insight into what we’re doing” and avoid turnover later on.
Several organizations offer internships, and many members do so privately as well, said Brady R. Kelley, executive director of the National Association of Surplus Lines Offices. NAPSLO hosts 13 interns each year. They spend four weeks with a wholesale broker member and five weeks with an insurance company. “They see both sides of the wholesale distribution system,” Kelley said. The top six interns each year go to NAPSLO’s annual meeting, which 3,500 professionals attend, and many get job offers. The organization has hosted about 250 interns since 1981, he said.
Panelist Jeffrey D. Henry, director of education and professional development for the American Association of Managing General Agents, said his group sponsors an innovative “white paper” contest each year through the colleges, whose topic is the excess and surplus lines segment.
Two winners each year are feted at AAMGA’s annual meeting in May. One of last year’s winners, from Utica College, got an offer within three weeks of winning, Henry noted.
An important area for successfully recruiting millennials—those born after 1980—is by providing a modern workplace, several panelists said.
Access to connectivity is important to millennials, Arnold said. His companies have RSS news feeds in lobbies and work spaces. It’s also company policy to allow remote access via tablets and smartphones. Other ideas he recommended were having more collaborative office spaces, bullpen environments and letting workers take their laptops to common areas and work wirelessly.
“You have to recognize the way this generation approaches information and approaches the world,” Arnold said. Having a more open work environment “communicates to a potential recruit that your company is forward-thinking; that your company is operating in today’s environment, not in what may be the stereotypical insurance environment that folks hear about.”
Understanding the complex mindsets of the millennial generation can be perplexing to insurance executives, he and other panelists added. They have challenges that baby boomers never faced, such as college debt “in amounts that were not even conceivable when I left school and in many ways equal a mortgage,” Arnold said. “They have immediate pressures that my generation did not have coming out of school.”
Millennials also “want to stay if the opportunities present themselves that let them do that.” Codispoti said, citing an alum who had the chance to go elsewhere for a 40% increase in salary and who stayed in his job after he was able to arrange movement internally to another post.
Henry said “it seems like a lot of people like to throw the millennials into a big bucket and say ‘they’re all this or they’re all that,'” overlooking that they are individuals who are motivated by different things.
It’s not about only money, Johnson and others pointed out. Cash is important due to students’ debts, but other considerations, like future development in the company, knowing there’s support from top down, and having training and development programs weigh heavily, too. Millennials look at “the total package,” Johnson said, including perks such as an on-site laundry and gym, health benefits and day care.
“Compensation ties closely to expectations,” he said. Recruiting from business schools or liberal arts schools makes a difference in terms of compensation expectations, he pointed out.
And several panelists said old-fashioned methods of finding talent are still vital to the industry’s efforts to overcome its talent gap, especially mentoring and referrals.
“I think mentoring is vital,” Henry said. The process is different in the business world, though. “Mentoring used to be looked at as, ‘I, the senior person, will tell you, the younger person, how to act and how to be successful in this company,’ and it’s just not like that anymore,” Henry said. “It’s more of a two-way mentoring.”