How to make insurance the career destination of choice

The insurance industry is no stranger to conversations about the growing talent gap impacting the financial services sector – and the challenge to recruit and retain top-tier talent, particularly as technological advancements reshape what it means to work. There’s a range of factors underpinning this gap including competition with other industries, shifting demographics creating an ageing workforce, and limited awareness of what it means to work in insurance.

The perception issues surrounding the industry are of particular concern, as many people have a limited understanding of what insurance actually does and the diverse career opportunities a career in insurance can provide. The work of industry associations to provide education and outreach to schools and colleges is moving the dial, as recently seen by the successful return of the London Market Group’s ‘Futures Academy‘, but what can individual insurance companies do to secure a sustainable talent pipeline?

Changing perspectives on insurance careers

The scale of the challenge is thrown into relief by how few people working in the market actively chose a career in insurance. Offering her own experience as an example, Nikki Lister, head of SME trading at Zurich in the UK, noted that she started her two-decade career on the phones at one of Zurich’s contact centres. “A lot of people, me included, tend to have stumbled into insurance and realised what an amazing career it can be,” she said.

At the time, she was taking a gap year and planning to take up a place at university to become a teacher, Lidster said, but what started as a temporary job soon blossomed into a career that has been, “a privilege and a joy”. Her experience of the industry and the wealth of opportunities it represents has made her a passionate advocate for drawing talent into the marketplace and opening up those opportunities to people from all different walks of life.

Why insurance needs to adapt to changing employee requirements

There’s a range of different strategies which can be utilised to make insurance a career destination of choice – from attractive compensation and benefits packages, creating new mentoring and networking opportunities, and making the right investments in technology and innovation. Underpinning each of these, however, is the need for insurance to adapt to changing workforce needs by prioritising the employee well-being considerations that have arisen in a post-COVID world.

For Zurich, this has included the rollout of a flexible working campaign, which Lidster noted has been very successful in the SME business, where 18% of its workforce now work either part-time or flexibly. “Being able to bring that to life in the interview process has been really important,” she said. “We absolutely see it as our responsibility to attract talent and retain talent through meaningful career paths. We see it as vital to our success – but also to the success of our wider industry, because this is a people-focused industry.”

What is a healthy talent recruitment and retention strategy?

A healthy recruitment strategy centres on a keen understanding of your value proposition, which for Lidster’s team centres on delivering a strong service proposition. Its recruitment strategy looks to focus on that service element and on finding individuals with the right transferable skills to work in a customer-facing role.

“They could be either in their early careers or during career changes at different times in their life,” she said. “We’ve got examples of people that have joined us from coffee shops, flight attendants, bar staff, retail workers etc. and we’ve also had some who had caring responsibilities in the past. We’re basically looking for people who pride themselves on delivering excellent customer service, love working in a fast-paced environment, are really good communicators and can demonstrate a desire to learn.

“We can teach all the technical elements of insurance, but what we’re really looking for is the right behaviours. Then once they’re in, dependent on their experience, we can support them either through an apprenticeship or the cert CII route. We’ve had 70 new starters in the last year which is due to the growth of our business and some of the great internal moves we’re seeing in the business.”

Getting the right people in the door is the first step but keeping them is where the real work lies. The key to getting that piece right is ensuring that they’re equipped with the right support and training. It is only by harnessing the expertise of experienced colleagues to work with new recruits through their induction that you build a high-quality team, empowered to support brokers and clients from the get-go.

“We delivered 40,000 hours of training last year in SME,” Lidster said. “A lot of that was to our new starters, but it was also on cross-skilling our existing underwriters on products. That enabled us to award 150 new underwriting authorities last year, enabling our underwriters to really support the broker demand, whether that’s on the phone or on live chat. It’s about empowering our people to become the decision-makers able to resolve that query as quickly as possible for the broker in that moment when they need us most.”