Finding Top Talent in the Insurance Industry

For the past decade, insurance agencies have struggled to hire qualified employees due to the changing workforce. According to the U.S. Department of Labor there are 5.5 million unfilled jobs, and 49 percent of employers say they are unable to fill many positions because of a lack of skilled workers.  Compared to other sectors in the economy, the insurance industry has a greater shortage of qualified people. Moreover, a study by McKinsey and Co., reveals that 25 percent of the professionals in the insurance industry will retire by 2018. Thus, there will be a greater talent gap in the industry that is already experiencing a shortage of workers. Today’s competitive economy has challenged insurance employers to modify their hiring strategies to close the skills gap and effectively recruit and retain employees.

Hiring managers and recruiters can get ahead of this talent shortage by taking a proactive recruiting approach. Right now, many employers take the opposite approach: reactive recruiting. This is when a company waits until there is a vacant job position to rush and fill the spot. In this scenario, employers often rush through the hiring process out of a necessity to fill the position as soon as possible and are more likely to make a bad hire.

Benefits of Building a Talent Pipeline

A pipeline will help with maintaining a pool of qualified and interested external candidates.  A hiring manager will have the opportunity to spend time  assessing candidates’ skills more thoroughly.  

Whether your agency has an open position or not, adopting an ongoing recruiting approach will set you up to build a successful team. In fact, it is more important to build a talent pipeline when you are not actively hiring. The many benefits of proactively hiring include:

•         Less stress on the recruiting process.
•         The ability to attract more and higher quality applicants.  
•         The ability to provide your firm with a competitive advantage.
•         The ability to fill critical open positions more rapidly.
•         Increased retention rates among new hires.
•         Dedicating a sufficient amount of time to thoroughly evaluate applicants.

Moving Promising Candidates to the Pipeline

A good applicant tracking solution offers tools that go beyond simply prescreening and sending assessments to candidates. The ideal tracking system helps agencies effectively keep in touch with those quality applicants that are available, even when there is not currently an open position. Think of this as a pipeline of qualified, interested candidates who you can contact the moment you have a job opening – this is the number one tool that an agent or hiring manager can leverage to keep recruiting and interviewing costs low, and it significantly reduces an agency’s time to hire. Once you’ve built a talent pipeline, you can resume the hiring process with applicants from the pipeline when you are ready to consider them for a current job opening.

Recruiting Pipeline Made Easy

CareerPlug specializes in working with over 6,000 insurance agencies to hire top sales producers. CareerPlug makes hiring easier by helping agencies build their talent pipeline to ultimate make the right hires and grow their company. To learn more about how CareerPlug can help you turn your agency into a talent magnet, request a demo today!