How do we attract and keep the best talent?

Insurance business recently presented IB Future Fest, the world's largest insurance festival. A host of industry experts were on site and we caught up with them to ask, how do we attract and keep the best talent? Well, you got to make the job interesting for sure. Something that I focus on a lot with my clients is eliminating boring manual menial tasks. That alone is repellent to, let's just say, aggressive career-minded individuals who want to do things that matter. And I would categorize like 80% of people, I think, are really interested in doing something that matters. Now there's 20% of people that I meet that are just pretty chill, right? They're cool with doing things the way they are, but there's a lot of people in the workforce that are very interested in doing something that matters to the business, matters to the client. And so I think that's something that we can really help with in technology is going to those people that are very interested. Let's say there's 60 or 80% of the workforce and saying, tell me all the stuff you hate doing that you find boring, menial, repetitive, and manual. And let's build an automation solution to get rid of that for you. So you can focus on the really high profile stuff that's adding a lot of value that you're interested in. And so I mean, every single day, every single week, my team of 300 people and I are really focused on that. And I think it's important whether you're building product or you're building services, or you're a carrier or a TPA or a broker that you treat your high performers with some respect and you actually try to give them the tools that they need to automate the boring manual stuff so they can enjoy their job every day. In my opinion, that's the main thing you can do. If you had to do one thing to keep and retain talent, that's it. Make your job fun. Make it interesting. I think that just allowing people to have more opportunities like this, people knowing about insurance, festivals, people knowing about networking opportunities, I think that will help people, you know, increase their ability to be able to expand their talents. I think being supported by good people like mentors, I mentioned that earlier, my mentor has been so supportive of me. I think people going out and utilizing all the opportunities that are presented to them will help them rise up and become a future rising star as well. And so hopefully you will utilize that and become rising stars in their own paths. I think the key component to making sure you get the right talent is going where we are located. Right now, we are all over the country, many different colleges, but the thing that a lot of companies are not doing is, sure, they're showing up and coming to our job fairs, but they're not grabbing us and showing us the opportunities they have and laying it out there for us, bringing us into their offices, bringing us in to their industry and where they are located and actually having maybe like a conference with undergraduates and showing them what opportunities there are, how this company is going to benefit us and how we can benefit them. So not only do they need to expand outside of just typical job markets and like LinkedIn and stuff, they need to come right to us and show us that they want us, they want to develop us, and that we're able to impact them just as much as they impact us. That's a really good question. I feel like supporting us, making sure that we have different opportunities available for us and making sure that, you know, we're being challenged on a daily basis, making sure that we're being exposed to different situations that will allow us the growth that we need. I personally work for Amwins, which I feel like is a great company to be at. I'm on a great team, and I feel supported on a daily basis. I feel like my broker trusts me with the workload that she gives me, and she trusts that I will build the relationships that we already have. Trust is huge within my role, but I'm also a walking sponge, so I try to absorb as much knowledge as possible to continue growing within the industry. So it's all going to come down to getting them while they're young. I think the issue with insurance is a lot of people just stumble or end up in insurance. Rather than thinking in their mind, insurance is a career path that they want to go to at the start of college. It's not something where you're looking for, I want to be an accountant, I want to be an attorney. No one says, I want to sell insurance or I want to be an underwriter. I think just supporting growth and having open and honest conversations with newer hires and figuring out what their goals are early on and being supportive of them, whether it's on the broker side, like where I am. If someone eventually wants to go into sales and start building their book, maybe taking some of the workload off their desk when they want to go out and begin prospecting and encouraging them to bring in whatever deals they can. Support from more senior brokers, helping them get those deals across the finish line. Whether it's on the underwriting side, helping make connections, helping with overall networking and just encouraging others to understand what a great industry we're actually in. The opportunities that are in front of us, insurance in general is a misunderstood industry where I think traditionally it's seen as a little bit of a boring product or a last resort for a lot of people. You hear, I think Tom Brady recently came out saying that he was going to be an insurance salesman. It was such a bad thing. The reality is, in insurance, you can do just about whatever you want. Back when I was younger, I wanted to be a sports agent or go into the sports industry until someone taught me that an insurance where more of my connections actually were. If I really wanted to, I could go move to London and work within the sports industry and go insure some of the NFL contracts, players coming out of college. You have the head and shoulders athletes that are getting their hair sponsored, hands sponsored, or insured, things like that. If you're a real estate professional, those are your interests. You can chase after those clients and really work within that industry more on the risk management side. We really touch a lot of aspects of what everyone else does in the world. It affects your life every single day, whether you know it or not. You can play a role in every single industry here, not just insurance. You're really limiting yourself if you only think of it as just this insurance financial product. Internship programs, mentoring, allowing the youth to do work the way they do it. They do stuff different. They use a chat GPT and AI. As long as they're validating the accuracy of what they're coming up with, I think they do the work however they want. If we're so entrenched in this is how it's done, we don't evolve as an industry. We don't retain the talent because nobody wants to work in a box that's predefined. They want the ability to be creative and organic in how they get their work done. Yeah, I think giving people impactful work, letting them see the impact of their work. Areas where you're doing something and you don't see anything coming of it, you don't see the value creation, it's not as easy to be motivated to keep working. If you can see the impact of, I did this, and I can see that it impacted the company or the industry, that's really exciting. Letting people be creative where they can. It's a very regulated industry, but if there's little areas where people can be creative and have fun, I think that helps with keeping young talent as well. Keep your promises as an organization, as an industry. I think people are looking for opportunity and development. When markets slow down, you should actually ramp up your development activities. We need people who see they have an opportunity, the ability to make a difference. I also think the insurance industry offers an opportunity for a lot of purpose, but as an industry, we don't talk about that enough. Again, I think we need to change that notion of why people should come and stay in insurance and then keep our promises. People will stay. I think you really have to trust the people that you have on your team and inspire them and support them whenever they want to try something new and to innovate. I think that by showing trust in who you have, you can encourage them to grow. Whether that be a vertical growth or a lateral growth, you're giving them an opportunity to move and change and innovate and trusting that you have the right people in place to do that. I think you have to have exposure to the people who are up and coming in the job market and really let them see. It's not just, oh, you're sitting at a desk doing this boring thing with a pencil. You know, it's something more dynamic and interesting and you're going to meet a lot of different organizations and all the companies need insurance. So everything from your big manufacturers to your tiny little startups, to the tech things, to the healthcare, there's so many industries that are affected that you can have import with, that you can learn about, that you can experience. And so I think there's so many different things that can be done and so many opportunities for people and traditional brokers, underwriters, claims handlers, lawyers who handle all that kind of work. But there's going to be other kind of adjunct professionals that work in the industry too. And some of those things aren't developed yet. They're new. So it's just to kind of grow with the times and encourage people that it's a really broad-based industry and there's a lot of things you can learn from it and it'd be, it's actually fun. Yeah, I think just having the support from your mentors and senior staff and letting young people have their ideas and helping to implement them and put them in place goes a long way. Young people have all these ideas and to have the support of your company and your industry and getting those ideas implemented is a good way to help you get recognized and grow. Again, I think it goes back to telling that story and telling that narrative of what it is and helping people to understand that within the insurance industry or our economy in general, we can't do anything without insurance. You can't have a car without insurance. You can't own a business without insurance. You can't function in this industry, in this world without insurance. So it's important people understand how much insurance touches everything that we do. And so if people would understand that and realize the importance of insurance and what we do, I think it would help to be able to attract and keep talent. I think that it stems with creating opportunities and safe spaces for talent. Opportunities like events for today, in this weekend, for example, as well as opportunities within the companies that support the insurance industry. Palomar has a great internship program and we continue to seek young talent and discuss the importance of the insurance world as well as opportunities and jobs that exist. A lot of people don't really look for insurance jobs. I know I most certainly didn't. I kind of fell into it. But really explaining and giving the opportunities that exist and letting them know that it's there. I think being able to create safe spaces with mentorship and leaders and really allowing young talent to know what opportunities exist and creating those lanes for them to really grow, not only in a professional world, but personal. So I think that that is a great segue into obtaining young talent and securing that for the future of insurance. You got to show how cool it is to be in insurance and events like this really reframe the point of reference for a career in insurance. We're here in Santa Monica, beautiful location, outdoors, and you really see kind of this pod approach of people, whether they're from the broker side, reinsurers, insured techs, all coming together to look at ways that they can solve solutions together. And I think that's what anybody, most people would want in a career of how am I solving real world problems that are happening today, working across lines to collaborate, to create something new. And I think insurance provides such a great avenue to be able to do that. Get them involved. I don't think there's anything worse than actually working for an organization that you're just doing what you're told. I think giving them the opportunity to hear their voice. I do quite a lot of reverse mentoring where I'm talking to a lot of young people who are helping me realize and keep me up to date. Obviously mentoring has always been traditionally looked at as the older experienced people talking to the younger up and coming people. I think the reverse mentoring is even more powerful. So the way that younger people look at the market is unencumbered. They come up with some ideas that can then be modified perhaps or used in terms of really moving companies forward. So I think giving them their voice is really important. Listening to what they say. And then actually, in some instances, putting that into action. And I think we're seeing the sort of average age start to come down a little bit. We're starting to see the new ideas and refreshing ideas. And we're starting to award the talent as well. So we were at a recent event, the LM forums, and we were awarding people who are up and coming stars in the market. So I think all of that goes towards really regenerating the insurance industry as far as people is concerned. Well, I think the way that we attract talent is showing just how interesting insurance is, that it's not just selling insurance policies, that is actually risk management and helping customers succeed in their businesses, whatever they are, and showing them how dynamic that is. And then there are a million different types of things that you can do in the insurance industry. And that it's not just selling insurance policies and then retaining them. I think having a dynamic and trustful and authentic culture within your company and culture is really important. And something that companies need to focus on and show what that career path could look like for potential candidates that are coming into the industry. I think just attracting, keeping talent, attracting first and foremost is just, I think there has to be more awareness of the industry and the opportunities in the industry. I think a lot of people historically who are in insurance kind of fell into insurance. It wasn't something that they aspired to be. I think a lot of the colleges have now risk management programs within the universities that will get some exposure to some of the undergraduate students to what risk management insurance has to offer, underwriting, being a broker, and then some of the ancillary actuarial jobs and things like that. But I think it's really incumbent upon us as a group and as an industry to make more inroads with the universities, maybe going and reaching out to our old alma maters and exposing some of the students who maybe don't have those risk management programs to the opportunities in insurance, because it's a very lucrative business that I think that you don't have to worry about dealing with economic downturns. We're here to stay. And I think it's just really a matter of exposure and just trying to focus more on exposure for those individuals who would be good fits for our industry, which is pretty much vast in the sense that even you have some people who don't have college educations, who didn't go to college, who are still in the business and have worked their way up and can make six-figure salaries with just a high school diploma, just once they get a PNC license and they've worked through and worked their way up from an account manager up to a broker. So there's just lots of opportunity and it just really is about exposure. So attracting and retaining talent in the insurance industry, it's really interesting at the moment because what we see is we have some folk coming in from university age, but then entering the industry at different stages of their career. And what we see to retain that talent is really nurturing those profiles to really accelerate and understand the capabilities and opportunities that they can get globally. I think empowering them. Individuals need to be recognized, recognized for the work that they've done and empowering them to be able to say, hey, you're doing a good job. What more would you like to do? My management team has done that with me. They have supported me in endeavors that I wanted to take on that are outside my daily job responsibilities. And by being able to do that, I'm here today. And I hope that others like me will be here in years to come. Well, I think we just got to treat people well, you know, meet each other and make the job content interesting. Again, we're quite fortunate because we are in the cyber part of insurance. So it's already the most interesting part. And I think that's why we don't really see many people leave. People want to stay and do this exciting work in insurance. By offering opportunity, certainly, you know, making sure that the people feel, you know, engaged and, you know, that they're getting, you know, interesting things to kind of work on. It's always a good idea to, you know, to pay people what they're worth and to make sure that we're being competitive with other industries. But, you know, that's, you know, the ABCs of attracting talent, really. It's coming out to events like these because there's a lot of young talent out here that you need to come out, introduce yourself to, talk to them, let them know that what you guys do. And I think one of the most important things is not only coming out to Future Fest, but to a lot of the other insurance trade show conventions out there. And most importantly, network and use LinkedIn for your business. The way that we attract and keep the best talent here, you know, let's call it the tech industry, right? I mean, you're going to have to have those offices that are innovative, that have, you know, fun, the snacks, the events. Like we have like the, you know, be it like happy hours. And then you're taking your clients out, you know, be it golfing or to games or, you know, go and do something fun, even concerts. But we have to be a little bit more ingenuitive about what we do, you know, with our clients and then what, you know, what we do with our carrier partners as well. If we really start to show it's an attractive industry in terms of, you know, what your life looks like, that's how we're going to keep talent.