A New View

Recruiting of old no longer garners the skill sets necessary for success in today’s insurance and financial services industry.

By Lucretia DiSanto Jones

The insurance and financial services industry has learned some valuable agent-recruiting lessons over the past few years. Michael J. Corey, vice chairman and global leader of the financial services sector of Highland Partners, a professional staffing and executive recruitment provider, believes that agency managers and others hoping to hire professionals into the business can take advantage of these lessons learned.

Corey looks back to the ’60s and ’70s and sees an industry landscape where many companies looked and operated very much the same way. This tendency certainly affected recruiting trends.

“If you wanted to change your pricing on certain products or see what other companies were doing with certain products,” Corey says, “all you had to was go to the state insurance departments. Everything was pretty well exposed and available. What you had was an industry with relatively little innovation in products because everybody basically copied each other. The distributions systems were essentially the same, and for the most part they were career systems.”

As a result, dealing with a career distribution system meant companies, hiring specialists and agency managers went out and hired people who were in the market for a job, but were not necessarily the most appropriate candidates. Corey aptly describes the scenario as a churning effect. “It was a catch-as-catch-can kind of thing,” he says.

What happens in this type of recruiting function is “you’re not necessarily hiring to your corporate direction or market, you’re just hiring to fill sales jobs,” says Corey.

Every successful advisor and agency manager trying to grow the ranks of his agency’s selling staff knows that this approach no longer works.

The products advisors sell have become more complicated, the legislative environment in which advisors operate has become more difficult to navigate, and the need for consumers to engage in financial planning rather than buy products has advanced rapidly.

Create a profile
To address these changes, you need to consider the profile of your ideal candidate and what core values—professionally and personally—that candidate must possess. “Because products are far more complex and sophisticated now,” says Corey, “you need to look for a different kind of person to sell those products.”

Things to look for
Here are some ideas to consider when recruiting advisors.

• Elevate the caliber of your candidates so you are sure to hire someone who can deal with today’s products.
• Remember that recruiting people with experience in the insurance industry is less important than finding people who match the candidate profile you have developed and who have the core values you seek.
• Do skill-set recruiting versus experience recruiting.
• To further answer the challenge of selling increasingly complicated products, look for individuals who are skilled at dealing with complex contracts, are clear communicators and have strong advising skills.
• Look outside of the industry. Lawyers, stockbrokers, accountants and individuals who have experience in bank trust departments will have the estate- and financial-planning skills needed to put a comprehensive financial plan together.

Technology in recruiting
Using technology to your advantage is crucial, too. Because technology provides easy access to a far broader community of prospective candidates via the internet, it should play a fairly important part in your search process. Technology can also help you further prequalify and assess candidates before meeting with them face-to-face—a big timesaver.