Client Challenge: Attracting Senior Life Insurance Underwriters to Join a New Organisation
A leading Canadian life insurance company, ranked among the top ten nationally and with operations spanning the country, faced the ongoing need to recruit several senior underwriters in recent years to support strategic growth. The organisation required candidates possessing substantial technical expertise in life insurance underwriting, along with alignment to its unique corporate culture (details regardingcompany culture and differentiation from other industry peers should be included).
The employment market for experienced underwriters is highly competitive, particularly within the life insurance sector where professionals seldom transition between organisations. Many have establishedlong-term careers, often exceeding twenty-five years at the same employer, and are typically conservative, cautious, and well-compensated with generous benefits aligned to industry standards. Additionally, pension arrangements further increase the financial risks associated with changing employers. The client also had specific requirements for bilingual capabilities among new hires due to the national scope of its business.
Traditional recruitment methods such as online job postings were not yielding suitable candidates, as the targeted professionals were rarely active in the job market. The client lacked established talent pipelines and the necessary resources to identify and engage potential underwriters from other companies. Thus, they sought a partner with existing knowledge of qualified candidates—someone able to assess suitability and effectively persuade selected individuals to consider a new opportunity.
Robertson’s Approach
Determine what matters most
Like many recruiting firms Robertson starts with a client intake meeting to review the job description. We know from experience that most job descriptions are overly ambitious; often requiring skills and levels of experience beyond what is necessary for a given role or reasonable for a given compensation range. We worked with the client to determine the technical and leadership skills that mattered most to the client; a strong analytical background, attention to detail, the ability to make sound decisions under pressure. It was also critical to the client that new hires were aligned with their core values, ensuring they’dcontribute positively to the organizational culture.
Leverage Established Underwriter talent pool and pipeline
Given Robertson’s extensive experience in financial services, and deep networks in insurance, we knew who the potential candidates were. In fact, the client hired us because we sent the head of the client’s Underwriting Department the resume of a senior life underwriter who was interested in making a move, and the candidate was exactly what the hiring manager was looking for, and we were familiar with many other senior underwriters at life insurance companies across Canada.
Provide Candidate and Competitive Insight
To convince senior underwriters to leave their current employer we needed to understand what motivated them. We had in-depth conversations with targeted life underwriters to understand how satisfied they were with their current employer, and what would motivate them to consider moving to our client or another life insurance company. We probed individuals about their current employers’ culture, learning and development opportunities, and the non-financial ways they were retaining talent, and shared this insight with our client so they could evolve their employer brand and retention strategy. Our client was particularly interested in learning about what one of their competitors, whose people often stayed with the company for over 25 years, was doing to achieve such high retention. We brought this insight back and strategized with our client about not just what want it was going to take to convince specific life underwriters to accept role with them, but how they could enhance their employer brand and retention programs.
Tailor the Employer brand for each Candidate
Our conversations with candidates helped our client realize they needed to increase compensation by 10% to convince senior underwriters to even consider making a move. However, the real work we provided was helping each short-listed candidate see the value in the non-financial benefits our client had to offer such as remote work, and career development and advancement opportunities. For each candidate we spent the time to understand what they valued and their career goals. For some it was the ability to work at a company with a better culture and work-life balance. For others it was the ability tohave a broader scope of responsibility and impact. We then explained how our client could deliver against their needs better than current employer.
Results
Since Robertson started working with this client two years ago, we have successfully recruited four Life Insurance Underwriters, within sixty days on average. All of them are still employed, and two have been promoted. More importantly all the underwriters we placed are happy they made the move to our client. Given our results, Robertson continues to hire life underwriters for our client, and they have asked us to recruit other roles including actuaries and claim adjusters.
By leveraging our knowledge of the insurance industry, proactively providing unique candidate and competitive insights, and helping our client and candidates find the right cultural fit, we enabled our client to build a resilient and high-performing underwriting team capable of meeting the evolving demands of the Life insurance industry.
