P R A D

chapter 5 Building the Candidate Pool

There is a widespread perception that the insurance brokerage industry does a poor job of recruiting talent. Participants in our baseline survey agree – among various elements of producer recruiting and hiring, they gave themselves the lowest marks in recruiting and prospecting.

Recruiting and Hiring Self-Evaluations (on a 1-10 scale)

7.1

6.7

6.2

6.1

4.5

Looking in the Right Place

Knowing Your Target Profile

Recruiting and Prospecting

Interviewing and Screening

Selling the Opportunity

Source: Baseline survey

Building a recruiting pipeline begins with identifying how many new producers need to be hired. As discussed in Chapter 3, each firm’s number of required hires is unique depending on the age of its existing producer force, its growth goals and its Sales Velocity. Of course, budgetary constraints also come into play. But the most successful firms establish clear and achievable targets for the number of producer hires they plan to make in a given year. To hit these targets, top performers build their organizational recruiting plan in much the same way that a producer builds a sales plan. They begin with a target number of hires and then develop smaller steps that support the achievement of the target. For example, most firms stated they typically interview 5-10 candidates for each producer they ultimately hire. Thus, to ensure a quality pool of candidates (and to avoid settling for B-quality talent) they try to build a pipeline that is at least 5-10 times their hiring target. Firms reported that expanding their pool of candidates has allowed them to be more selective in their hiring decisions, ultimately leading to higher levels of success. This first step, however, is often a challenging one. Agents and brokers struggle to build large pools of potential candidates. In our research, we spoke with leading firms about how they construct a recruiting pipeline large enough to meet hiring goals with highly-talented individuals. Following are best practices for building a recruiting pipeline based on survey data as well as interviews with top performers.

29 Producer Recruiting & Development Study