P R A D

Prioritizing Recruiting

Often, recruiting is not done well because it is not emphasized within the organization. We heard from top performers that a valuable strategy is to designate one individual as responsible for coordinating the recruiting pipeline. In fact, recruiting should be considered a critical part of this individual’s job and taken into account in the annual performance evaluation. This individual may or may not be tasked with actually doing the recruiting; instead their job is to elevate its importance within the agency, develop specific tasks and objectives and regularly report on activity levels and goal attainment. Recruiting should get the same amount of time and attention as other key agency initiatives. If the individual discussed above is not doing the recruiting – someone must be. The industry uses internal and external recruiters to generate potential producer candidates. While roughly 50% of the firms in the study reported using an outside recruiter for at least one hire, only 12% of total producers were hired using outside recruiters. Further, producers hired through outside recruiters were successful at lower rates than producers hired without outside recruiters, although the differential was less than we originally expected.

Use of Outside Recruiters

Outside Recruiter Success Rates

62%

Producers Hired Using Outside Recruiters 12%

55%

Producers Hired Without Outside Recruiters 88%

Producers Hired Using Outside Recruiters

Producers Hired Without Outside Recruiters

Source: Supplemental survey

Despite the mixed data, outside recruiters can actually serve a useful purpose for agencies. Professional recruiters allow firms to grow their candidate pool while consuming fewer management team resources, which helps to justify the investment. Further, outside recruiters can be especially effective in finding sales talent from outside the insurance industry. Recruiters were used for nearly a quarter of these hires.

Several firms in the study are experimenting with employing their own full-time recruiter. This is obviously a strategy reserved for a small number of relatively large organizations that have a hiring

30 Producer Recruiting & Development Study