In the candidate-short and top-heavy industry that is insurance, recruitment agency Kona & Co. Group has found a “tremendously successful” approach that has allowed the Melbourne-headquartered business to place a substantial number of commercial insurance broking hires in the past quarter, and here managing director James Toth (pictured) shares what he believes should be the way forward.
“The big challenge within the insurance sector at the moment is exposure and people understanding what insurance is as a career path,” Toth told Insurance Business. “But if you start to target graduates who’ve been working at personal lines insurers or health insurance businesses, those kinds of roles we’re seeing a tremendous amount of success transitioning over to commercial insurance because they already have a fundamental understanding of the role of insurance.
“The issue you have when you pluck a graduate straight out of university who has never heard of insurance before is it can take them some time to understand exactly what the market is and why companies need insurance, and have an overall excitement towards a career in insurance. Whereas if you take people out of health insurance or personal lines insurance, you have someone who has a fundamental, foundational understanding of, ‘OK, this is the value that I’m providing’, and therefore retention skyrockets and people’s enthusiasm to do the role does so as well.”
The Kona & Co. boss, whose camp works with two global insurance brokerages, added that insurance broking is a highly challenging market to recruit young talent into, and that thinking a little bit left of centre helps in capturing excellent candidates who are poised to be great assistant account executives or account executives, given the proper support and investment.
In Toth’s view, young people with one or two years’ experience in an insurance call centre are likely to have the soft skills needed to be an “amazing” broker.
He asserted: “You just need to teach them the technicalities. These are well educated, committed people who have learned products and topics so far away from what we could maybe conceive in some scenarios. It’s not difficult for them.
“What you really struggle with in broking is the right people from a personality perspective. When you take someone out of an insurance call centre, they have those soft skills already; you just need to teach them the products and it’s really useful.”
What’s crucial is showing up-and-coming talent that such an opportunity exists beyond the familiar lines of business such as home and motor, and that insurance can be a career in which they can grow professionally instead of it being merely a couple-year stint. That’s not to say there isn’t growth in personal or health insurance, but Toth thinks commercial has a progression pathway that not many young executives are aware of.
“If you want to get into banking, you start off as a sales consultant for car loans,” he illustrated. “Insurance hasn’t taken that approach because personal lines and commercial insurance are so far removed in the broking world and you don’t have that natural progression of taking people through from the more transactional stuff to the more complex. This is the opportunity to bridge those markets, and we found a really great way to address what is a very serious problem in insurance.”
Companies, meanwhile, will have to be open to giving younger and less experienced candidates a chance. The key, said Toth, is having a long-term vision when it comes to hiring staff.
The managing director explained: “If you’ve got an account executive earning $100,000, comparative to a very junior candidate on $60,000 there’s a $40,000 swing as far as technical understanding goes, but I would estimate it probably takes about $10,000 of investment to take someone from what would be a very junior staff member into a competent broker.
“Within six months of investing in them for Tier 1 and Gold Seal courses and having them support a senior broker, they’re probably not up to the same speed as a $100,000 person but you’ve got room to keep that progression pathway open. This is the best way to ensure that in the coming years you have the appropriate talent to keep your business sustainable.”
“For people who you’ve gone out of your way to invest in and you’ve given them a career opportunity,” highlighted Toth, “it’s so impactful. You can’t imagine the level of value that people give to it – it’s incredible. It’s been so amazing doing this kind of work, because the people that we’ve placed have been so happy.”
