Australia’s number one insurance recruiter, Ensure Recruitment, has opened its doors in Auckland to fill what it says has been a gap in the NZ market.
The boutique recruiter, which focuses on the more specialist, technical positions in the market, realised there was good reason to establish the business after doing some work over here for some clients from Australia.
General manager for the New Zealand office, Hamish McDonald, said the team had been quietly working away in the few months since setting up their Parnell office.
“Our proposal to our clients is to partner with them. We want to be an extension of their brand and their business offering so we’ve been reasonably slow and deliberate in how we’ve approached the market but it’s grown well.”
He added: “We’re not looking for the volume of the transactional recruitment model. We’re looking to be more like a technical specialist and partner to the insurance companies.”
He said the team did a lot of research on candidate pools to work out where the up and coming talent was, and were proactive in matching the right people to the right businesses.
McDonald said so far in New Zealand Ensure had operated predominantly across the life and general insurance markets but was planning to dovetail into the broking markets, advisory markets and associative areas such as travel and health.
Ensure is not the only self-described specialist insurance recruiter to target the New Zealand market in 2015 as
Stirling Andersen opened its doors at the beginning of the year.
McDonald, who has been in recruitment in New Zealand since 2003, said insurance often came second to the banks and broader financial services however.
“Because of that there is less knowledge around what the needs of the companies are, firstly to understand what the roles are they’re recruiting for and critically, sourcing the right people with the right technical skills.
“So I think there’s enough happening in the market to warrant players like us but it’s more because we have a narrow niche focused solely on insurance.
“Typically it’s in areas where insurance companies have tended to struggle. They have a tendency to approach people from other organisations directly themselves, or go through their networks, and our offering is to present a broader range of network to choose people from.”
He said having their trans-Tasman offering was appealing too. There had been a few New Zealanders returning home after long stints in Australia as well as Australians looking to come to New Zealand.
Ensure also had an Asian offering in Hong Kong therefore covering a good flow of talent around the Asia Pacific region.
