Reeling in the new recruits

The surplus lines market is not unlike any other segment of the industry. Recruiting and hiring talented young professionals is a top priority. But attracting young college graduates to a small, yet important segment of the insurance industry has proved to be a bit of a challenge.

Bob Sargent, president of Tennant Risk Services, a wholesale broker based in Hartford, Conn., says the insurance industry has difficulties attracting new recruits to its workforce in general — but attracting those recruits to the lesser-known, specialty area of surplus lines poses an even greater challenge.

“Our challenge may be a little bit different because our industry is relatively small,” writing just about $30 billion in premium, Sargent said. “Students don’t understand what our part of the business is. So the challenge for us is explaining what we actually do and why that might offer some opportunities for a particular individual.”

To help educate, inform and encourage dynamic, goal-oriented young people to enter into a career in the surplus lines industry, Sargent and his peers at the National Association of Professional Surplus Lines Offices Ltd. (NAPSLO) launched a Career Initiative targeting college students and young professionals nationwide.

“There has been an interest in attracting talented and creative people to the business,” Sargent said, “but there was a feeling that there was very little awareness in what our segment of the insurance industry was actually about.”

The NAPSLO Career Initiative targets colleges and young people nationwide through public relations and marketing programs geared toward college career centers and job-finding Web sites, as well as magazines, newsletters and other publications. Currently, a number of NAPSLO members are actively recruiting for positions.

While the career initiative was just launched in late May, NAPSLO has already been in contact with a number of college career placement centers, giving them materials to pass onto interested students. The initiative also produced a recruitment video targeting students and young professionals.

“There are great opportunities for a range of different types of people in our business,” Sargent said. “What we are trying to do is get some geographic spread, provide this information and create awareness for a broad spectrum of types of people and a range of different geographic areas around the country.”

Goals
Sargent explained the two basic goals of the career initiative include making students aware of the surplus lines business and providing those young people who do express an interest with some sort of a connection with surplus linesemployers.

“Our goal is to build this program so that over time, there are a number of students that end up being hired by NAPSLO members,” he said. “But I think it’s going to take some time to actually get there.”

So far, the initiative has focused on about 20 to 25 colleges and universities around the country, and Sargent says they plan to build on that over time.

“Secondly we are trying a number of different methods for informing students,” he added. “We’ve done a video, worked with a bunch of career centers, and we’ve worked with professors and have used other Web site/e-mail marketing techniques.”

Finding the right recruits
Sargent stressed that pegging a certain profile of individual that would be better for the surplus lines business is not what the initiative is about. “The types of people we would want to target are people who are creative, people who like working with people, and who are talented individuals,” he said. “Our feeling is that this industry offers opportunity for a very diverse set of individuals, and we want to make that clear to people.”

Sargent says the surplus lines industry offers lots of career opportunities for all different kinds of people. “Certainly our industry provides an opportunity for responsibility and rewards performance and results fairly rapidly,” he said. “But we also have some of the other aspects of the insurance industry, where there is great opportunity for balance between work and family and personal interest.” Careers in specialty insurance sometimes enable young people to put their passions to work by folding them into their career choice, Sargent said.

“Obviously we think our segment is quite an interesting one,” Sargent said. “There are a lot of pieces of this business that are attractive and could offer people a great career.”

NAPSLO’s career initiative also includes a new career section on its Web site at www.insurancecareersonline.com. “We tried to design it from the perspective of a college student who doesn’t know anything about the surplus lines industry and is looking at it as a career,” Sargent said.

The Web site includes a job locator where students can go to prospective employers that might be interested in hiring.

While the career initiative is still in its early phases of development, Sargent said, NAPSLO members remain committed to building methodologies for its expansion over time.