The insurance industry is full of highly profitable insurance agencies that are consistently growing. However, what makes one agency competitive from others is differentiation.
Your competitive advantage could reside in being highly specialized in one particular area such as health policies or E&O, location, quality or service.
A key factor to having an awesome service is having the best people working for you.
In this post, we’re going to analyze how to attract talent and recruit insurance agents to your company, especially if you’re just starting with recruiting and growing your staff.
Regardless of what stage your insurance agency is at, recruiting insurance agents will be required to grow.
Depending on the size or specialty of your company your needs will differ when looking for the right candidate.
Bear in mind that experienced insurance agents, or highly specialized ones, will have higher wages and incentives. Newly graduated agents have low salaries but you will have to invest in training and development. You will have to analyze your business and then decide what’s your best option.
For example, if you have an established company with a strong culture and good training processes, then you might prefer to invest in education for newly licensed professionals.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to grow fast, then your best option is to hire an experienced agent.
If you focus on life insurance then make sure to read these tips for recruiting life insurance agents.
Without further ado, let’s go through 12 tips on attracting the talent you’re looking for to recruit insurance agents to your agency.
Table of Contents
Work With Local Colleges
Engaging and participating in educational college activities is key.
Whether you’re recruiting at an on-campus recruiting event, presenting success cases, or giving a masterclass, people will learn the name of your company and see your brand as a leader in the industry.
This kind of activity will let you have one-on-one conversations with the best students and future talent who are proactively seeking a career in insurance.
However, as another option, you could also contact the career services department of the universities you’d like to work with and request being added to their list of companies to work for. Requirements vary depending on multiple factors, so the best way is calling the university and asking what’s needed to appear as an option.
You should make sure your brand is perceived as a leader in the industry and a great employer to work for, so students will reach out and you’ll have a good list of recruits to interview.
Find Candidates on LinkedIn
Hopefully, you are using LinkedIn, a social media platform where you can post news, updates about your company, and post job opportunities. It is well known for building connections with relevant positions such as business owners and specific employees in any department.
Networking in general on LinkedIn is key to your business but it is essential for recruiting insurance agents. Your company should have a reliable LinkedIn account with an updated profile and you should also actively be searching for insurance agents and reaching out to them.
Whenever you find the connection you were looking for it’s recommended to send a personalized message to them referencing a post they made, an article they wrote, their job title, or something that is both work-related and personal to them. Moreover, you’ll want to ask for their resume and background.
Some tips to find the candidate you’re looking for you can put on the search bar the attributes you’re looking for.
Here are some example searches you can try on LinkedIn to find potential insurance recruits:
- insurance agent
- recently graduated
- seeking opportunities
All of these searches and other similar queries will return plenty of relevant profiles for you to review and reach out to.
Specialized Recruitment Agencies
Recruitment processes tend to be long, hard, and tedious. If you’re focusing on growing your business then you might not have the time for conducting multiple interviews yourself.
In this case, you may want to spend a bit more and hire a recruiting agency to pre-qualify candidates for you.
Their objective is to find the perfect candidates depending on the requirements that you provide them. They will assist you throughout the recruitment process and choose a reduced group of potential candidates for you to interview.
Although they come with a cost, they should save you time and help you find a higher number of high-quality recruits.
Here are a few insurance recruiting agencies that you may want to check out, we just found them on Google, so we aren’t recommending them but simply sharing the options:
- insurancerecruiters.com
- ultimateinsurancejobs.com
- jacobsononline.com
Find Recruits on Other Social Platforms
If you want to have multiple sources for finding recruits, then other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter could work.
Yes, it’s not the most common or frequent way to actively recruit. You can search these platforms in a similar way to how you searched LinkedIn to find independent insurance agents who are promoting themselves on social media. Reach out and start a conversation to see if they would be interested in working with your agency.
As another option, you can create a social media ad campaign and a form to collect entries, so you can actively build a database of recruits. Creating social ads is fairly straightforward and not too expensive.
In your ads, you can state the requirements, set a budget for the campaign, and manage the time this campaign will run without spending a crazy amount of money. The best part is, you can set your targeting on platforms like Facebook to only target users who have “insurance agent” as their profession or somewhere else in their profile.
Hire Temporary Agents and Freelancers
If you need extra staff for a particular project, or you have peak times of the year, then hiring consultants, freelancers and temp employees is ideal.
With COVID 19 it is not uncommon for agents to sell insurance from home and work remotely as insurance agents.
Bear in mind that temporary employees will charge per project, or per hour, and it’s typically a more expensive rate if you hire an experienced agent. However, as soon as the project or peak time ends, the cost of the temp employee goes away too.
In conclusion, if you want high-quality employees to start immediately and only for a short period of time you might want to choose this option.
Train Sales and Marketing People
Like any sales position, being an insurance agent, or a broker comes with a high amount of rejection from prospects.
A good agent will know how to handle objections with rebuttals, prospects changing their mind, losing opportunities, and last-minute changes.
An insurance agent must be an incredible salesperson, so why not look for sales and marketing professionals and train them into insurance agents?
They will know how to get new clients, where to find them, and how to retain them. Training a good salesperson on insurance will make a great professional in no time.
When you find a salesperson you’d like to recruit you can do the following:
- Show them our guide on how to become an insurance agent
- Train them on the most common insurance objections and rebuttals.
- Get them to read the latest industry news from the 40 best insurance blogs.
Once they are licensed and familiar with their role you can begin giving them on-the-job training.
Test Personality, Positivity, and Attitude
It’s important not only to prove an agent’s knowledge and professionalism but also to test their attitude toward challenges. You can train a person on a topic, but changing an attitude is a difficult thing to do.
Plus, it is good to hire the best candidates that will fit in with your existing culture and staff.
So during the interview, you could present a group challenge or present a business case for them to solve and then push a bit with questions.
You can even have your candidates perform a personality assessment to make sure they align with your insurance agency’s culture.
Every agent in your business will be dealing with customers on a daily basis you want to retain for a lifetime, so a communicative, empathetic, and kind agent is extremely important for customer retention.
Be Clear About Goals and Expectations
When conducting interviews or attracting talent you should be clear about your expectations, goals, and sales goals in particular.
You should be truthful and upfront about sales as you are communicating your requirements and giving them a clear understanding of the pressure that they will be dealing with. Explaining objectives and timings will also give the candidate a clear picture of the business and set proper expectations.
Setting the right expectations is important for performance goals to be met and also to retain your new employees.
Recruitment Websites
An oldie but a goodie. Nowadays there are tons of recruitment websites and it’s one of the cheapest and easiest ways to hire potential candidates.
Beware that from this kind of platform you are going to receive plenty of resumes that are not always aligned with your ideal profile.
If you invest in premium space on these websites you can feature your job offer at the top of any search, so you will be relevant and easily seen.
You will save a lot of money but you will also have a huge amount of information to review and filter.
You can try some of the following job posting sites:
- indeed.com
- ziprecruiter.com
- glassdoor.com
Referrals from Current Employees
Asking for referrals to your current staff is always a good idea. Your employees know about the company, profile of employees you’re looking for, and requirements.
You can create a rewards program where every time an employee refers an agent for a position they can get rewarded with a referral bonus, gift card, or some type of recognition in exchange.
Agents usually assist in conventions and events of the industry and are masters of networking, this way you will hire close to the industry and your organization.
Give Unemployment Offices a Chance
You could give a chance to someone who’s older or just lost their job unexpectedly. You never know what experienced agents recently lost their job.
It’s also quite easy to work with them, people working in these offices are kind and empathetic. You will only need to explain to them the minimum qualifications you’re looking for and what you are looking for in a potential candidate.
However, you will need to be aware that with unemployment offices there are likely more applicants in the pool who won’t be good candidates.
Create a ‘Careers’ Section on Your Website
Candidates that go to your landing page are usually professionals who know you from before the posting and are already interested in what you’re doing as a company. Following this logic, professionals that proactively take the time to go to your website to look for a job do it because they are really interested in your business.
Even if you’re not currently hiring you can still have a posting up to take in recruits. This will build a high-quality database of insurance professionals for future opening positions.
Having a careers page on your website is also a great low-cost option that can be quickly implemented saving you time and money.
Final Thoughts
Recruiting insurance agents to your agency that will perform and stay onboard for the long-term is a real challenge.
You have to consider multiple variables such as their background, attitude, how prone they are to selling, pipeline building, and marketing techniques.
In a highly competitive environment, it can be difficult to find ways to recruit insurance agents so hopefully, these tips helped you to create the best strategy for your insurance agency.
Leave a comment below and tell us your favorite method for recruiting insurance agents or ask us any questions you may have.
