Power Panel: How can the industry attract young talent?
Danny Wood [00:00:17] Hello, I’m Danny Wood, News Editor of Insurance Business Australia. Welcome to Insurance Business TV where we are holding our Insurance Business Australia Editorial Boards. These boards which we’ll publish quarterly involve assembling a panel of senior insurance professionals to get their views on industry challenges, opportunities and hot topics. In this panel, we’re looking at recruitment challenges, the talent crunch, and we’re joined by Jen Bettridge, Director of Clear Insurance in Brisbane. We’ve got Peter Jeeves, he’s Head of Construction for Lockton Australia and their State Manager in Queensland. He’s also in that state’s capital. We’ve got Meena Wahi, Director of Cyber Data Risk Managers, she’s in Melbourne. And Ken Dixon is Director of Dixon Insurance Services. He’s headquartered in Brisbane. Peter at Lockton let’s start with you. Firstly, welcome to the panel.
Peter Jeeves [00:01:06] Thank you appreciate it.
Danny Wood [00:01:09] Good to have you on. Is your firm suffering any impacts from this much talked about crunch in talent?
Peter Jeeves [00:01:17] Look at Lockton, we’ve been successful in growing substantially over the last five years and where our growth has been substantial in terms of the people we’re putting on. But it is a challenge getting people on board, it’s not easy. I think the expectations of younger people in particular around what they want to see in the organizations that they are joining, growing and we’re trying to keep up with those needs and those demands. And they’re not necessarily mandatory. There are a bunch of things that we’re looking for out of organizations, and it’s up to us as an industry and as organizations to meet those challenges and deliver those as best as we can.
Danny Wood [00:02:09] Now let’s talk to Jen. Jen, welcome to the panel.
Jen Bettridge [00:02:12] Thanks for having me.
Danny Wood [00:02:14] It’s a pleasure. And what sort of recruitment challenges are you seeing at Clear Insurance?
Jen Bettridge [00:02:21] Probably finding potential employees that share the same value as the company and then are on the same track to I guess, ordering the company in what it’s trying to achieve? So talent is definitely quite sparse. And getting new, new blood into the industry has been a challenge for some time. I think we’re all battling with that. And I think we need to come up with new ways of attracting people into young people into the industry. But what that looks like, I’m not too sure. I definitely think technology has a bit about a role to play here. And the fact that you know, a lot of people 20 years ago fill into the industry through junior roles. You know, a lot of women in the industry can lead by receptionist, all that sort of thing. I don’t know a brokerage anymore that has a receptionist located in and everything’s all on voIP. You know, we don’t have mail to be sorted three. So I think the junior roles in in insurance brokerages just doesn’t exist the same way. And that’s definitely a problem.
Danny Wood [00:03:35] Meena, let’s talk to you. Firstly, welcome to the panel.
Meena Wahi [00:03:38] Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Danny Wood [00:03:40] It’s a pleasure. Now you obviously a much smaller brokerage. What sort of recruitment talent crunch challenges are you observing?
Meena Wahi [00:03:48] Oh, I mean, we are small, but like I said, I’ve now added another brokerage. And we have a niche. So we’re very much focused on cyber and other brokerages focus on intellectual property insurance. So being small means that, you know, we need to reach out to very specialist businesses who want to insure the risk with us, you know, like, you know, mass targeting clients and, and the staff that I have, don’t necessarily have to have many, many years of experience in insurance. So I tend to recruit staff with skills in, in marketing in social media in admin, rather than have them clean up in insurance and I find that I sometimes have to go look overseas, but my experience is interesting because when I reach out to clients, I find that they are struggling with clients or with struggling with staff who can cater to my sort of Um, you know, products because they don’t understand cyber risk or they don’t understand intellectual property risk. So what happens is that even in interacting with larger companies who have boards, I find that in interacting with board members, I find that, you know, emergent risk, and especially cyber risk is not so well understood. And there’s definitely a gap in the market for those sorts of skills from a perspective of companies managing their own cyber risk.
Danny Wood [00:05:33] Let’s stick with you for the next question. In a way, you’ve answered it there. But if you were to restate it, what would you see is one or two of the big recruitment challenges right now, Meena?
Meena Wahi [00:05:44] I would say that the supply of insurance brokers who are going to take on specialist roles in various brokerages is lacking, like the, we have more generalist skills available, and the specialist skills tend to be few and far in between. In terms of being able being available in in staff, and the challenge is that, you know, you can keep a staff was very specialized, but how do you maximize the return on investment from them, because you may not have a huge book of business, just in cyber, so, and for smaller specialist brokers like us, you know, he may be may not be able to afford someone who’s had 15 years of experience, just doing cyber, because they, they become much too expensive. So it’s all about being creative, and having staff who can perform a whole lot of other duties and keeping the expertise amongst one or two of us who, who cater to the subject matter expertise and keeping the non subject matter expertise, stuff outside of that circle. And it’s, it works out better that way.
Danny Wood [00:07:06] Jen, from Clear Insurance, you mentioned the sort of difficulty of finding the values fit or the culture fit sometimes for new recruits. But once you’ve got that, what are what are some of the other issues you’re seeing?
Jen Bettridge [00:07:18] I’m just gonna have to put the emphasis back on the shared values. We focus on that when we’re recruiting them. And our newest recruit is probably been six months. And that was a massive, massive driving factor is who do we need? What are their values? What do we want in a person? Are they aligned to us? And when we sat down, we actually sat down as a team together. And we wrote out this list of qualities in the next recruit person that we wanted to bring into our team or really, really clear on who we wanted. And it actually made the process really quick and easy. After we did that together, so yeah, haven’t had any problems.
Danny Wood [00:08:01] And Ken, welcome aboard to you again.
Ken Dixon [00:08:04] Thank you.
Danny Wood [00:08:06] Well, that’s good to hear. And Ken, it sounds like you’re a bit over your recruitment hump to that you mentioned earlier is that true? Or what do you see as the issues in this space?
Ken Dixon [00:08:17] Thanks, Danny, well over the recruitment hump, we’ve got good staff on board, they know their stuff, those in the training in the various products and tears we do, I think the biggest issues that were found is the hybrid working relationship. That is work in the office and work from home. And obviously COVID brought this to a head, we’re running pretty much a hybrid operation now, where the girls will have two or three days at home, and they work from home. We know they’re working from home, the work is being done, the workflow is there, which is great. So it’s a real positive reinforcement of the quality and the ethics they bring to the workplace. So the recruitment process was sound that we got the right people. It’s now just managing when do I go in the office? So which one of the three officers or if we have meetings, yeah, who’s at home who’s not? So there’s a different management strategy now to get people together? Obviously, there’s still zoom meetings, but weekly or fortnightly, we’ll try and catch up in Brisbane for both tomorrow on the sunny coast. It works well. But I think that’s the biggest balance now is people have an expectation. I will work life balance and the hybrid working style seems to be working for us. I was a huge non advocate for it, but I found it working.
Danny Wood [00:09:37] And Peter had locked and what about you are you as a state manager in Queensland? I imagine you’re overseeing a lot of this is hybrid working pretty well accepted at Lockton?
Peter Jeeves [00:09:47] Our hybrid working is definitely accepted. We, you know, we want encourage people to be to work flexibly and we also want them to come into the office and to engage agents to learn. And that’s where we’ll probably see, the biggest challenge from a recruitment and training perspective is, obviously, we’ve got people that come from larger organizations that have got really good skills in certain areas, but lack in other areas. And because of the hybrid working environments and the way in which we are working today, just more generally, it’s hard to see where there’s gaps in skills, and then being able to ensure that we deliver training and support to cover those and to bring those people up to speed as quickly as possible.
Danny Wood [00:10:37] Yeah, that is a bit of a challenge, isn’t it in this new environment? Jen, let’s bring you back in here. I mean, there are a couple of recruitment issues that you feel need solutions. And if there are solutions, what will mean? What would you like to see?
Jen Bettridge [00:10:52] I think the avenues in which we advertise by just the same old advertising streams just don’t work anymore. So bring us up on sync is just that you get 20 applications for people that don’t even have any experience in the industry. They’re just trying to put their applications in to get the quota. So I think that’s definitely there’s a shift away from See, LinkedIn is okay. Networking, I think is probably the, the biggest solution there. And that takes time and energy for the directors and to get out and actually do that.
Danny Wood [00:11:31] And, Ken, what about you? Are there a couple of things that the industry could be doing more to help out with in the recruitment space?
Ken Dixon [00:11:38] Oh, gee, Danny, that’s a tough one. As an industry, I’ve always said that the insurance industry is its own worst enemy sometimes. And by that, I mean, the regulations we have to deal with not supporting the business that is written and not supporting the staff, a lot of my staff want growth. And it’s not financial growth. They want growth in their expertise, the challenges that they see. And I think from an industry perspective, I would love to see webinars and training seminars that are not one on one type scenarios. You’ve got people that are in the industry for a long time. And they want, they want a bit of technical know how but they want to hear from experts from business interruption or PI, or any of the more abstract fields, people want to learn. And it’s good when they do learn, because then we can deploy them further into our brokerages with different clients, they can fill gaps. So I think training from an insurance perspective is our number one issue right now to give people the experience, given the knowledge and know not from one insurance company’s perspective on how a particular class of risk works. But how the industry sees that particular class of Richard work.
Danny Wood [00:12:51] And Peter, what about you? How do you see a couple of solutions to recruitment issues that you might be having?
Peter Jeeves [00:12:59] I think our promotion as an industry is pretty lacking. We are very poor at advertising ourselves, as a great industry to work in it is a great industry to work in. And we don’t say that enough to people externally and to the broader community. And we often get tarred with the current affair type. You know, stories that degrade what we do. And reality is quite different. We do such great work and we should be shouting from the rooftops more that more loudly about it.
Danny Wood [00:13:34] I think everyone on the panel would agree with you there. Meena, let’s finish with you. And when we were talking earlier, you talked about this link between understanding cyber risk and this skills gap in the industry. Can you talk a little about that?
Meena Wahi [00:13:48] You know that the whole shift to digital companies started recruiting a whole lot of tech staff. But they have probably missed the link between business and technology and the link between risk and technology. So there’s a bit of a gap there. And unless they meet this gap, what happens is that it translates into that gap in adoption of risk transfer mechanisms because there’s not enough maturity out there where people understand you know, how cyber risk should be managed, what type of risk is and I find that because there’s not such a match between demand and supply they would be even people like myself, you know, I’m putting myself out there now as as an on demand talent, that you know, if I feel that you know, if I’m going to help companies by cyber insurance, for example, and even other brokerages sell cyber insurance. I’m putting myself out there as a as a cyber expert who can come and educate them, because that helps me in the long term that You know, if I educate managers or if I educate other brokers that the demand for cyber insurance will grow and a whole lot of collaborations and all those green initiatives that I’m proposing and you know, the same I can say to Jen and Ken and Peter, that, you know, brokerages aren’t doing very well with cyber insurance, and therefore, you know, sourcing expertise from another broker is, is the way to go. But one thing that I’m proposing to boards at this moment is that if, if a board composition of older traditional board members can grapple with cyber risk, for example, they have someone like me come on board as an on demand talent, and on demand is that you’re not you run your own business. For example, I have my own brokerages where he is well established. But if I go and sit on a board as an on demand talent, I just have them grapple with key issues around cyber risk, then you’re not sourcing, or recruiting a staff like full time or part time or as a contractor, you’re just recruiting staff because they have expertise in that area, on an on demand basis, and they do the work and they just go So flexibility in terms of understanding your own needs. What do you need? Why do you need it? And how long do you need that expertise for? And sourcing that expertise, paying that expertise in a partnership model or whatever remuneration model works is the way to go because I don’t think there’s such a need in the market to have to have every broker house, a cyber insurance specialist or every board to have a cyber insurance board member, but there is definitely that needs. So flexibility is the way to go.
Danny Wood [00:16:45] Flexibility sounds like a good idea. And that’ll wrap up our Insurance Business Australia Editorial Board looking at the industry’s recruitment challenges and what can be done. I’d like to thank our board, Jen Bettridge is with Clear Insurance, Peter Jeeves with Lockton Australia. Meanwhile, the Director of Cyber Data Risk Managers, and Ken Dixon with Dixon Insurance Services. Thanks to you all and thanks for watching Insurance Business TV. Bye for now.
