Talent gap: How to stop the industry’s churn and burn

Two years ago, Winsbury hoped that new junior level talent who had lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic would join the insurance industry. That hasn’t happened. However, some firms, like GB, are taking their own steps to help reverse the talent gap situation.

“Yesterday I was in Sydney and I attended our interns’ final presentation to our Australian group executive of the projects they’d worked on,” said Winsbury.

Read more: What’s the top insurance industry recruitment problem?

The interns came from a range of professions including health, law and marketing.

“Some were still at university and others had just graduated – it was very exciting. So that talent funnel is great,” he said.

GB is offering some of those interns full-time jobs.

“These are really good, young, capable people that we’re attracting out of university to try and give us the best edge in the market. So, we’re employing young professionals that see insurance as a potential career that utilizes their skillsets,” said Winsbury.

But the GB executive said it’s going to take a lot more work across the industry to overcome the talent gap issue.

“This is working for us, but do we still have a talent issue? Yes,” he said.

Winsbury said inflation is starting to impact salaries and insurance companies are moving staff across their business to deal with talent scarcities.

The issue is particularly acute in the insurance industry’s IT area.

“It’s IT skills that are in short supply and high demand,” said Stephen Browne, vice president and country manager for Australia and New Zealand at Xceedance. “Other industries are also seeking people with IT skills, which exacerbates the problem,” he told IB in December.

Brown’s insights strike accord with Winsbury’s. He said to compensate for the shortage of skilled digital personnel, some firms are moving personnel from the business side of insurance to IT.

“That’s a double whammy because it creates shortages in the operational side of those organisations,” said Browne.

Insurance industry companies are offering big money to attract IT talent. Browne said some IT professionals are being offered up to 40% more in wages compared with pre-pandemic levels.

But once you attract the right talent it can be difficult making them stay.

“We’ve taken lots of steps around our executive recruitment because what we found is that people don’t necessarily leave companies, they leave managers,” said Winsbury.

Winsbury said “core training” GB’s existing leadership is helping to retain more staff.

“We get better retention rates which helps manage this churn and burn that we’re seeing in the industry at the moment. So that’s been a large focus for us and that’s bearing fruit,” he said.

But, he said, there’s a long way to go.

“We haven’t fixed it [the talent gap] by any means,” he said. “I talk to our competitors and they’re facing very similar challenges. But the combination of bringing in bright young graduates from university that we can train ourselves, developing training hubs in our major locations and also upskilling our leaders is helping us combat the inflationary pressures we see and also a general gap in talent across the sector,” he said.

Recruitment consultancy Kona & Co. Group suggested a solution to help ease the talent issue that some may see as radical.

Read next: Does the industry need to follow Kona & Co.’s four-day week?

“The recruitment market for insurance specifically is going to become beyond challenging to attract great people and I can tell you hand on heart: the companies that attract and retain the best will be the ones that do things like a four-day work week,” said CEO James Toth.

Others in the industry disagree but, Toth said, for companies that want to grow, “This is a sticking point, it’s not a fad, it’s not a phase.”

Clyde & Co and Winmark’s Looking Glass Report released in December found that people-related risks, including attracting and retaining talent, were top concerns for executives and boards in 2021. Almost 70% of respondents expected these risks to have a high or very high impact on their organisations.