Agency Amplified (eBook)

Achieving Scale in a Shifting Digital Landscape

Justin Goodman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
322 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-8290-2 (ISBN)

Infos

'Agency Amplifed: Achieving Scale in a Shifting Digital Landscape' is a step-by-step guide built upon two decades of experience as well as insight from some of the top-performing agencies nationwide. Not only does this book address critical issues encountered by both small and large agencies, but it lays out a 'paint-by-numbers' plan to amplify your people, systems, and processes at scale.

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"e;Agency Amplifed: Achieving Scale in a Shifting Digital Landscape"e; is a step-by-step guide built upon two decades of experience as well as insight from some of the top-performing agencies nationwide. Not only does this book address critical issues encountered by both small and large agencies, but it lays out a "e;paint-by-numbers"e; plan to amplify your people, systems, and processes at scale.

Textauszug

Insurance agencies are being pinched by a tight labor market, an aging workforce, and a series of demographic and cultural challenges with the workforce now available for hire. Put simply, agencies are losing workers faster than they can replace them, and competition for new talent is at an all-time high.

If you own an agency that needs to hire new professionals to replace workforce turnover, you know the pressure is high. Between workers retiring and others leaving to pursue opportunities elsewhere, you might doing more hiring now than at any time in the past twenty years. If you’re having problems finding qualified employees, you might even be tempted to hire any warm body that applies.

But you should never make important hiring decisions out of desperation. Instead, there are five proven steps you can take to make sure you’re getting the best talent available. By following these guidelines, you’ll find, hire, and keep the best possible talent for your agency.

1. Hire for Attitude and Aptitude.

When seeking potential candidates, many companies scour their networks to find anyone with relevant work history and a good reference from someone they know. But hiring a great candidate should be much more scientific than just looking for a connection to someone known to you. A better way to ensure your candidates are really a fit for your organization is to look at their attitude and their aptitude.

Attitude can be fairly subjective, but the right mix of attitude traits for an insurance agency customer sales rep is easy to spot. Consider these questions as you evaluate a candidate’s application:

1. Will their attitude “fit” with the other employees in your professional setting?

2. Is the candidate enthusiastic about the role?

3. Do they appear motivated and inspire confidence that they’ll show up to work and do a good job?

4. Are they self-aware enough to be a team player and understand that they need to learn from others? Are they eager to learn?

If the candidate is a hard no on any of these questions, it might be a sign that they don’t have the right attitude for the role.

For a more scientific approach, utilize services that help you determine which personality traits are most important for certain roles. Identify your best CSR and contract with a company like Total CSR to evaluate them with a personality profile. Then you can match candidates against your employee’s personality profile to find positive matches. A candidate with a personality that matches a known successful employee is a great sign that your candidate has the traits to also succeed in that role.

Aptitude can be even more objective. In addition to the standard indicators like test scores and grade point averages, you can also use companies like Total CSR to evaluate intelligence and critical thinking skills. They can help you design and administer tests to identify critical cognitive skills in your applicants. With a third-party service like this, you can sort through your applicants to identify prospects with advantages in key cognitive abilities and even help you find candidates that you might otherwise have overlooked.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Look Outside the Industry for New Employees

One of the core challenges facing insurance agencies is that the pool of qualified candidates with experience in the industry and who are looking for jobs in the industry is limited. One great way to expand the available talent pool, however, is to reach outside the industry for prospects with the right skill set.

Identifying the right skill set isn’t as challenging as it might seem, and once you know it, you’ll have the information you need to hire professionals with or without industry experience.

Often this means looking for the right skills in nontraditional places. For example, the skills to be a successful insurance customer sales rep are needed for many customer-facing roles, whether in sales, customer service, or another job. Potential candidates are likely all around you.

If you come across someone who stands out and shows their skills in a different setting, you may want to consider how those skills could morph into a successful insurance career— then hire that person! The keys to success are in looking for the right skills in people you meet and being ready to take action when you find them.

3. Leverage Learning Development Trends

After hiring, you’ll need a robust onboarding program to help new hires acquire the job-specific skills they need to be successful. I talk about this more in the next chapter, but this detail is key in finding new hires, especially those outside the insurance industry. As author Cameron Bishop wrote it in his 2018 Forbes article “Seven Learning and Development Trends to Adopt in 2019,” employers should “View training as an employee benefit and bait for talent acquisition.” Bishop goes on to say

Training can be a key differentiator between companies competing for talent. Employees want to work for organizations that provide personal and professional development, and they consider it a deciding factor when looking for new employment or determining if they should stay with their current employer… . Leverage your training as an employee incentive, and add it to your existing benefits package alongside retirement and health and wellness options.

Bishop equates training to other, more “traditional” employee benefits, even if many companies do not.

Companies routinely consider paid time off, retirement plans, and similar benefits to be significant perks. They list these benefits prominently during the hiring process, yet many don’t put training opportunities in this same category. For the companies that offer training to employees, not advertising this information to potential hires is a missed opportunity.

With many companies lagging behind in employee education, effective training and continuing learning opportunities are both great perks to highlight during a competitive hiring process. Furthermore, learning opportunities are great tools to keep your employees engaged and up to date on industry best practices, helping them feel valued and perform at a high level.

4. Offer a Different Career Roadmap

Human resources (HR) professionals often talk about an employee roadmap—a list of milestones an employee meets while at a company.

The traditional employee roadmap is often portrayed as a segment of road that represents the “path” an employee takes while working for you. HR teams look at important points along the way, or “moments that matter,” and call them out as stops or turns on the employee’s roadmap.

Every employee has an onboarding experience, a variety of career changes along the way, and finally an offboarding experience when the employee’s path and the company’s diverge. But what happens to an employee’s career while they’re on “your road” is something you can influence.

The typical insurance agency career roadmap doesn’t have many twists and turns. Often an employee will start in customer service and stay in the job for several years. Their only changes may be becoming an agent or deciding to leave your agency to pursue a new opportunity.

But the insurance industry has many career paths, and training, continued learning, and professional certifications offer great ways for young professionals to advance their careers. Offering alternate plans for your employees to advance their careers can help you attract employees with varied interests and help you retain employees with valuable skills who want to make a professional change. What’s good for them is good for your agency.

5. Consider Students

Every professional, even the most successful and most talented, started off as an unproven beginner with zero experience. At any given time, there is a whole ecosystem of potential superstars toiling away at local colleges and universities, looking for any opportunity to get some real-world work experience.

Many college students will go so far as to take unpaid internships, trading their effort for experience they can put on their resumes. Others can’t work for free but would jump at the chance to trade part-time jobs waiting tables or doing manual labor for an office job that pays and provides professional experience.

The enthusiasm college students have about this kind of work experience, however, comes with important caveats. They may only have limited hours to give, their turnover rates may be high, and even the good ones might not ever take a full-time job in the industry.

That said, a student hire might be very effective as a part-time employee and give you quality service for the next couple of years. And if you ultimately find someone who is a great fit, they may be eager to become a long-time employee after graduation.

Even student employees who aren’t stellar themselves can become great recruiters for you among their peers. They might find their work with you rewarding and speak about it in their network of recent and pending college graduates. An endorsement from a peer might just be how you find your next superstar employee.

The End Result

It’s a tough time to be an insurance agency with a need to hire, but there are options. Taking even little steps to give yourself an...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.5.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-8290-0 / 1098382900
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-8290-2 / 9781098382902