Searching Outside the Box

When it comes to attracting people into the adjusting profession, Laurie Walker, president of the Ontario Insurance Adjusters Association (OIAA) in 2008-09, says the association is starting to think — and look — outside of the box.

Walker is the accident benefits practice leader for Ontario at ClaimsPro. She says the recruitment and retention issue facing the Canadian insurance industry at large, and the adjusting community in particular, is not a new threat. But the association is beginning to explore other avenues of drawing people into the field beyond just relying on the school system to funnel people into the profession. By targeting individuals in other occupations — such as the service industry, for example — the property and casualty insurance industry may be able to entice young adults with a set of transferable skills who are looking for a change of scenery.

Walker, like many of her peers, stumbled into a career in the insurance industry. Born and raised on a tobacco farm in Norwich, Ontario, she left home for the bright lights of London, Ontario to study business marketing at Fanshawe College. After school, she returned to Norwich “dead broke,” she chuckles. She bumped into an old friend from high school who mentioned that the insurance company in town was hiring people for data entry positions. Walker applied and got the job; she began taking insurance courses through the Insurance Institute of Ontario. Within a couple of years, she had built up enough of a financial cushion and experience to return to London where she landed a job with Anglo Canada (now Axa Insurance).

“I worked there for about 13 years,” she says. “I started in the underwriting department for the first three months and then quickly transferred to the claims department.”

Walker admits underwriting felt tedious compared to working as an adjuster. “There’s an investigation component to your job [in the claims department], there’s a customer service component,” she says. “There’s a little bit more job satisfaction in being involved in the claims department versus the underwriting department, because you never really deal with the consumer in the underwriting department… whereas in the claims department you get to see the product being serviced and delivered right on the front line.”

Walker acknowledges the industry can no longer rely on chance encounters or happenstance to recruit new entrants into the industry. And yet, the same things she loves about the profession — the investigation and service components — create a challenge when it comes to recruiting and training. Given the broad knowledge base and nuanced people skills required to resolve the complexities of the job, the learning curve for an adjuster tends to be a bit longer than it is for other professions with more straightforward duties. Since adjusting is a career with a heavy customer service component, it means newcomers will have to work for a few years under the mentorship and tutelage of their older counterparts to build a solid foundation in the profession. “It’s an applied science that you learn through application,” she says. “You can’t graduate from any program and say: ‘Okay, I’m a great negotiator,’ because being a great negotiator takes a lot of skill and a large knowledge base. You need a lot of repetition to develop that skill.” As the average age of the adjuster increases year-over-year, it’s becoming increasingly urgent to fill the empty positions sooner than later so that there are people with the appropriate experience to help the newcomers through those critical early years.

SEEKING STREET SMARTS

Walker believes there is a disconnect between a person graduating from college or university with little to no experience and the graduate’s expectation of high wages — an expectation that needs to be overcome in order to improve retention.

“I had a situation once where someone said to me: ‘I graduated from school and I’ve been doing this for six months now,'” she recalls. “I kind of giggled, because I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I learn how to do something new every day.”

The OIAA is exploring new ways of understanding what makes a good adjuster and what transferable skills adjusters have. Based on this analysis, the industry can look to recruit from other professions as an option instead of focusing their search for new candidates from entirely within the school system.

“There are certain jobs that people have or have done that give them a certain skill set,” she says, adding these may include jobs in the hospitality or food services sector. “They have learned a set of core skills that are transferable,” she says. “If they have [those positions] on their resume you can say: ‘You know what? That person may be able to be trained [as] an adjuster because they have been trained to deal with difficult people in the past.'”

The upcoming OIAA Conference in February will include seminars that focus on targeting other sectors for recruitment, she notes. When looking to poach talent from another pool, a firm first needs to have a strategic plan. “You have to first identify what transferable skills your company wants to attract, because they can be different depending on what job you are hiring for.”

By working through organizations like Workopolis, an adjusting firm can learn which occupation pools tend to foster those skill sets and learn how to target individuals from those occupations specifically. “There are so many other occupations that have transferable skills that we can reach out to and say: ‘We can offer you a better career,'” Walker says.

Once an employer hires new staff, the human resources effort doesn’t stop there. Employers need to be competitive on the salary front, but they also need to make the workplace “a good place,” Walker says.

For example, if employees don’t feel that they are being heard, or if they feel that their contributions in the workplace are minimized or neglected, they will leave. “As the office manager, you need to focus on that,” Walker says. “Sometimes it’s not always about the numbers. Sometimes it’s not always about the expense line. Sometimes it has to be about the people.”

People make the claims department, Walker says. The claims component is a critical piece of the insurance policy that’s being sold to the consumer. “The happier the person is, the better the product being delivered to the insured consumer.”

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“The industry can look to recruit from other professions as an option instead of focusing their search for new candidates from entirely within the school system.”