Tips for Recruiting Talented Insurance Agents

Learn how to attract top talent to your insurance and benefits agency.

The insurance industry has seen steady growth over the past 10 years. Along with the fact that an increasing number of agents and advisors are nearing retirement, it’s safe to assume that insurance agents are in high demand. 

While you might be in need of agents, you still want to find the right employee. They represent your brand, can make or break your reputation, and directly affect client acquisition and retention.

Let’s discuss some top tips for recruiting the best talent, where to post your job openings, and where to proactively look for candidates.

Recruiting Ideas To Attract Top Insurance Agents

There are a few things your agency (or any business) should be doing to stand out to job seekers.

Showcase Your Insurance Agency’s Culture

Companies each have their own unique culture and values–and people care more about culture than salary in today’s age. Giving prospective employees a glimpse into your company’s culture gets them excited about the idea of working for you. 

Showcase your culture on your website’s “About Us” page and throughout your social profiles. You will want to: 

• Clearly state your agency’s mission and vision
• Talk about your company history and future plans
• Highlight the insurance products you sell
• Discuss events your agency attends or hosts in the community
• Share office happenings, like team bonding events, parties, or company outings
• Feature information about your remote or hybrid work policies 

People today are looking for flexibility, a mission-oriented company mindset, growth opportunities, and values that align with their own. You will want to highlight these attributes in your culture messaging to attract top talent.

Provide Benefits People Care About

When recruiting insurance agents, compensation will likely be the first thing many prospective employees want to know about. However, it’s important to keep in mind that benefits packages are also incredibly important.

Some common benefits (whether paid by the employer or voluntary for the employee) are typically vacation time/PTO, affordable health and life insurance, dental and vision coverage, AD&D coverage, FSA dependent care, and short- and long-term care coverage.

While these benefits are sought after–especially when the employer pays a good portion–many employers still try to provide additional perks to attract and keep good employees.

Employee Benefit News reports the 15 most popular employee perks today, in order, are: 

• Paid family leave
• Flexible/remote work options
• Professional development
• Sabbatical leave
• Gym membership or onsite fitness center
• Student loan repayment
• Onsite healthy snacks
• ID theft prevention
• Financial planning resources
• Fitness goal incentives
• Public transit assistance
• Pet insurance
• Pet-friendly offices
• Health coaching
• Dedicated volunteer hours

Whatever benefits you currently provide, be sure to re-evaluate what your employees care about every year. While you probably won’t be able to provide everything they wish for, showing that you care and are trying to meet them halfway will go a long way.

Make Advanced Technology a Priority

Providing the right tools and technology empowers your team to be more productive, and in turn, less stressed and frustrated. In insurance sales, time is money. Technology that enables your team to work efficiently helps them perform their best in the position you hired them for.

Since providing your staff with the tools to succeed is a necessity, it’s a good point to highlight in your recruitment efforts. List what technology your agency utilizes, like an industry-specific agency management system (AMS), within job descriptions to show prospective agents or other employees that you’re invested in their success.

Know What You’re Looking For

There are a few key attributes that can let you know whether a candidate is a good fit for the job. List them in your job descriptions, and make sure to listen closely during any interviews to see how your candidates match up. 

Qualities of a good insurance agent include: 

• Having a knack for selling
• Honesty 
• The ability to handle rejection well
• Good interpersonal and relationship-building skills
• Dedication and perseverance

Where Should You Post Your Job Openings?

To get the most views of your job description, there are a few places you should post it to recruit insurance agents.

Website Careers Page

The first place you post job openings should be on your careers page. This way, you will always have a spot to link back to no matter where you want to spread the word.

Your careers page should include:

• Company mission statement
• Company history (or link to About Us)
• Company culture
• Summary of employee benefits 
• Positions available 
• Location of position
• How and where to apply, and any relevant specifications

Within each position, include details like minimum requirements, necessary qualifications and skills, and what the job entails. Once you have your open positions posted on your website, start spreading the word–one of the best places to start is social media. 

Social Media

LinkedIn and Facebook both have native capabilities to post job openings–meaning you can use their tools to advertise open positions and target people you’re after. 

Use LinkedIn’s templates to create your job description or copy and paste what you’ve created for your website’s job postings. In addition to LinkedIn’s high visibility and targeting, it also lets you add questions to the application to better screen candidates. Plus, you can target people based on the skills and experience you’re looking for. Keep in mind that LinkedIn’s careers tool is not free, so you’ll have to budget accordingly. 

On Facebook, you can post a job opening directly to your Company’s Facebook page. You’ll have the option to receive applications via your page’s messages inbox or email. Posting a job on Facebook is free unless you decide to turn it into an ad to expand your reach.

If you would rather not use these platforms’ native tools, you can simply link to the postings on your website’s careers page. 

While there currently aren’t any native post options on Twitter, it’s still a powerful recruiting platform. To get your job openings in front of agents, add “We’re Hiring!” to your bio with a link to your careers page and regularly “tweet” job openings. Include the position’s link along with a short description–you’ll have to get pretty creative since Twitter only allows 280 characters per tweet. 

Recruiting Sites

Another popular place that insurance agents look for job openings is on job search websites like CareerBuilder, Monster, and Indeed. While this option isn’t free, it’s a great way to get your business in front of searchers who may not have heard of your company before.

In July of 2022, Indeed boasted an average of 599.3 million monthly visits to its site. Monster came in with 7.9 million, and CareerBuilder with 6 million. With so many people using these websites, it’s clear there is a big opportunity to get your business in front of many more job seekers. 

Before you post on job search sites, vet each platform to ensure that your ideal candidates are using them. 

Where To Recruit Insurance Agents

Once you’ve posted your job opening, you don’t have to sit around and wait for applicants. You can be proactive and look for candidates yourself! 

One of the best places to start is LinkedIn. This social networking platform has 822 million users as of 2022–and since it’s designed for business professionals, it makes finding the right fit much easier. LinkedIn also has recruitment enablement features such as letting you search for candidates based on their location, skills, and/or current job title. You can also put “Hiring” on your profile picture on LinkedIn to open the door for more conversations. 

Another place to look for candidates is on those sites we mentioned earlier: CareerBuilder, Monster, Indeed, and others like them. While these are places to post job openings, many of these sites also allow candidates who are looking for work to post their resumes for recruiters to find. 

Another way to find qualified candidates is to put an employee referral program in place. Why not have employees you already trust help you recruit people they would recommend? A referral bonus can be an incentive to encourage your employees to bring in top talent.

How To Track Agent Recruitment

Whether you’re heavily recruiting agents or just hiring every once in a while, you need a place to track and manage this process.

AgencyBloc is an AMS for life and health insurance agencies that allows you to track agents throughout the recruiting process, and then, as a contracted agent or employee of your agency. Track where agent leads are coming from to be sure you’re investing in the right platforms and getting the most value for your money.

You can store an abundance of information on agents in AgencyBloc:

• Personal information (name, birthday, social security number)
• Contact information (phone number, email, street address)
• Type (Prospect, Recruiting, Onboarding, Active, Termed, Retired, etc.)
• Classification (Tier 1, Tier 2, etc.)
• National Producer Number (NPN)
• Lead information (date, source, etc.)
• Primary Market (Med Supp, Health, Life, etc.)
• Team (assign them to a team within your agency)
• Their clients & their respective policies
• Their Activities (to-dos)
• Notes & Attachments
• E&O information
• Contracts
• Licenses
• Commission data
• Custom Fields, where you can create a place for anything else you’d like to track

While you use this information to track potential employees, it’s also beneficial to tell prospects about it so they know you’re able to keep track of important paperwork like E&O, contracts, and licenses for them. With AgencyBloc, you can even set up workflows to ensure they’re reminded when E&O, contract, and license expirations or renewals are approaching.

This blog was originally posted on March 4, 2020, and has been most recently updated and republished on September 20, 2022.

Posted by Kelsey Rosauer on Tuesday, September 20, 2022 in Automated Lead Routing & Assignment

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