As the labor pool of available finance and accounting talent continues to shrink to record low levels, we’ve been speaking with account executives in recruiting firms to get a feel for how the job market has been specifically impacted in various industries.
For insight into hiring in the insurance industry, we recently caught up with Aston Carter Director of Strategic Sales for Financial Services Tom Jones. Drawing on 15 years of experience placing finance and accounting talent, Jones paints a picture of a staffing environment where success hinges on an organization’s ability to follow “The Golden Rule” of recruiting — where “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” means matching your hiring process to the talent you want.
First, a tour of the insurance industry hiring landscape.
Generalized Scarcity and Progressively More Specialized Roles
Regardless of where on the organizational flow chart a given finance or accounting position may fall — whether it’s an assistant role in basic transactional accounting or a directorship that requires extremely specific revenue model knowledge — it’s harder than ever to find good talent.
“I believe the unemployment rate across all industries for degreed finance or accounting professionals is less than 2%, it may even be less than 1%,” says Jones. “Within that, it may be a little easier to fill positions that require more general transactional accounting and support, whereas roles at the directorship level require more specialization.”
This slight easing of a challenging finance and accounting labor market among less specialized roles is a pattern common to most industries.
At first blush, it may appear that an already small finance and accounting labor pool would be further divided within the insurance sector due to a widely differentiated product line. That’s not the case, according to Jones.
“Of course, each sub-sector within insurance would prefer to hire candidates with specialized expertise, but I’ve found knowledge of the basic revenue model is usually transferrable,” he says. “And the large players in the industry diversify their offerings across each of those segments anyway, so any candidate with hyper-specialized skills will fit somewhere else in the same organization.”
The Limitations of Traditional Recruiting
While the insurance industry has native features that keep its roles less specialized than other sectors such as manufacturing or medical devices, even a slightly more generalized market for finance and accounting talent is more difficult than an average human resources department is equipped to handle.
That’s because the responsibilities of most in-house talent acquisition teams evolved during a less challenging environment for hiring, when it was still possible to simply post a job opening and choose the best candidate from a well-qualified applicant pool. This relatively easy process, now a relic of the past, allowed HR departments to centralize hiring for all roles — from the executive suite to the mailroom — while also performing payroll and conflict management functions.
These days, says Jones, staffing within this field requires more specialized and focused effort.
“You have to leverage specialized knowledge of your exact subsector of the labor market,” he says. “Execute a targeted approach to going after passive job seekers and have the recruiting bandwidth to talk to enough people to ensure you're sourcing the right talent.”
This is where “The Golden Rule” comes into play for hiring talent — hiring managers have to make use of specialized recruiting skills to attract candidates with specialized skillsets, including finance and accounting.
How Proactive Approaches Win Better Talent
In hiring, The Golden Rule means modifying the approach to talent recruitment to reflect the qualities they most value in an ideal candidate. In finance and accounting hiring for insurance firms, such a candidate search process would therefore be highly specialized, rooted in market knowledge and as proactive as possible.
“The initial meeting I take with customers is often predicated on a manager’s immediate need, and we’re always strategic about qualifying those requirements based on a constantly evolving knowledge of what the current market will bear,” says Jones.
But when managers are also thinking proactively about their future needs, he adds, “That’s when we can match talent to a success profile and bring it in as it becomes available. Those clients avoid missing out on top candidates who wouldn’t otherwise be available in a couple of weeks.”
Partnership is Key
As the traditional “post and coast” method of hiring fades into the past, hiring managers tasked with staffing the finance and accounting departments in the insurance sector are increasingly reaching out to recruiting firms with the capacity to locate talent. The approach managers take to these engagements is another crucial element of The Golden Rule.
“Our customers see that the demand for recruiting services has never been greater,” says Jones. “So there’s sometimes an assumption that we’re doing better volume. In reality, the amount of effort required to find and select great candidates has also never been greater, which makes our margins thinner and forces us to be selective about the partnerships we choose.”
What are the most basic operating assumptions of a functional partnership?
“If a potential customer isn’t willing to invest the necessary time it takes to define and qualify their needs in terms of what the employment market will bear, or isn’t ready to shorten their response time to capture active leads, those are both red flags,” says Jones.
As the overall labor pool has fully switched from employer-friendly to employee-driven in the ten years since the recession, it seems a similar shift has occurred in the relationship between employers and their recruiting vendors. Specialized recruiting expertise is now just as valuable as finance and accounting skills specialized to insurance, or any other sector. The kind of recruiting that’s necessary for success in these fields is too labor intensive to justify for a partner who won’t have a dialogue or can’t operate at the speed of the market.
One thing is clear: regardless of what industry you’re hiring in, it pays to practice what you preach.
If you’re ready to explore hiring options with a partner who thoroughly understands your own specific labor market, contact Aston Carter now for a free conversation.
US - EN
