P&C insurance industry launches collective recruitment effort

Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry has launched a collaborative, industry-wide recruitment effort dubbed Project Reframe.

Announced by the Insurance Institute of Canada (IIC) Monday, the public education campaign aims to portray the insurance industry as an engaging, dynamic, and interesting place to build a career. It’s aim is to address a lack of public awareness about what an insurance career is and isn’t.

Essentially, the industry is “reframing” its own story to welcome eager, prospective employees into the fold.

“Historically, the industry has had a little bit harder of a time attracting new people into the business,” IIC president and CEO Peter Hohman told Canadian Underwriter. “If you look at our recent demographic research, it was summed up quite nicely by saying a limited public understanding of industry careers makes recruitment more difficult…

“[Over the past few years,] at any industry conference you go to, the calls for more new talent really have grown a lot louder — both from the insurer side and the broker community as well. And it’s not unique to any one particular province. It’s really coast-to-coast.

“As an industry, we’ve typically addressed this issue on more of an individual employer basis. We’ve not really taken collective action…like we’ve seen from the accountants, engineers, or other trades. But the need has grown to such an all-encompassing degree that it really has become an industry imperative.”

The Insurance Institute of Canada, the education arm of the P&C insurance industry, is orchestrating the campaign.  Running for two years, Project Reframe will take a three-pronged approach to bringing new recruits into the industry.

Related: Why the industry needs to stop saying they “fell” into insurance

The first prong is a public awareness campaign showing the industry has careers of interest for everyone. The theme of the campaign is ‘purpose meets passion,’ alluding to the fundamental purpose of insurance, which is to help people in need (e.g., when their house has burned down, their car has been stolen or damaged, their business has been destroyed during a natural catastrophe, etc.)

Emphasizing social media, the campaign will make use of vetted social media influencers, programmatic video, paid display ads, retargeting (e.g. sending paid ads to people who have visited a website or social media profiles), and leverage Meta (e.g. Instagram), LinkedIn and TikTok. Assets include 15- and 30-second videos, static banner ads, reels, stories, a toolkit, and a microsite to carry on the conversation beyond the first few engagements.

The Institute will be constructing a library for housing these assets. Individual companies will then be able to ‘white-label’ the assets, meaning they can use them under their own branding for recruitment campaigns.

Three specific target audiences for this opening phase of the campaign include new university graduates (of any program, not just insurance programs), newcomers to Canada and career changers. Campaign timing for this first phase is Jan. 22 to May 30, 2024.

The second prong involves the Institute reaching out to these new prospects. The public awareness campaign will direct potential recruits to a new microsite, where they can leave their contact information. The Institute’s Career Connections program will contact these people and discuss industry career options with them.

The third and final prong is designed to help bring new recruits up to speed during the onboarding process. The idea is to complement the employer’s own onboarding initiatives with what Hohman describes as five “accelerated learning modules,” which will be ready to go early in the spring. Each module will be about three hours in length.

“We are developing five new accelerated learning products we will provide to employers,” Hohman told CU. “One is what we call a ‘new hire’ type of learning experience that applies equally to any of the jobs in the industry. It’s really to give them that initial introduction to insurance and its core functions. From there, we have additional modules for brokers and agents, underwriters, adjusters and commercial insurance.

“The fun thing is, these are all audio and video, and they’re narrated with a virtual, AI-generated host. We’re moving into a digital, AI type of learning product, which is exciting for us.”

Project Reframe is the culmination of about a year of industry collaboration behind the scenes. That so many industry executives lined up behind the initiative speaks to its importance, Hohman said.

“The Institute hosted a Talent Gap Summit [in Toronto] in late January 2023 with 40 senior industry leaders,” Hohman recalled. “For these senior [industry executives] to give up a full day, many traveling from out of town, really spoke volumes to us about the industry leadership’s concern about the issue.

“There was a tremendous amount of great discussion, and a number of good ideas on how the industry could collectively tackle the issue, rather than everyone flying solo to meet their own needs. That, in turn, led to a couple of follow-up task forces and a number of working groups. And then, in just a couple of months’ time, actions were [proposed] by these groups and presented back to the summit participants.

“[The summit participants] were very excited and [showed] a great, great deal of enthusiasm and support for these ideas. And so, over the summer and fall months last year, guided and supported by [the Institute’s] board, as well as the senior leaders that formed the Talent Gap Summit, we developed this three-pronged approach to help the industry address its talent gap.”

Feature image courtesy of iStock.com/drante