Honest relationships

Each type of employee will have to have its own desired skill set. You will need to tailor your interview questions to draw out or illicit the information you need to determine if they are a fit for your organization. You may be interviewing someone for one position and find that they are a better fit for a different position.

My best advice is not to settle and hire an employee just because you need to hire an employee. (Years of hiring State employees experience speaking here. ) It will cost you more in the long run, and once you hire someone that isn’t a good fit, the harder it is to get rid of them, and ultimately you will have to go through the process again. This will be harder for smaller agencies in smaller communities as your options will be more limited. If you limit your options to those who apply to work at your agency, your chance of success will be greatly limited. Get very involved in your community and attend everything that you can. Keep your eyes and ears open. The perfect candidate may be standing right in front of you.

If you are fully staffed and come across what you think would be the perfect fit, you may want to consider bringing them on, as perfect fits rarely come around. Did any of you dream of being an agent when you were growing up? I would say no unless you grew up in the family insurance business. For those that said yes and didn’t grow up in the industry, I would contend that you probably need therapy.

SECURA’s team of insurance experts is making insurance genuine. They are here to support you and your clients. Our underwriting teams are quick to reply, open-minded, and know their stuff. Plus they are backed by our caring claims group who will get your clients back on their feet.

The point is that people who may be a great fit typically don’t seek positions in this industry. If you are at a social event and someone is there that is very social(can talk to anyone), likes to help people, and enjoys being part of a team, you may want to have a conversation with them. The worst thing they could say is that they are not interested.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

- Wayne Gretzky

Okay, you hired the perfect fit, and now how do you keep them? In a smaller community with limited pools of employees, it will be harder to retain those employees due to supply and demand. Your reputation as to how you treat your employees will go a long way in employee hiring and retention. You will want to provide new and existing agents and CSRs with top-notch education and designation opportunities. It will cost you some money, but the benefits will far outweigh the cost of employee turnover and the loss of accounts due to a lack of policy knowledge and the ability to convey your agency’s value to clients. Employees want to have a sense of worth, and providing them with regular benefits along with educational benefits tells them that they are an integral part of your agency’s vision and mission. Shameless plug is that you can receive all of those educational needs through the IIA of IL.

A great analogy of employee retention is your lawn. What? Think about your lawn. If you do nothing, it will look good in the Spring, stressed in the Summer, and dormant in the Fall. If you water and mow your lawn (put in the minimal effort), it will look fine throughout the year but will, over time, thin or promote disease growth and will eventually not look great and thereby force you to tear it out and start over (hire new employee). If you water, mow weekly, edge every other week, fertilize seasonally, aerate yearly, thatch every couple of years, and slit seed every five years, you will have a lush, thriving lawn that will be the talk of the neighborhood. Fertilizing, aerating, thatching, and slit seeding is analogist to giving your employees great educational opportunities. Performing those tasks will cost you more, but the ends will justify the means. We all have that house in our neighborhood where the lawn looks amazing, and we wish we could have that lawn. Not going to lie; I am that guy. You could have that lawn with time, effort, and money. Those with great lawns don’t have any special formula. They just deem the investment of time and money important. You are lucky to belong to the Association because there is a special formula for hiring and retaining employees: you can access hundreds of peers who experience the same struggles. IIA of IL hosts great events to interact with your peers, like the EDGE Conference (see page 22) and CONVO 2023 (October 1012, Peoria, IL).

Don’t forget about your IIA of IL tools to help with all of this: Career Plug, My Agency Campus Learning Solutions for Insurance Agents, and Big I Hires. Check out our website to learn more.

As with anything in life, you will get out of what you put in. All my coaches growing up told me that, and it holds true with everything in life. If you want to coast along and hope for the best, it may work in the short term. If you want true success, you will need to be fully engaged. The more people (employees and clients) you can get excited about your agency, the better your agency will be situated to thrive and prosper. Or, as Spock would say, “Live long and prosper.”

As always, this just Brett’s 5 Sense (hopefully we get inflation under control and I can return to 2), and I hope it was helpful. If you need any clarification or have any suggestions for future articles, please email me at bgerger@iiaofil.org.

Trusted Choice®