The basic options for your firm are to hire a recruiting firm or do-it-yourself. I encourage prospective client hiring managers to find out if they can do it themselves. You read that correctly: a recruiting firm owner suggesting to potential clients that they may NOT need a recruiting firm!
Here are 6 checkpoints that indicate that your commercial insurance agency/brokerage is strongly positioned for do-it-yourself new producer recruiting:
- You have in-house recruiters equipped with the right tools (e.g. LinkedIn Recruiter license and Applicant Tracking Software) plus the skills and the time to use them effectively and consistently.
- You hire enough producers to develop a steady rhythm and process (probably 5+ new producers per year).
- Your recruiters tell your company’s story and market your firm’s producer career opportunity in a compelling way.
- Your producer recruiting process is thorough and disciplined, yet also brisk and decisive, so you’re able to recruit top sales talent.
- You know how to pay new producers and bridge them to validation in a reasonable time period.
- You hire the best sales people in your market – not just the best people you come across or the best applicants to a job ad you run.
If you’re in great shape on these half dozen items, you probably don’t need us – or any third party recruiter – to help you. You may want to recruit on your own or try out one of the slickly promoted, low-budget turnkey recruiting solutions like ZipRecruiter. After a dose of do-it-yourself producer recruiting, you will either discover that you’re good at it OR you will develop an appreciation for the value of hiring a professional to do the work for you!
If you’re way short of the mark on some or most of these 6 questions, then you may find it useful to develop a professional sales recruiter relationship and have them work an active new producer recruiting process on your behalf. External recruiters focus on both the strategy and the mechanics of how to find people and they can increase your speed to hire, the breadth of quality candidates you see and make it easier for you to focus on your core business and your clients.
The easy answer is to just call me and outsource the work to CIB since we’re the only firm 100% dedicated to new producer recruiting, we’ve been doing it the longest, and we’ve become the commercial insurance industry’s new producer recruiting experts. (Note: I declare “expert” with some hesitation recalling the definition given by Niels Bohr, a Nobel Prize winner: “a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field”). While we’ve made our share of new producer hiring mistakes, we’ve also figured out how to put together a cohesive, effective, and continuously improving new producer recruiting program.