As we discussed last week, soft skills are crucial when finding the best candidate for your insurance business. Ninety-two percent of talent professionals believe soft skills are just as important if not more than the technical skills needed for the job. At The James Allen Companies, we believe both are essential, but soft skills can…

It’s no secret the insurance industry is facing a talent shortage. An estimated 60 percent of the workforce is expected to retire in the next ten years and only about five percent of the incoming generation is interested in the insurance industry. These factors combined with an increase in technology-based positions result in a shortage…

When referring to the candidate market, the term market is often used in relation to candidates as a commodity, but the more traditional definition of the word as it pertains to a store is also applicable. To run with this analogy, we have to think about candidates as products, but we also have to be…

In 2017, we sounded the alarm bell regarding the impending talent shortage that is to be a result of the massive retirement of Baby Boomers. By October of that year, according to data collected by Pew Research and the Social Security Administration, Boomers were entering retirement at a rate of 10,000 individuals a day. That…

The end of 2017 is fast approaching, and as the year closes, we feel it is time to close the book on one particular topic that has dominated the hiring conversation for the past few years:  Millennials. We don’t expect this article to be the final word on the place of Millennials in the workplace,…

“Adapt or die.” That’s the response Billy Beane offers his head scout when the latter challenges Beane’s (at the time) unorthodox method of recruiting the best baseball talent in the film Moneyball, the 2011 sports drama that chronicles the true story of the Oakland A’s 2002 baseball season and how they found success by ignoring…

As we look to close our four-part series on talent-shortage crisis, we begin to look forward to better understand what the insurance industry can do to combat the impending deficiency of qualified leaders and personnel. To recap the major points of our Eleventh Hour series:  baby boomers are retiring en masse, leaving a large hole…

We have discussed how the three primary generations that comprise the pool of insurance industry talent (baby boomers, generation x and millennials) each present a unique problem in terms of the workforce. In part two we continued to explore how betting on technology to compensate for dwindling manpower could be nothing more than wishful thinking.…

In the first episode of this four part series we discussed the growing talent crisis that continues to threaten the traditional structure of the insurance industry. Specifically, we focused on the three generations that occupy the insurance talent pool and how each poses their own unique threat to the ability to meet staffing demands. The…