Profile: Seeking Compassionate Generalists

Recruiters may soon be looking to turn compassionate Rhodes scholars into insurance adjusters, assuming current trends in the adjusting profession hold true.

This is an exaggeration, of course. But certainly good adjusters can use a well-rounded education, and there’s no question empathy is among the most important assets in an adjuster’s skill set.

For Ontario Insurance Adjusters Association (OIAA) president Alan Gallagher, one of the key issues facing the insurance adjusting profession is recruiting such compassionate generalists. And in tackling this challenge, the profession must find its way out of a conundrum, the former CBC radio broadcaster observes.

On the one hand, the profession is appealing to those with a generalist knowledge base who like variety. Whether they deal with claims related to fire damage, agricultural mishaps, jewellery theft, printing press breakdowns, or even stolen art or knitting supplies, adjusters quickly need to grasp the subject matter at hand. “You can’t not know what you’re talking about,” Gallagher observes. And certainly part of the thrill of being an adjuster comes from not knowing from one moment to the next what kind of claim will come through, and what kind of knowledge base might be required.

But such thrill-seeking generalists are hard to find these days. “It’s tough because so many people are in high school and they’re told: ‘You’ve got to be going down this path, and here’s where you want to go,'” Gallagher says in a phone interview from his Ottawa adjusting office of Vanler McLarens Canada. “That makes it tougher to find someone who has a lot of general interests and is willing to help people and go from there.”

In addition, it is increasingly difficult to keep up with consumer expectations in a wired world. Instantaneous Internet and cellular communications have shrunk the amount of time adjusters can take to work out problems and offer responses. Some adjusters working for insurance companies might find their good intentions caught in the middle of a feud between the policyholder and the insurance companies for which the adjuster works. Other adjusters might find themselves on the front line, working out solutions with policyholders in a delicate frame of mind.

“You are dealing with people who are in a lot of cases at their worst,” Gallagher notes. “They’ve lost the house, or they’ve been in a car accident in which there may have been a fatality for that matter…

“I think you also have to be able to separate your work from [your personal life] and realize that when the guy’s screaming at you, he’s not screaming at you — it’s at what you’re telling him.”

Certainly, adjusting is not a vocation for just any

generalist. “It’s tough to attract people [to the adjusting profession],” Gallagher agrees. “It’s not a job for everybody, that’s for sure. You have to be good with people.”

Like so many before him, Gallagher himself did not enter the profession with any kind of specialized knowledge or education. In fact, prior to moving to Ottawa in the late 1980s, Gallagher was working as a radio announcer for CBC in Toronto. After getting married, Gallagher and his wife received some land in the Ottawa area at about the same time Gallagher’s work with the CBC in Toronto started to dry up. He and his wife moved to Ottawa, where Gallagher followed the footsteps of his father and became an insurance broker in 1990.

Two years later, Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company bought up Safeco Insurance and hired 18 new people in the Ottawa area. Dominion hired Gallagher, who started doing work on the claims side.

“Claims seemed to be more interesting,” Gallagher said of his shift from insurance broking to claims adjusting. “More change, more variety. At Dominion, I started as a telephone adjuster and then progressed through the ranks, handling all types of claims…

“What I like is the resolution. There’s been a couple of large house fires in which everything is destroyed and you’ve been able to get the people back in and get their lives going again. I did a large golf club that got burned down, and we were able to get it back up and running. There were a lot of people involved because it was actually a community association that ran it. It was kind of nice to get them back and going, and I took some pride in that.”

Gallagher worked at Dominion until 1997, when he left to work for an independent adjuster named PCA Adjusters. From there, he jumped to Vanler Insurance Adjusters Ltd., which McLarens Canada acquired in late 2007. Gallagher, whose family includes four children aged 6-13, believes he is only the second OIAA president to be based in Ottawa.

Gallagher notes times are increasingly tough for independent adjusters looking for a steady flow of work. He observes companies have been doing more of their claims adjusting work in-house or by means of call centres. Gallagher says communications technology has advanced to the point of crowding out the independent adjuster’s traditional role as intermediaries between policyholders and the insurance companies.

“You know, there are so many more ways to communicate with people,” he says. “Half the insureds — well, probably three-quarters of the people — own a digital camera and can forward pictures to someone just as quick as I could.”

Market consolidation and retirement are also both contributing factors to a relative lack of work available to independent adjusters these days.

For one thing, the shrinking number of insurance companies means greater competition among adjusters to handle the companies’ claims. “From when I first started, [the number of insurers] probably dropped 10-15% [through consolidation], so the job opportunities are limited,” Gallagher says. “As they’ve amalgamated, a lot of the smaller [insurance] companies have disappeared, and that’s happening in the adjusting field as well … In Toronto it’s different, there are still a lot of smaller firms. That’s due to sheer volume. But in Ottawa, we’re limited to pretty well national firms. There are a couple of small firms still here, but most of them are now national, and I think [because of that] the job opportunities are limited a little bit as well.”

To counter this trend, Gallagher notes independent adjusters have taken to offering unique or exceptional service through the use of rapidly advancing technologies. Also, they have tended to offer more specialized or niche services not generally offered by larger companies.

Consolidation, however, is not the only cause for concern when it comes to drumming up business opportunities for independent adjusters. Another issue is that there may not be enough independent adjusters to handle an increased workload, even if more work were to become available. The adjusting profession is no stranger to a demographic trend seen in all of Canada’s financial service industries in that a growing number of senior and experienced adjusters have retired or are planning to do so in the near future. That’s where the OIAA’s recruiting efforts come into play.

“What we’ve done each year is that we’ve had our claims conference in Toronto, where we have 150 vendor booths and various seminars,” Gallagher notes. “In the last several years, we’ve offered a job fair for students, where we bring in students from the insurance program and have various employers in the room and let them go at it. It’s not only claims-oriented but it definitely is something that we can help. We’ve talked to [students] before, just to try to let them know what [claims adjusting is] all about, really. For a lot of people, the stories they usually hear about claims are about the bad experience of the guy who didn’t get something covered. We try to battle that. That’s one of the things the association will be doing is the job fair.”