Why your P&C employees are leaving you for your competitor

Losing your employees to other P&C firms? Join the club. 

A full 38% of financial services and accounting professionals, including within the insurance sector, are already looking or plan to look for a new job before the end of the year, according to a recent Robert Half survey.  

If you want to hold onto your top talent, “you have to understand what people’s motivators are to make a move,” said Mike Shekhtman, senior regional director at Robert Half, a business consulting firm. 

Companies can do that by making sure their benefits and salaries can compete with what their competitors offer. 

According to the survey, financial services employees pursuing other employment opportunities are motivated by: 

• Higher salary (55%)  
• Better benefits and perks (30%)   
• Remote work options (23%) 

“Salary over the last two, three years has [become] really important to people,” said Shekhtman. “We know how much pressure families and individuals have had in terms of inflation costs, burdens that come with interest rates, and other external factors.” 

Plus, contract work is a viable route for many corporate professionals more generally, with 31% of workers saying they are interested in contract roles in the future. 

“There’s a thought process for some [who] believe…they can get another [more aggressive] salary hike than [they could by] staying with the same employers for five years,” Shekhtman observed.  

Amid an era of employee poaching between P&C companies, offering a competitive salary, or benefits and perks, may be a crucial piece to retaining talent. 

“Competitive pay, the benefits, the perks — they need to be analyzed on an annual basis,” said Shekhtman. “I think it’s critical that you take a close look in terms of how you stack up in comparison to your competitors and other similar organizations. 

“It will at least allow you to know if this is a leverage point for you, or it’s a point of threat, or [if] you need to be able to focus in other areas.” 

Financial services employees looking for jobs also have their fair share of deal breakers, the majority of which stem from poorly streamlined hiring processes.  

When applying for open roles, candidates said they’d lose interest and withdraw from consideration due to:    

• Poor communication and follow-up from the hiring manager (52%)  
• Excessive — more than three — rounds of interviews (47%)  
• Delayed decision-making or lengthy hiring timeline (41%) 

That last one’s important because the average hiring process is now taking almost 14 weeks from start to finish. By contrast, two years ago it only took about eight weeks, according to general professional services results. 

“The length of hiring people is also increased tremendously, which is where people are being lost in the process,” said Shekhtman. “We’ve seen [that] 92% of hiring managers have said that they’ve actually lost talent because of the process that they had at some point.”  

Ensuring your hiring board members are on the same page can reduce the number of interview rounds, as well as the back-and-forth decision-making that comes with hiring the ideal candidate.  

Plus, reviewing job postings on a regular basis can lead to both applications from well-aligned candidates and the hiring team understanding the full scope of the position, as well as the company’s end goal for hiring.  

Feature image by iStock.com/Gwengoat