At its recent 2023 NIBA Convention, the National Insurance Brokers Association (NIBA) launched a new strategy with big implications for dealing with recruitment challenges. For the first time, Insure Your Future provides the industry with recruitment materials specifically promoting an insurance broking career.
The strategy is designed to tackle the talent crunch and counter an image problem shared with the wider industry. However, it’s winning ingredient could be solving a basic issue: explaining what insurance brokers actually do.
“Insure Your Future is our initiative to promote insurance broking as a career of choice,” said Phil Kewin (pictured above), NIBA’s CEO.
He said the materials - including banners, T-shirts and tote bags - are ready for brokerage firms to deploy at career expos so they can better target school leavers, graduates and career changers.
“Historically, the only information that we’ve had to use is Careers in Insurance and that collateral is actually owned by ANZIIF [Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance],” said Kewin. “It’s good stuff and a great collaboration but the key thing is it doesn’t focus in on insurance broking.”
He said that’s what Insure Your Future, with the tagline, “brilliant careers, unlimited opportunities,” is all about.
A feature of the initiative – which for some may conjure the Don’t Mention the War episode in the John Gleese Fawlty Towers comedy - is how it counterintuitively takes on insurance broking’s recruitment issues by deliberately not mentioning broking in its title.
“The reason we don’t say anything about insurance broking is because we want the title to be something that people engage with and want to ask for more information about,” said Kewin. “If we called it something like ‘Come and be an insurance broker’ a lot of students and their parents would automatically think that they know what that is, they’d keep walking and probably miss out on a really good conversation about a profession that they may not know existed.”
The branding and logo also involved a lot of thought, he said.
“It’s got eight pointers for the six states and two territories that show all the different directions your career can go in and looks a bit like a compass,” said Kewin (see picture immediately below of Kewin at the launch).
Kewin said a NIBA working group has been looking at the talent and recruitment issue for the last year.
“A lot of people have asked what we are doing to try and encourage new talent because people are leaving the industry,” he said.
In the convention’s planning stages, when NIBA sent out notices to members asking what questions they’d like to ask during the board’s panel session, Kewin said it was clear how much interest there would be in this initiative.
“Within 24 hours, a third of the questions that we got back related to what we’re doing about talent or what we’re doing about encouraging people to come into the industry,” said Kewin. “I found that really reassuring, which was one of the reasons we actually turned it into a launch at the beginning of the conference rather than a strategic discussion at the end.”
Brokers took all of the materials, including banners and T-shirts, that NIBA brought along to the launch.
“All the collateral we had at the convention basically went on that day, that’s how much positive response we had,” said Kewin. “Brokers were coming up and saying, ‘This is great. How do we get on board?’”
When Insurance Business suggested that brokers were approaching this initiative in the spirit of the President John F Kennedy quote: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” Kewin agreed.
“I was really encouraged by that because it just showed that everyone wants to help make it a success,” he said.
The next step for Insure Your Future is finalising its website. Kewin expects more stages in this recruitment strategy to follow.
“So for the school leaver, this is all great but if they do want to become an insurance broker, what do they do from here? Do we have a jobs board? Do we direct them towards different websites like specific insurance broking job websites?” he said.
What do you think of NIBA’s Insure Your Future recruitment initiative? Please tell us below.
