Attracting diverse talent to our market has been a challenge for years, but 2023 was the year that the LMG decided it was time to stop talking and start doing. In October we launched our plan: good on paper but none of it tried before. My ambition was to be brave, to take on a number of firsts; hoping that we could prove our concept and learn enough to build a lasting programme.
The first of our firsts was to tell a better story about why specialty insurance is a great place to work. The LondonInsuranceLife website is the centre of that story: great role models telling compelling stories about what they do and how they got here. Profile, videos, podcasts – plus a jobs board brimming over with entry level opportunities.
Then we wanted to generate traffic by highlighting the material in the channels in which young people gather – social media. TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn have been the core of this. Topics have been driven by the interests of our viewers and range from ‘how do you get a good CV?’ to risks in a football match which got 1,000,000 views in the first 24 hours. We have made our own content, worked with influencers and even had a cat video! But the most powerful tool we have is the young people in our market – if they can share our materials, use their networks to tell our story we can really move the needle.
So a great story in the right places – done! Next was how do we reach university students? Again, digital marketing is our friend here but also literally getting in front of students in person. Rather than being also-rans at careers fairs, we hosted our own events in nightclubs and art galleries getting students in front of young brokers and underwriters to talk about what they do. Having trialled events in two cities last year, we will run them in more cities in 2024, and spread the news wider still.
The next challenge was schools’ outreach. Here the numbers speak for themselves; 50 schools identified in areas of high socio-economic challenge, 1,000 Year 12 students saw our presentations, 115 became participants in our Futures Academy work experience fortnight in the market. We partnered with 45 firms to make this programme happen. Everyone – students, volunteers, HR teams, all spoke remarkably positively. One-third of our participants applied to come back in the autumn for our second new event: the Apprentices Discovery programme, where 20 firms who were hiring for apprentices met students in a careers fair.
Companies have been delighted to meet a cohort that doesn’t need to be told what specialty insurance is – we have done that job for them already. But secondly even the large firms have found it has given them access to a pre-qualified group with wide diversity markers, 63% of our cohort came from an ethnic minority background, 50:50 male, female and 35% from low income families.
Let’s not sing our own praises too loudly (although did I mention how much joy this work has given me this year?) - we have learned a few lessons too. We discovered that to talk to 17 year-olds you have to think more like a teacher and less like a professional. We have learned that you have to follow up with students if you want to keep their attention. Firms have also learned that they will get more value if they follow up directly with new contacts.
But mostly, we have learned that to succeed, you can’t get off the escalator after reaching the first floor. Every year our target audience is completely refreshed and we have to start again. I am delighted that the market seems keen to do this. It seems we have all learned that we can make change happen on talent, but to do so we have to work together and commit to this for the long term.
To quote Matthew Moore at the launch of the campaign, “if we can grow the percentage of our working population that is under 30, the future of insurance will be in safe hands. Which for those of us in the over-40s generation, is very good news indeed.”
