Survey Findings Reveal Insurance Industry Employment Outlook in 2010

The Insurance Industry 2010 Employment Outlook Survey is the latest in a series of white papers by GreatInsuranceJobs.com, following the 2009 Insurance Industry Hiring Outlook completed last year. Following are some the survey's major findings:

Source: Source: GreatInsuranceJobs.com | Published on May 4, 2010

Ninety seven companies (74%) have current job openings. Thirty-four companies (26%) have no current job openings. In Greatinsurancejobs.com’s previous survey, completed in September 2009 (greatinsurancejobs.com/whitepaper), 83% of companies had job openings while 17% had no job openings.

Only twenty companies out of 131 reported they will not hire one single person in 2010. Nine companies indicated they will hire at least 2,000 employees in 2010. Twenty-one companies predict they will hire more than 500 employees in 2010.

The top insurance industry positions being hired in 2010 are insurance sales professionals, claims, underwriting, call center and IT.

Insurance employers indicate that qualified and quality candidates are still hard to find. Employers are getting volumes of resumes for each open job and finding that most applicants are not qualified for the position they have available.

Human Resource departments are overworked. Human resource departments are forced to comb through hundreds of unqualified candidate resumes looking for matches for their job requisitions.

Social Media Recruiting is on the radar screen of 31% of the surveyed companies. Most insurance companies using social media to help recruit are mainly using LinkedIn. Secondly is by Facebook, but most companies do not have a strategy for using either platform to recruit.

The unemployment rate in the insurance industry has risen in the last two years from 3.1% in 2008 to 7.7% in February of 2010 (BLS). Many factors play a role in this dramatic increase in a relatively stable workforce for years and surveyed companies shared their experience. Contributing factors include insurance company’s ratings deteriorating, the current state of the battered construction industry and the continuing soft market. With low demand for insurance products, companies cannot charge top dollar for premiums limiting their ability to grow and hire more
workers. This survey found that hiring has slowed since last year, however companies are optimistic for the rest of 2010 that the worst is over.