Destination Insurance: Quantitative reporting fundamental to talent pipeline success

What should be the role of quantitative reporting in the insurance industry’s talent pipeline, are firms collecting enough data for that role to be fulfilled, are the right people seeing the right data at the right time and what is the data telling us about the current state of the market?

These were the questions posed by Insurance Times’ deputy editor Yiannis Kotoulas to panellists Anthony Butler, founder at Flarepeople, Greg Phitidis, brand director at Free Brands and Savan Shah, head of research at Insurance Times, during a discussion on quantitative talent reporting at yesterday’s (15 January 2025) Destination Insurance conference.

According to Phitidis, good data collection is the first and most fundamental step to solving the industry’s talent problems.

He explained: “It shines a light on things. If you don’t have the data, you’re in a dark room, fumbling around to find a key to open a door that you know will make everything much easier.

”Without it you’re operating on assumptions and those assumptions can be a very time consuming and costly way of finding out the truth.”

To highlight this, Phitidis pointed to research his firm completed in January of this year that revealed insurance sits bottom of the list of desirable industries for young talent, while industries such as tech and healthcare are at the top.

Insights like these, he said, help contextualise the severity of the problem and therefore increase the awareness of a need for action.

Disseminating data

Just as important as collecting this data, added Butler, is making sure the data isn’t just ornamental, but ends up in the hands of decision makers at the right times.

“In my experience we’ve got the data. But it’s the communication down to those people that are making reactive rather than proactive hires that’s the challenge,” he said.

“And that feeds into things like interviews. How are we interviewing the newer generations? Does it appeal to them? Does it excite them? How does that compare to other industries that insurance is competing with? There’s a complexity of different things we need to look at and we need to take that data and develop it into these outcomes”.

But what is the data telling us about the state of affairs as they stand today? Shah, referencing Insurance Times’ second annual talent survey, highlighted several major barriers to talent influx.

He explained: “One of the questions we asked was what’s the biggest challenge organisations are facing. The majority of respondents were senior management and the leading cause – referenced in 75% of responses – was dealing with misconceptions about insurance careers.

“Some 67% said it was a lack of awareness about the industry and 54% said it was competition from other sectors. It speaks volumes about the challenges there are.”