Insurance Times partners with new brand FlarePeople to uncover pricing talent pain points

Insurance Times has partnered with new insurance recruitment and training brand FlarePeople – part of GWV Talent Solutions Group – to launch a new survey designed to uncover potential pain points and practices in the hiring and training of underwriting talent.

The 12-question online survey quizzes UK-based pricing professionals on their recruitment challenges and timelines, skills requirements and gaps, appetite and engagement around talent programmes, diversity and inclusion and average retention.

The survey, which can be accessed here, will be available from Monday 9 June 2025 and run for three weeks – closing on Friday 4 July.

Insurance Times and FlarePeople will use the insights gleaned from the survey to compile a comprehensive report. This will provide an exclusive overview of UK general insurance pricing teams’ attraction, development and retention challenges.

All survey participants will receive access to the final report, which is scheduled for publication in July 2025 following the survey close.

Katie Scott, editor at Insurance Times, said: “We are excited to be collaborating with FlarePeople on this research project, which very much aligns with our focus on data led content and will help inform our burgeoning talent campaign too.

“We look forward to hearing from market participants and getting their insights on the talent challenges they are facing.”

Busting bottlenecks

This survey launch aligns with the unveiling of the FlarePeople brand today (5 June 2025). This proposition will sit alongside GWV Talent Solutions Group’s other businesses Vermelo RPO and Gerrard White Consulting.

FlarePeople has designed a “recruit-train-deploy model” that it hopes to implement in the insurance pricing arena.

This involves attracting science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates, early careers professionals, ex-forces personnel and career returners to take part in a 10-week programme focused on insurance pricing, modelling and business context.

Upon completion of the programme, participants are then deployed into insurance organisations on an initial contract basis.

Flarepeople’s managing director, Anthony Butler, described this proposition as “laser focused on solving the pricing talent challenge”.

He continued: “We’ve spent years listening to pricing leaders across the insurance market and the frustration is clear – it’s incredibly tough to find people who have the right mix of data skills, commercial thinking and real insurance understanding.

“And even when you do [find these employees], keeping hold of them is just as hard [because] candidate supply and demand continues to be challenging. Additionally, they tell us they don’t have the resources to build effective early careers programmes or to successfully drive diversity initiatives.

“That’s why we built FlarePeople and the Pathfinders Academy. We’re not just launching a new brand – we have built a new capability model for the industry.

“As part of our launch, we’re commissioning a new industry-wide survey with Insurance Times to capture the scale and shape of the [talent] challenge as it stands today. This data will not only help inform insurers’ strategies, but also guide how we continuously evolve the academy to meet changing market demands.

“We believe this is a critical moment for the sector – and we’re here to make sure talent doesn’t remain the bottleneck to innovation, fairness or growth in insurance pricing.”