What’s your role in recruiting?
I work in HR with a focus on our tech group. So I support tech areas such as infrastructure, business intelligence, analytics and e-commerce.
What kinds of skills and technologies is Travelers looking to expand its use of?
We always look to take advantage of hardware engineering and software development, but especially these days on data security. We have adapted an agile methodology, moving away from waterfall. Coders and developers with familiarity and expertise in SaaS and geospatial coding also greatly appeal to us.
How is Travelers recruiting employees to fill that need?
There are several avenues for us to bring people in. Training internal staff is big for us. We have an IT university for skills development that we started two years ago. There are several concentrations junior level employees and veterans can enter, including architecture, project management, and information security. We have, however, been training staff for a very long time using in-house and outside experts.
Aside from the IT university, we recruit experienced candidates from different industries. You name the industry, we recruit it. We don’t limit ourselves to just insurance. Yet, understanding how insurance works is critical. We also have a sizeable eight- to 10-week intern program and IT Leadership development program that we hire entry level employees from.
What are some of the advantages you feel you have in IT recruitment?
As an insurance company, it’s probably misunderstood how fast-paced our IT careers are. IT staff makes up one-tenth of our entire organization. We understand IT and we have to. We are very dependent on it so it has to be efficient. That’s how we deal with customers, e-commerce, and core processes such as quoting, delivering of policies, and claims. We are not all underwriters. We offer very interesting tech careers.
What are some of the challenges in recruiting?
We have a war on talent every day. We just need to make sure the individuals we bring in are right for us and that we are right for them. Travelers has offices across the country with IT positions primarily based in Hartford, Connecticut, St. Paul, Minnesota and Hunt Valley, Maryland.
How has the IT landscape in insurance changed over the past few years?
Where is it heading? Need to be agile in how we use cloud data and import security. Insurers aren’t tech companies but our tech needs to be very current. What we deploy supports agents and employees that need to use said technology to produce products.
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