Sandy Ball, chief people officer at Aspida, a life insurance company, spoke with Digital Insurance about the skills she thinks people in the insurance industry need and hiring and retention.
What challenges have you noticed related to hiring and retention?
I think we have a really good retention rate, but I would say, just one of the things that we experience is with people, when they come into the organization, I think they want to grow really quickly, and we give them opportunities to do that. From an HR standpoint, I can't always control the promotion of things. What we commit to people is development. So I can't promise you the promotion, that job might not exist right now, but we do do a lot with our employees around development and I'll develop you so you are ready for the next role.
That's worked well for us, but you do have a lot, especially the earlier career people, coming in and expecting a lot of progression in a small company, there's progression in experience. There's just not always progression in title or money. So, that's something I think is not unique to us or the industry, but definitely something that is a challenge for us.
When we hire, being a smaller company and having our origins in a startup our hiring process is pretty intense. We do a really robust job of screening people against, kind of our values, we call them our Moxie values. And really making sure that people have the potential to grow, because the job that we're hiring for is going to change and grow and expand, and we might need a little bit of a different skill set. So we're always hiring for, can they do this job? But do they also have the potential to grow and do other jobs and grow with the company?
We make mistakes, just like everyone else, and sometimes you hire a really technical person, but they don't fit into the values, have siloed behavior, they exhibit things that impede your growth, not really help your growth, and so you only make that mistake a couple times, and then you really correct that, and you figure it out, and you adjust your hiring process and the quality of your candidates, and you make sure you're kind of getting what your company needs.
I always say, nobody grows up and says, I want to work in insurance. But a lot of people just aren't exposed to insurance either. And when you talk about the innovation, the disruption of the industry and the exciting things that are happening, it could be, it could be anything. I think that draws people in, regardless of the industry. We do a lot with the colleges and universities in the North Carolina area, just exposing them to what is insurance. What a premium is, what are the different aspects of insurance, and what are the careers in insurance?
What skill sets are you looking for in potential new hires?
Being in insurance, we don't necessarily, especially in early career, and I'm not saying like an actuary, but like in early career, we don't necessarily look for insurance background or knowledge, because we can train on that. What we kind of value is ownership and collaboration and people being willing to take initiative on things and bring a different perspective.
So we may bring people in from different parts of like different industries, because they're bringing different ideas. And we've tried very hard not to be your traditional insurance company. We show up differently and we pride ourselves on that. So we look for people that are going to bring, continue to bring that to us, and bring the different ideas, or bring the, 'oh, here's a different way of doing that. I know the insurance industry might do this all the time, but we like, let's try this.' And so having people that will own something or have a little risk taking in them.
We really have a good culture of rewarding and not penalizing people who want to try something different and understand like, 'oh, maybe that just didn't work, but we tried it, and now we just pivot.' But we always want to give people the latitude to try something and even if it doesn't work, it's like, but we tried. You can't innovate without trying and failing.
What are you seeing ahead in your job and more generally?
We've hired like 50 people so far this year. We're gonna keep growing. And I think with growth comes both really exciting things and really like, you know, how do we keep our culture intact? You don't want that kind of culture exhaustion and so we're always very intentional about what we do and the initiatives we bring, and making sure that we're getting feedback and setting ourselves up for success with that. Because growth is always exciting. Change is always exciting, but it also comes with pains, and so just recognizing and addressing those as we grow, and just talking about them. Just be aware of them, and let's talk about it.
We do a lot of skip levels, where the CEO and I will meet with employees, usually once a month we'll do different groups of employees. Sometimes we'll do it by function. Sometimes we'll do cross meetings with new hire employees to just get their experience. Everything we told you in the interview about our culture and who we are, is that your experience? Because I want to make sure it is. I want to make sure it aligns with what we tell you is what you're experiencing. If it's not, do we need to tweak something or change something, and because I want to be honest with people about, hey, smaller company, you're probably doing a lot more than you would in a bigger company, but you're also getting a lot more experience. But if that's not. For you totally get it, but I want you to come in with eyes wide open.
