Insurance
Recruiter
Insurance Recruiting 102 -- Decision Time.
 As a
life insurance recruiter, you have arrived at
that point where you are
going to have to make a recruiting (gut reaction)
decision.
"Do I move forward with
this person or not?" Building
a successful insurance agency requires some hard recruiting
decisions.
Okay, they
passed the personal
observation interview, and I liked what
I seen up to
that point. Now
What? Keep in mind I have not really made any decision to
hire him/her. You must keep an open mind. Just because you like this
person is not enough for a final hiring decision.
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So it is at this point that I move forward
with the second part of my recruiting process. We are now
going to find out what this person is made of.
- First off,
I give
the potential recruit a brief
summary overview on the positives of coming into the
business.
(low key
selling) Don't
be overselling. Your company should
have available some type of a
recruiting presentation that you should use. If not, you are starting
out with a big obstacle, unless you created your own professional
presentation.
- After the
above summary
overview, I
then (hard)
sell all
the negative things about the business: (evening
work, takes a couple years to get established, starting and building
your own
business, a 100 percent time commitment, tight budget
in first year or so, Get paid to generate prospects, etc.) I
want to let them know
the negatives,
and if they know all that, and then come back for
the next interview,
you know you have someone that has
a
strong belief in themselves and understands the reality of having to
do
the things successful people need to do. Unfortunately, most life
insurance recruiters
are reluctant to get into the negatives, and even scared to
bring them up.
- Upon
completion
of this interview, I then hand them my "Welcome
to our Team" booklet
and briefly review the contents and then ask them to take this home and
review it in more detail, then write down any questions or concerns
that they may have
so that we
can discuss them at our next interview. I also make the following
comment " If you do decide to come into this business, you will
probably be grossly underpaid
for the the first two years, but if you make it, you will be grossly overpaid
for the rest of your life.
- And
then in closing, "I say, When we do get back together, and if you think
this is a career you want to embark on, I am going to want you to
sell
me on why I should hire you and bring you onto my
team. Why do I
do that? Because I am now going to find out what kind of
selling skills this person
has. I am going to be the toughest sale they will ever make.
- Additionally,
Mr Recruit, If we
decide
at that time to move forward, I will want to sit
down with your spouse
and go through our career opportunity with
you and your spouse, so that
they know what
we are about to embark on, and they can ask their questions. (If you recruit
someone and do not get the
wifes
support, you immediately created a failing situation for
you and
the recruit.) Professional and experienced life
insurance recruiters understand the importance of this.
At
that point, we set up a tentative closing interview date to decide
whether
we will move forward or not. You don't want to be telling
this this person that they are hired or you are ready to go
forward
with them.....It is important to let them wonder if they
will be hired or not. I then follow up with a Thank You
letter to
them, confirming our next interview.
Play
down the the positives, re-emphasize and explain the
negatives.
Then
make them
wait
and think about it, and then have them come back and sell you on
why you should be hiring
them.
Does
your company have a system in place to help you perpetuate and
build an
agency?
I realize
that most
companies have some recruiting tests that the
new
candidate must take before they will consider hiring them. Those
written tests, in my opinion are just one part of the
recruiting
process. I only gave these tests a 30% weight towards the
total recruiting decision on a
possible recruit.
As
I mentioned, factors such as that person being compatible with my
personality, my thinking, how fast they walk, how they communicate to
me, how
comfortable they make me feel when talking with them, carries
more
weight in my final insurance recruiting decisions than anything else.
Another key aspect of recruiting has to do with the type of
recruiting program
your company has in place. Does the company provide
any
incentive programs for existing agents to
help the team
grow as
life insurance recruiters ?. Many companies strictly rely
on the
life
insurance general agent, agency managers/district
managers or general managers to do all the
work, and that is their mentality, rather than embracing the
entire team
and getting all
the agents involved in the recruiting process to
help the agency manager or general agent to recruit
new insurance
agents.
I was able to build a 120+ person agency in 7 years because I
used
my new recruits
and my existing agents to
recruit for me. Why, because
they
had an incentive and a reason to do so. I will brainstorm and share
some of these ideas in a separate topic page called
(insurance
recruiting 104).
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