How to Attract Top Talent To Your Benefits Agency: The Ultimate Guide

Any good candidate is going to look you up on LinkedIn at the very least, and the most prepared of them will be Googling, studying your website, and even reading reviews and looking for clues on compensation and work culture on sites like Glassdoor or Indeed. The latter provides a rather telling snapshot of employee experiences with the Work Happiness Report. This survey is completed by current and former employees and allows them to rate their experience in more than a dozen categories including learning, flexibility, purpose, inclusion, management, appreciation, and belonging. These areas of workplace satisfaction may not have been so important to the typical employee 10 or 20 years ago, but they are certainly taking precedence today. People want to be appreciated for the work they do, feel supported by management, and know that they are part of something bigger than themselves in a way that is not harmful to others or to the environment.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer just a buzzword, but a serious consideration for top talent in any industry. Just a few years ago, Cone Communications conducted a survey among Millenials to find out what they looked for in potential employers. Key findings indicate that this age group is dedicated to making the world a better place, and they expect their employers to join in that effort. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed said that they “won’t take a job if a company does not have strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) values.” Furthermore, 83% of respondents would be more loyal to an organization that helps them contribute to social and environmental issues. More than one-third of today’s workforce are Millennials and by 2030, they will make up 75% (Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 2020). Particularly poignant is that the Baby Boomer generation will still make up the second-largest group, with an increasingly strong demand for healthcare services. 

The easiest way to demonstrate that you run a great company that people should want to work for is to actually run a great company! No amount of PR will erase a toxic company culture, or a lack of accountability for environmental impacts, for example. You need an honest, transparent branding strategy. The benefits industry (and all industries, really) has become more transparent as a result of the expectations from candidates about accessing information and details about potential employers. The availability of first-hand accounts through various career websites and social media channels means it's more important than ever to operate with integrity, and engender a company culture people actually want to be a part of. Running a genuinely great company will attract genuinely great talent.

Define Your Core Values

Clearly defining your core values is an important step in leading your team to success, and demonstrating your commitment to consistently running a good company. Your organization’s core values will serve as guidance when the time comes to make tough decisions, keeping your team focused and on the same page. Communicating company values is also a great way to ensure that any potential candidates align with your beliefs. One way to do this is to create a mission statement that will be appropriately forward-facing as well. 

Information about your mission and core values should be easy to find with a few clicks on your website, or a quick Google search. IMA does a great job of describing what their company stands for and presents it in a visually appealing way that is easy to follow. 

Discuss Profitability

Chances are if you’re hunting for top service talent in the benefits industry, your company is profitable. If you are a smaller benefits consultancy be aware that candidates will be concerned with the ability of your company to manage the day-to-day and still make a good profit. They want to know that their paycheck will clear, no matter what. Stability and growth are huge factors for a talented professional looking for a long-term landing pad. Candidates might not look into your detailed public financials, or ask for statements, but they will be generally aware if your company is struggling. Part of running a great company is making money. They want to see that you'll still be there at the end of the month, so be prepared to discuss certain aspects of the financial wellbeing of the company. 

Many smaller agencies have been acquired by larger ones. If you haven’t yet, that will also be on the mind of candidates. The first year or two after an acquisition is fraught with merging cultures, politics, and uncertainty which is not a selling point. Most likely you can’t promise that you won’t be selling ever, but if there are no plans in the short term, it is usually helpful to convey that.

Nurture Your Own Good Reputation

If you’re running a great company to begin with, you’ve already earned your good reputation. If not, then there’s no time like the present to make things right. Top talent usually has a good deal of choice when considering employers, so it’s incredibly important that your company shines brighter than the rest. There are a few actionable items to start with to build or repair your company’s reputation. 

Thought Leadership, if executed correctly, will result in broad brand awareness and affinity, boosting your reputation without even talking about your specific services. You must have something unique and insightful to contribute to the broader conversation. Your expertise, sources, and personal presence will all lend credibility to what you’re saying and, by extension, how you represent your company. Think about how your CEO can contribute new and invigorating insights into the challenges facing the healthcare industry in the coming years, delivered expertly with such authority on the subject that people ask, “Which company does she run and how can I land a job there?” 

Corporate philanthropy is not only an inherently good thing, it will also boost your reputation with current and prospective employees. Team up with a charity for a long lasting partnership, or allow your employees to choose an organization for a donation matching program. Put your company in the right light so that the top talent in your field can be sure your company takes corporate social responsibility seriously. Consider Alliant’s wide variety of causes they support to benefit the communities around them. They support the efforts of their employees through corporate giving and matching gift programs. They also encourage their employees to engage in community volunteer work, whether through time served, mentoring, leadership, or simply lending a helping hand.

Employee reviews can be a powerful recruiting tool, that is, if the reviews are positive. There are more than a dozen reputable websites that job candidates can visit to read reviews of companies. Glassdoor may be the most well-known of these sites and they boast reviews of more than 600,000 companies. Some of the others use a 5-star rating system across a variety of workplace considerations like “vision & strategy” and “work environment” as well as things like culture and colleagues. A few of the top job listing websites provide open-ended questions and allow for commentary. If you are confident that you have maintained a positive relationship with former employees, you can ask that they go to a few of these review sites and leave some words of wisdom for job seekers. You could even make it part of your exit interview process. Recruiting is an intricate process, and is relevant in almost all aspects of employee relations, even when they’re leaving. 

Brand-focused ads, or messaging on your website can inform potential candidates of your culture, values, and mission. Doing the right thing is not always enough to spread the word. Companies must be intentional and strategic in building a good reputation and then letting the world know about it. 

Address the Real Internal Issues

If you are serious about earning a good reputation there are some difficult decisions to make.  You might have a culture of long hours, or limited resources to support your clients, or most likely, you have a manager who is difficult to work for. The latter is the most common.  

In a perfect world, we have a client we are recruiting for whose reputation is so stellar we could attract anyone. In reality, there are factors of push and pull. We try to work with clients who have enough attractive ‘pull’ features, but to get someone to go through the life event of changing jobs, there usually needs to be something the employee wants to leave as well. Most often it’s a boss who is difficult to work for. In our experience firms usually allow top talent to leave them rather than dealing with the source of the problem. When we hear about these situations from employees and out in the wider marketplace, odds are that the agency is aware of the problem, and is choosing to ignore it. The longer employees see the problem not being dealt with, the worse the culture gets. The best talent gets picked off and you are left with the lower performers.  

These are sensitive issues. How do you fire someone just because they have a poor management style? Perhaps they can be reassigned, taken out of management (and if they leave that solves the problem.) However, what if it stems from a leader or a partner? Perhaps you can initiate 360-degree reviews so they can hear feedback. Get them executive coaching. This is beyond the scope of our expertise, but I’m sure there are consultants who can help with this. This could be affecting your company's reputation, which trickles down to the ability to recruit and ultimately profits, so ignore it at your peril.

Particularly with the Millennial generation, career pathing is consistently reported as a top consideration. Candidates desire the freedom to map out their own career, and expect an employer to support their journey. You can show candidates what they need to learn and accomplish to move up from their starting position, whether that is from an Account Analyst or Coordinator to an Account Manager, or a Senior Account Manager to Associate Account Executive to Account Executive (AE), or a Senior AE to Team Leader/Unit Leader to a Director of Account Management.

Perhaps they are more analytical and they can move up to run an underwriting department, or they can be the technology expert that helps internal teams and clients with enrollment and benefits administration software, like Ease, Empyrean, or Employee Navigator or something else.  By creating a clear path of learning that includes measurable performance objectives and training needs, a more engaged and motivated workforce emerges. In addition to training people into existing career paths, consider incorporating a program of reskilling (sometimes called upskilling). 

Reskilling is a great strategy to reposition some of your high performing employees to acquire new skills like underwriting, reading claims and experience reports, learning the mechanics of stop-loss and self-funding, data analytics, learning the concepts advocated by Health Rosetta, learning how to make the enrollment and benefits administration software work better for clients, and even digital marketing skills to help with the social media awareness of the firm.  

The economic landscape has been greatly altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, shifting many of the necessary functions of providing a service to the digital realm. Retaining your current employees and adding these new skills to their repertoire is more cost-effective than hiring to replace. It also demonstrates your commitment to the people you employ, which will set you apart from many other organizations.

Curate Professional Development Paths

Providing robust opportunities for your employees to learn and grow in their careers is an investment worth making. Cigna University is a training program that aims to “create a culture that empowers employees to drive their careers and professional development.” Through collaborative resources, customized content, immersive experiences, and practical learning, Cigna employees spent, on average, 53 hours on training in 2019. More than half of those hours were dedicated to “specific skills training, career development, lifelong learning programs, and external learning pursuits.” Ensuring candidates that there is a clear path for them to develop their career, and then delivering on that promise, is a great way to attract and retain top talent. 

Allowing some work time to study for and paying for employees to attain certifications such as CEBS, GBA, REBC and RHU are examples of what you might consider offering to current and prospective employees. 

Reskilling

You don’t have to go for broke here. By incorporating just a few strategies, your company can join the reskilling movement and keep that competitive edge when acquiring new and top talent.  Could you employ one or more of the following?

• Job Rotation: sometimes referred to as cross-training, job rotation is usually a temporary, lateral move to another position to gain specific knowledge and skills for that position. This may not always be easy to do, but if you can have coordinators sit with underwriters, and underwriters sit with account managers and account managers join AE’s on renewal strategy meetings, and AE’s join producers on prospect calls, each will have a better understanding of how their role fits within the whole, to support the client.
• Job Enlargement: add activities to an existing role to teach new skills and growth. Just be careful not to overload. This could be used when someone is looking for a promotion.  You can start to give them some of the responsibilities they will have to do more of when they are at the next rung.
• Job Enrichment: add extra dimensions like skill variety, more autonomy, and more feedback. 
• Peer Coaching/Mentoring: akin to cross-training, pairing colleagues with others who perform different but related job functions creates opportunities for learning new skills. When one employee is more experienced or “senior” than the other, mentoring can be a valuable experience for both people. Consider having some of these sessions over Zoom (or similar) so that sessions can be recorded.  If you don’t have a training library, that seems like a good project for someone to be in charge of.  

Giving your current team members the opportunity to grow and learn will help to create a culture of mutual respect and support. Great for morale and great for any candidate who is looking in from the outside, wondering if they will be a good fit in your organization.

Have you taken steps to create and foster any specific company culture? You might be surprised to find that when you don’t specifically work on building a company culture, a negative one (or none at all) can tend to develop on its own - and both are undesirable. Every company’s culture is unique and widely determined by the people working there, but as the captain(s) of the ship, there is a great deal you can do to get the right people, and build a culture you can be proud of. A great result of a clearly-defined and consistently-maintained company culture is the intangible benefits that keep your most engaged employees happy. 

The Millennial view of the workplace is one of collaboration and innovation. They want a management team who is committed to employee success. A healthy work-life integration with plenty of flexibility works to motivate this group. They expect clear direction, access to all the tools they will need, and support in order to get the job done. Do not mistake their desire to move away from the 9-5 workday as laziness. Millennials are more apt than previous generations to be “always-on.” Someone may need to leave work to pick up a sick child, but they will be back in their email as soon as they have their little one settled at home. They want freedom to handle what life throws at them, and your confidence that they will still succeed at work when given that freedom. If you can create this type of autonomous, yet supportive environment, Millennials will sing your praises. 

Another way to create a positive company culture is to sponsor activities that allow employees time to destress, away from the office. These can range from very structured trips to loosely defined happy hours. A chartered bus to the beach, a sporting event, or a theme park can provide opportunities for team bonding and will strengthen cohesion. There are even virtual team-building opportunities through services like Seshie. Provide opportunities for your team to have memorable experiences together - experiences that you can share with the world.

Once it’s established, use your website and social media channels to get your great company culture out there! 

How to Share Your Company Culture

Here are some practical tips for outlets and opportunities to share the wonderful company culture you have now engendered. Whether it’s on your website itself, or out there in the world on social media, it’s important to present a unified, clearly-defined company culture that potential top talent can relate to, and envision themselves being a part of. 

Website

In addition to presenting a clear and inviting brand experience overall, your website should have an easy-to-find, clear and concise section that details the reality of company culture. Many insurance and benefits organizations include this type of detail in the About Us, or Our Team section of their websites. Here are some practical tips that may help you attract top talent with your website: 

• Use actual photos of your team members.
• Include links to team members’ LinkedIn profiles.
• Provide contact information for each team member to demonstrate a commitment to transparency and communication.
• Present your core values in a clear and meaningful way.
• A robust resource center such as a blog that focuses on industry-relevant topics will lend a great deal of credibility to your expertise.

Social Media

Embrace social media as a tool for talent acquisition, especially when it comes to establishing a positive brand reputation and sharing company culture. There is a wealth of information being shared on these platforms, so take advantage of it with employee ambassadors who create fun, imaginative, and honest content to share with prospects, known or unknown. 

• Build your brand and general awareness on social media by contributing to conversations that matter in the benefits industry.  
• Get creative on niche job boards and associated forums. 
• Post photos and videos that bring your organization to life, and portray a genuinely desirable workplace. 
• Ensure that your social media presence is strategic by using relevant hashtags and engaging with the right communities.
• Typically, most social engagement in this industry will occur via LinkedIn.

Share Company Culture Among Employees

Sometimes the effort to attract top talent from outside of your organization can leave your current team out of the loop. If you are making changes, keep everyone informed and even include them in the creation and implementation of new initiatives. There are a few ways to accomplish consistent and clear communication with your team:

• Business communication platforms like Slack are great tools for keeping everyone on the same page.
• Internal company newsletters can be a fun and creative way to get the word out about the goings-on in your organization.
• Receive valuable feedback from your employees with tools like SurveyMonkey or CultureAmp (which also helps you build a great company culture). Be careful with this. If you don’t make any changes based on the feedback you receive, employees with feel that you are not genuinely interested in their opinions.

However, you choose to go about communicating with your team, just be sure to include them. Focusing solely on new hires, you risk alienation of current employees, which will ultimately create division.

Here, we revisit corporate social responsibility (CSR). As we already know, Millennials (as well as Generation Z) value CSR to a great degree. They want to work for a company that is doing their part to help others. This can take form in several ways:

• Reducing the company’s carbon footprint
• Socially and environmentally conscious investments
• Participating in fair trade
• Charitable giving
• Volunteering in the community

Many well-known corporations successfully manage large-scale campaigns to contribute to society in a positive way. For example, Kaiser Permanente has a robust environmental stewardship program that guides “how we power our facilities, purchase food and medical supplies and equipment, manage waste, and invest in our communities.” In addition to the way it attempts to operate on a daily basis, Kaiser has laid out ambitious goals for “greening the healthcare system” by 2025. Smaller organizations can still do their part by adding solar panels, using energy-efficient light bulbs, remaining vigilant about fair trade practices, and supporting employees in their volunteering efforts. 

Giving Programs

A charity matching program can be appealing to a potential candidate and will truly make a difference for non-profit organizations. IMA’s fundraising events, Ping Pong on the Plaza, Pickleball, Pickle Jam, and Sandblast raised $300,000. The IMA Foundation provided grants to nearly 100 nonprofit organizations and IMA associates gave almost $135,000 in personal giving, with an additional $23,000 donated by the IMA Foundation through their Matching Gifts program.

Education and Content

Specifically in the insurance and benefits sector, the chance to educate the public on the complex topics we deal with is attractive to many candidates. It’s a way to give back to the community while using their own expertise. Kaiser Permanente, for example, provides a robust educational offering on its website, with information about everything from vaccines to healthy eating and exercise. For patients, ongoing education is available to promote preventative health measures throughout life. This wide variety of offerings is something that will not only attract great clients but great employees as well. Being able to help people on such a personal level is rewarding.

Retention of the top talent that you already have is a great tool for attracting more. Not only can you rely on these model employees to refer quality candidates, but when a potential new hire is researching your organization, she/he is bound to touch on the happiness and well-being of current employees. Continue to run a great company with an eye to a few specific areas and attracting top talent will come easily. 

Positive Reinforcement & Inclusion

Recognition is a very easy and cost effective way to demonstrate that an employee is valued. Performance bonuses or office parties, outings, and awards are effective in creating an environment where employees are rooting for one another. Team building activities are a great way to help employees unwind, connect with each other, and often provide welcome breaks outside of work. 

Positive reinforcement can even be as simple as a “thank you” for a job well done, or simple recognition on a company chat board, or sharing a positive client-side review. Public recognition is nice, but just as effective is talking to them in your office or theirs, or in their cube, or catching them in the hallway and stopping them for 30 seconds.

This point is just a few lines in a long paper but I can’t emphasize it enough.  Sometimes all employees need is a little pat on the back.  We all want approval. Sometimes, the first time an employee hears how valued they are and how much they are loved is when they have found another job and go in to give notice. I have seen times when being complimented by their boss or boss’s boss  is enough to get someone to stay.  They weren’t even counter-offered with money, but just the recognition of how important they are to the organization is enough.  Don’t wait until an employee is one step out of the door to tell them they are doing a great job.  That is usually too late.

Flexible Work Environment

There is significant demand for flexibility in the workplace and granting a certain amount of autonomy to employees. Micromanagement is a deterrent for the next generation of employees - Millennials have been known to shop around for a job that will meet their needs and desires. They are the consumers of the workforce. You must be offering something they will buy.

Employees view flexibility as acknowledgement that they have lives outside the workplace. Less rigidity in scheduling shows a commitment to helping employees achieve a good work/life balance. Providing an option that accommodates medical appointments, child care hours, or avoiding tough commutes is a great show of solidarity and personal concern for your employees. They feel valued when given a bit of freedom in their schedule. Knowing that your management team respects and trusts the team that is already in place provides a great backdrop for potential employees to place themselves into. 

COVID-19 gave you a shove into the future. You were forced to allow employees to work from home, full-time. You adapted. You learned how to use the tools. If I'm not mistaken, the work still got done. As we all go back to work, maintain the flexibility!

In one survey 81% of 1022 working professionals enjoy working remotely. This is our experience as recruiters when speaking with top service talent. Many AE’s, CSE’s and Consultants ask whether there is flexibility to work from home. Most people want an office to go to, but not every day.

You may have concerns that without employees coming to work everyday you’ll lose a sense of cohesion, culture, communication and knowledge sharing, but there are workarounds for all of these that have been discussed in this paper; i.e. knowledge libraries, mentorship programs, and team building events.  We are just talking about being flexible.  There can still be times when groups, or departments can be asked to all come in on certain days of the week or month if you want to feel more connected.

Compensation & Intangible Benefits

We talk a lot about how salary isn’t everything to employees these days. When asked about the most important qualities in a job, not only does compensation not come first, but it’s usually further down the list like 4th.  Companies must offer competitive salaries to attract top talent, but values are shifting. While salary is definitely an important factor, flexibility, work/life balance, employer provided resources, and career advancement opportunities play a large role in where a candidate chooses to work. In addition to offering the standard medical insurance, life/disability coverage, and retirement plans, consider the four categories of benefits:

• Benefits at work (hours, leave, skills development, activities, gifts, food & drink)
• Benefits for health (wellness programs, mental health awareness)
• Benefits for financial security (matching on 401(k), employee stock ownership, bonuses)
• Lifestyle benefits (childcare, grocery delivery, legal services, carpooling)
• Financial Literacy and Money Management
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance

Being part of the benefits industry puts us all in a unique position of awareness in regards to the creative ways to provide compensation. Create your own offerings as you would have your clients create theirs - with the mindset of attracting and retaining the top talent in their industry. 

Employee Referral Bonuses

Encouraging your own employees to refer candidates for open positions can be an effective way to add even more talented people to your team. It can also help streamline the hiring process. Recruiting software company, Jobvite, found that employee referrals can decrease hiring times from about 39-55 days to 29 days. Some of the lengthy processes like creating and posting a job, sorting through resumes, and scheduling interviews can be skipped when a team member refers a potential candidate. And although employee referrals only make up about 7% of potential candidates, they have a 40% conversion rate, meaning almost half of employee referrals are hired. Offering bonuses for referring a candidate who becomes a long term employee can be a great incentive for your team to keep an eye out for a great potential coworker. 

When It Comes to Attracting Top Talent, You Must Also Focus in on the Recruiting Process 

In a 2019 PwC survey regarding the future of recruiting, 49% of respondents reported turning down an offer due to a bad recruiting experience. Clearly, it is crucial to get this right. It is important that you craft this experience with care. And, in the end, it mostly comes down to communication.

If you request that resumes be submitted, acknowledge receipt. If someone is not a fit, they would rather just hear that right away than be told weeks later, or worse, completely ignored.  This goes for any stage in the interview process. If you know they’re not right after the first or second interview, just tell them. Show them the courtesy you would want to be shown. Pulling the band-aid off is better received than being strung along, or again, just never hearing back.  This happens surprisingly often considering we are all supposed to be professionals and how small this industry is. You can have a candidate still saying positive things about your company in the marketplace even when you didn’t hire them if you handle the process well.

Avoid setting yourself up for high turnover by really assessing the problem you need to solve. The better your understanding of the problem, the better suited you will be to choose the candidate who can provide the solution. Selecting the right person for the job hinges on the marriage of which skills are needed and which skills he/she possesses. 

In looking for the best service talent the problem you are most likely looking to solve is to have your clients well taken care of so they are happy and stay clients for as long as they are profitable. ‘Taken care of’ means having someone they like working with who is smart, strategic and can help them manage their employee benefit plans. Beyond that, anyone who can make money, save money, or improve a process for a firm is always welcomed. 

In regards to finding someone who can take care of your clients, what are they taking care of?  How big is the book in revenue and number of clients? Are they complex?  What industries are they in? Are they self-insured? Will a support team need to be managed and will they need support and training? Do you need someone with more analytical and underwriting skills, or more relational? Will they be the primary contact with the client or is the producer still involved?  Are they supporting multiple producers and are there politics or personalities to be managed?

The more you understand what the situation is, the better able your recruiters are to determine if your candidate has the right qualities. No one is a 10/10 so you will probably need to also ascertain what is a ‘need to have’ and not just a ‘want to have’.

Once you have grabbed the attention of some top prospects, keep the process moving and share more details about the job in a personal email. Most compliance-approved job postings do not leave room for everything that a candidate really wants to know. Provide the answers to the questions they are bound to ask:

• Who will the candidate report to? Include that person’s networking profile (i.e. LinkedIn).
• What does the reporting hierarchy look like? Be specific, giving names. This is a small industry and perhaps they know, like, and respect the people listed. 
• What are the specific products involved?
• What is the target size for clients?
• What is the range of the base salary?
• Describe your company culture.
• Describe your company’s community involvement. 
• Outline what you expect in the hiring process (i.e. how many steps, who they might meet, whether there are aptitude, personality, or drug tests.) 

Getting down to the nitty-gritty from the start means less time spent waiting for the next step. It also allows the candidate to see some insider details about your company. If, for any reason, he/she believes it won’t be a good fit, better to learn that early on in the process. Be sure to provide information on moving forward with the process if everyone is in agreement.

It is unlikely that you are the only company interested in the top talent that you have just found through your recruiting efforts. Assume that once they begin to think about leaving their current company they will end up talking to at least two other companies, or if you’re doing this right, this is a passive candidate, and they are happy enough in their current position. Especially in this case, the candidate won’t be interested in jumping through a bunch of hoops, until they have learned enough to become really interested.

Applicants expect responsiveness, and in many cases, a mobile recruiting experience. Keep the interview process as short as you can to get the job done, generally only three or four steps. You can add more at the request of the applicant, such as speaking with current employees about their experiences or senior leaders to hear about the long-term vision for the company. More importantly, keep the momentum moving forward so you can keep the candidate engaged. I recommend not having a two-week gap in between steps if you can help it. If scheduling doesn’t allow for this, at least touch base with the candidate in the gap week to let them know where things stand, and share what to expect next and when.  

If your process takes more than four to six weeks, top candidates will lose interest or, worse, they may be scooped up by someone else. Above all, avoid disrespecting an applicant by ending the process abruptly and without communication. This will damage your company’s reputation, and it’s just not a good practice. If the applicant has not been selected for the position, just tell them. The benefits industry is a small world, and word will get around if you are in the habit of leaving applicants wondering.

There aren’t many things more frustrating for a candidate going through the interview process than encountering an ill-informed interviewer. Anyone who is assigned the responsibility of communicating with prospective employees must have a clear understanding of all that you have set up to attract these candidates. Avoid any hiccups in this early stage of courting a top prospect. Make sure internal recruiters, managers and HR team members take the time to understand compensation packages, bonus structures, profit sharing, health benefits, retirement benefits and any other program or package that will benefit the employee.

Your effort definitely doesn’t stop when the candidate signs your offer letter. In fact, onboarding should be considered the final step of the recruiting process. Many businesses think that having an onboarding process means they don’t need a formal orientation, but once you understand how onboarding and orientation are different, you begin to see the value in both. For new hires, orientation is a one-time event welcoming them to your company. Onboarding, on the other hand, is a series of events (including orientation) that helps new employees understand how to be successful in their day-to-day job, and how their work contributes to the overall business.

Onboarding is a Strategic Plan

While an orientation agenda can be boiled down to a checklist, onboarding is a more strategic plan. During the onboarding process, employees are thoroughly introduced to their department. They learn the culture and business objectives by participating in meetings and starter projects with co-workers. Managers should schedule regular check-in meetings with new employees so that they get comfortable talking to one another. Gradually, new hires will learn the specifics of their role and responsibilities, such as how to properly complete key tasks, who to go to with questions, how to get approval for their work and how to make suggestions.

An onboarding plan should focus on what matters most to each department, with the goal of helping new employees make connections between company-wide goals and their day-to-day tasks.

Employing top talent in the benefits industry is a key component for any organization aiming for success and longevity. It is not enough to post a job advertisement with a competitive compensation package, and then cross your fingers. You must be willing to do the work and do it with intention for the right team member to choose your company over another. There is a great deal to consider when you are on the hunt for the top Account Executives and other service talent because they are well aware of their desirability. You must convince them to make the move.

Position your business to catch the attention of a diverse pool of top candidates by focusing on corporate social responsibility, competitive wages and benefits, and creative intangible benefits. Show prospects that you value their time and will respect the way they need to use it, especially when it comes to family. Create and then show off your great company culture. These are huge concerns for the largest sector of the workforce, the Millennial generation. Remember that they are consumers of the job market and will shop around to find what will best suit their needs - it won’t always be money. 

One you have a genuinely stellar workplace established, equip your team to begin the search. Be sure that everyone involved has the capacity to dedicate themselves to identify, contact, court, interview, on-board, and train the best the job pool has to offer. Provide clarity on the position being filled, and lay out the easy interview process you’ve developed. It will be time-consuming. It will be arduous. It will be worth it. The proper acquisition of great talent in the benefits industry can translate into more and better client relationships, ultimately earning your company more and more profits. Do you have the right people with the right skills to find your next top performer?

If you’re unsure that even the best people on your team will have the time and resources to recruit the best of the best, it might be time to consider teaming up with some experts. Professional recruiters are armed with specialized knowledge, niche networking tools, and a host of resources to successfully locate the right talent for your organization. Adding the responsibility and expectation of recruiting top candidates can overwhelm an already busy and high performing team. You may consider laying all of that onto the laps of a team that specializes in recruiting specifically in the benefits industry. The Spencer James Group is well-equipped to manage all of the time consuming details of recruitment while you provide the direction. Let us find your next top performer so you can focus on the bigger picture.