The nation’s unemployment rate isn’t bad right now. For the last several months it has been low and in December the rate was 3.5%.
For the insurance industry the rate is sitting at around 2.1%.
At least that’s according to a report issued in the third quarter of 2022 by The Jacobson Group and Aon’s, Ward. It looks at 270,000 employees working in the carrier market and for property casualty insurers, life and health and reinsurers.
The two organizations found that 1.56 million people work in the industry. That’s down 85,000 jobs from 2020. That drop — says Greg Jacobson who is the CEO of The Jacobson Group — reveals an interesting trend in insurance employee retention and recruitment.
“This is not because insurance companies are not hiring people; they’re trying to hire lots of people,” Jacobson said. “I looked at the percentage of people that are being laid off in the financial services industry, and the percentage of people that are quitting on their own volition in the financial services industries [and] we are at the lowest in the last 10 years in terms of the percentage of people who are being laid off, and we’re at the highest in the last 10 years in terms of the number of people who are quitting. The reason why we’re down 85,000 jobs is because companies cannot hire fast enough to replace the workers that are leaving.”
Here’s what Jacobson’s Insurance Labor Market Study found:
- If staff can be found, 68% of companies are going to hire in the next 12 months
- 71% of the PC segment is hiring
- Just 5% are going to cut jobs
Breaking things down by company size:
- 80% of medium-sized companies are going to hire
- 72% of large companies will hire in 2023
- 61% of small companies plan on hiring in the next 12 months
Aon’s Ward CEO is Jeff Rieder said looking at future staffing plans is very interesting because it’s getting closer and closer to being aligned with revenue expectations.
“[We asked companies about] their next 12-month staffing plan from July 2022 to July 2023, and we can see that 68% of companies were expecting to increase staff, and [that] synced up very closely with the percentage of companies that are expecting to grow in revenue, which is at 73%,” Rieder said. “Only about 4% are expecting a decrease in revenue, compared to about 5% expecting to decreased staff. This is probably one of the most correlated metrics that we’ve seen over the last several years.”
Source link: Insurance Business America — http://bit.ly/3GWRf5K
