Insurance Nerd Day: An Interview with an Insurance Nerd

Happy Insurance Nerd Day! Celebrated July 18, Pioneer Mutual Insurance Company founded the holiday in 2016 to add some pizzazz to the industry. Insurance may not have the most exciting reputation, but it has a track record of providing enduring careers, even outside of the obvious roles of producers, claims adjusters, or actuaries.

It’s a special day here at AgentSync because, as an insurance technology company that’s working to connect the industry and simplify some of the tougher backend processes, quite a few of us are insurance nerds. To honor the occasion, we sat down with Tony Cañas, an insurance professional who is a self-identified insurance nerd – so much so that he helped co-found the blog and networking organization, Insurance Nerds. While Tony has both a deep and wide insurance background, his current passion is helping connect insurance professionals with opportunities in the industry.

The following Q and A has been edited for length and clarity:

Q: What makes someone an insurance nerd?

Tony: It really is a matter of self-identification, right? If you consider yourself an insurance nerd, then you are. Now, there are many who are and don’t know they are because they never thought about it. They’re just the people that came into insurance 15 years ago, 25 years ago, and fell in love with it. Before social media, before LinkedIn, they assumed that they were the one weirdo who really loved insurance, and they never realized that there’s many of us. So, yes, whether you self-identify or you simply fell in love with the industry and became a giant nerd about it, you qualify.

Q: How does one properly celebrate Insurance Nerd Day?

Tony: There’s no wrong way to celebrate insurance nerds. Acknowledge it, post on LinkedIn with something fun, let people know why you love the industry, encourage others to celebrate, and encourage future generations to work in insurance. I think the biggest thing we can push when it comes to the nerdiness of insurance is, we have a reputation for being a boring industry, and that’s the furthest thing from the truth. This industry is fascinating! There’s always some way to improve, some way to get better.

Q: Unfortunately, there aren’t enough insurance nerds to go around. Why should someone become an insurance nerd, and how do we get them started?

Tony: This industry is endlessly fascinating! You never run out of stuff to learn. Why? Because if it exists, it requires insurance. I call this the aviation underwriter paradox. Somewhere out there is a kid who grew up playing Flight Simulator and wanted to be a pilot, but for whatever reason, they didn’t manage it. But they’d be a perfect underwriter or broker for aviation insurance. But there are two big barriers for them in insurance. First, they don’t know that job even exists. Second, it’s not an entry-level job. So we need to find that kid and get them excited about the job, get them into insurance, get them through those initial years of experience, and start them on the right path to an actual career.

Q: If we’re swimming upstream against a boring reputation, though, how can we get people to see the benefits of a career in insurance and stay the course?

Tony: As I said with the aviation underwriter paradox, the first thing is helping people understand there are many paths that can take you to your interests. Second, especially on the carrier side, you can grow your career through extra education, and often your employer will pay for you to get your CPCU or any of 10,000 alphabet soup designations. You learn, you get better at your job, and they stay with you if you leave. Third, insurance has some of the best benefits as an industry, from vacation time to retirement savings.

It’s also critical to remind people that insurance is recession-proof as an industry. Basically, whatever happens in the economy, we tend to suffer a lot less downsizings than the rest of the economy. If we go into a recession, you might not buy a new car, you might not buy a new home, you might not start a new business. But your existing car, home, and business need to continue to be insured. And on the agency and broker side, compared to just about any other sales role, insurance is an incredible career. No other sales role has renewals to the level that insurance has renewals.

Q: At AgentSync, we’ve written a few times about addressing the talent crisis and how carriers and agencies can overcome a shrinking workforce. How can we recruit and retain quality people to the industry?

Tony: We need to understand millennials and younger generations are more mission-driven – our parents told us to go chase our dreams and do something good for the world, but we also have student loans. I think of it from those two lenses: We need to pay our loans, and we’re trying to do something we feel good about. So, what better mission is there than helping people get back on their feet when something goes wrong?

I’d have a hard time selling the mission of a bank. Selling the mission of an oil company. Right? Insurance has an amazing mission. OK? But no one grows up wanting to work in insurance. There are almost no exceptions to that rule. So when people start at your company, they see it as a job, not as a career. Insurance has great careers and lots of crappy entry-level jobs.

One example is the claims call center at any large carrier. These are horrible jobs, but this is also the No. 1 entry point into our industry. They churn through recent college grads, and those people burn out and never come back.

Q: How would you address that early career burnout and address that meat grinder of call center work?

Tony: First, you have to be honest about the fact that claims is hard. It’s not for everyone. Every person you talk with is having a bad day. But you also don’t need every person you hire to make a career in claims. Give them a roadmap for a career. Tell them that if they give you two or three good years in claims, you’ll teach them the basics of insurance, claims, and the paths open to them in claims, underwriting, processing, product, sales, whatever their interest is. Turnover that pushes people into new positions in your company isn’t bad turnover.

Second, for the first two years, the main role of an agency or carrier is to beat an employee over the head with the mission of insurance: We help people get back on their feet when something goes wrong. Entry-level jobs are a sliver of what we do in the industry, and helping people understand how that connects to the bigger mission can help them stay interested in pursuing a longer-term insurance career. Help your new hires dream about the future career they can have so they’ll stick it out through that first few years of drag.

Third, feedback, feedback, feedback, feedback, feedback. I can’t say it enough. It doesn’t have to be a big formal process. It can be 30 seconds once a week to say “I like this and this, and we can really work on this and this, here’s some resources to help you improve where you need to, anything you need from me to help you grow?”

Q: Anything else carriers or agencies can do to better recruit future insurance nerds and differentiate themselves as an employer?

Tony: Internally share pay bands that correlate to your jobs, and be transparent about pay bands in your job postings when recruiting. Get really good at flexibility and remote work. Those are the basic expectations of many workers entering the labor force, and if you can’t do that and then give them a career path from the beginning, then either the industry will lose them completely, or they’ll find advice and tools somewhere else and they’ll move to a company that does offer the benefits and transparency they need to grow.