Re/insurance faces recruitment crisis; needs to attract young innovators, say execs at Guy Carpenter Baden-Baden symposium

The re/insurance industry is facing a looming recruitment crisis, with many key figures now approaching retirement age and not enough effort being focused on bringing in the next generation of leaders and innovators, panellists agreed at the Guy Carpenter symposium on Sunday.

“I’ve had a quick gaze around room for diversity, age and gender and it’s not great,” said Ian Branagan, SVP and group chief risk officer of RenaissanceRe Holdings.

“There are too many old people like me. We have to find ways to encourage diversity.”

Jon Hancock, director of performance management at Lloyd’s, added that the challenge is to come up with a different offering that will attract people with the skills the industry needs for the future.

“We should have workforces that reflect the customers we are trying to serve,” he said.

“We are doing better in terms of the depth of diversity and inclusivity but the cold, hard employee proposition needs some work as well.

“The whole value proposition of what people go to work for has changed. Much as they like to have a fair salary for the role, they are driven not by the dollars in the bank account but by the people they work with and the environment they work in.

“We have more to do on that to encourage people to come and work with us; we have to change our thinking about what attracts people into the industry.”

Laurent Rousseau, deputy chief executive officer of SCOR Global P&C, added that it is not so much a matter of “out with the old, in with the new” but a challenge for the whole industry to evolve together.

“The question is not how can you chuck the people in this room out and get new fresh blood in their place, but how do you take care of your people and bring them along on this transformation,” he said.

“It’s a question of how to bring in different ways of working and of disrupting.”
James Nash, chief executive officer of Guy Carpenter, added that work needs to be done to develop a clearer message about the value of the industry.

“We have a terrific industry. We put people’s lives back together and economies back together when bad things happen, but we don’t spend enough time focusing on what we do, the purpose of our being,” he said.