For over thirty years of my career, I’ve been active in the property and casualty insurance brokerage industry, during which time I’ve traveled the country and met with hundreds of top brokers, sales managers, and agency owners.  Throughout this experience, conversations with my industry peers have always included one consistent theme – the significant challenge of hiring great salespeople and how the ability to do so is critical to long-term success.

This article, which serves as the culmination of those conversations, evaluates the currently available hiring assessment tools and delves into the development of a brand new option on the marketplace.

The Current Marketplace

First, let’s look at some of the most popular tools utilized by brokerage firms and evaluate them from an independent standpoint.  I asked a top PhD student in the Organizational Behavior arena to review all the material he could find on each tool, and the results are fascinating.  RISK66 subscribers can access the PDF summary of this research by logging into RISK66.com, going to the Resource Library and clicking on the first document, which is titled, “Hiring Tool Evaluations.”

RISK66’s HIRE P² Hiring Tool

As part of my dissertation work, and afterwards in conjunction with AOE Science (www.AOEscience.com), we have developed HIRE P², a hiring tool focused on the property and casualty insurance industry that synthesizes extensive research on the people it was designed to assess.

Alongside this research, HIRE P² utilizes the most recent advances in modeling methodology, an expansive database of industry-relevant data, and a team of the best researchers in the field to create a hiring assessment tool that produces the most accurate projections of success in the marketplace.

The use of this tool revolves around the highly researched and validated core personality measurements of Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience along with powerful, new classification algorithms emerging from the field of data science and mathematics.  HIRE P² is currently the only tool on the market that utilizes both the aforementioned algorithms and data specific to the property and casualty industry.

To complement its current capabilities, HIRE P² is also a dynamic product, as we are continuing development and expansion of the tool to capitalize on ever-increasing sophistication in both the psychometrics and modeling used for predictive purposes.

In a few weeks, a beta form of HIRE P² will be available to all RISK66 members for evaluation purposes.  This summer, we will begin to offer the tool on a pay-per-usage basis to RISK66 members. 

For more information on RISK66.com visit www.RISK66.info or contact Timothy L. Coomer, PhD, at TLC@SIGMAactuary.com.