 Cost Efficiency
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Case Study: Cost Efficiency
Our client, a Fortune 100 insurance company, was having difficulty building an actuarial staff of sufficient size and skill level.
Traditionally, the company had relied on an organic approach to actuarial staffing. They hired entry- or junior-level actuaries, and grew their staff from within. But as the company grew, and as industry demands became more complex, it became clear that their internal pipeline was no longer sufficient for their needs.
Actuaries are a difficult hire. And as our client's human resources department spent more and more energy trying to keep up with this growing need, this difficulty began to take its toll. Recruiting costs started to spiral out of control. The company was spending nearly a million dollars a year on recruiting agency fees alone.
THE CHALLENGE:
- Our client needed to trim agency and other recruitment costs, without diminishing their ability to hire highly-skilled actuarial talent.
SEVEN STEP APPROACH:
Our Recruitment Process Optimization approach is designed to cut down on cost-per-hire. One way we do this is by drastically reducing our clients' reliance on traditional – and expensive – recruitment agencies.
After a detailed discovery phase with the actuarial department heads and HR, Seven Step assigned a Process Optimization Manager to engineer a better actuary-recruitment process.
Discovery, which involves an analysis of each of the seven steps, revealed that there was significant ground to be gained by focusing on step #2, sourcing. We set out to optimize three key sourcing areas: Networking, Attraction, and Sales.
- Networking: We conducted full analysis of our target candidate, to be sure that we knew where they were: where they hung out online, what companies they worked for, what professional associations they belonged to, etc. From there, we could develop a strategy for reaching the most desirable actuaries as efficiently as possible.
- Candidate Attraction: A detailed competitive analysis – Who else is looking for actuarial talent right now? Where do they post their jobs? What do their postings say? What sponsorship and advertising efforts do they use?– allowed us to develop an online and offline advertising strategy that truly stood apart from the pack. We used the most effective channels for reaching actuaries we could identify, some of them expected, and some of them quite unique. And we made sure that all of our online postings were optimized to be as search-friendly as possible, which had the effect of turning Google (et al) into a very effective (and free!) channel for our efforts.
- Opportunity Sales: Once we were able to attract good candidates to the opportunity, the challenge became one of identifying the best of the candidates we drew in, and making sure that we were selling them persuasively on becoming an actuary at our client's company. To make sure that this process went as efficiently as possible, we reengineered our client's sales approach to focus it on a consistent selling message that we share with every qualified candidate, no matter what our point of contact with them might have been.
RESULTS:
Early in our engagement, the hiring line managers in our client's company were skeptical of our ability to deliver the magnitude of results they needed. They believed that recruitment agencies were the only way to bring on new actuaries, and they had become completely dependent on their help…which is how the company got into the cost-containment issue in the first place.
And it was worse than you might think. Beyond the basic cost of recruitment agencies, this hiring manager dependence had given rise to an unstructured and dispersed actuarial recruitment process, with no real ownership or control over the candidate pipeline.
We quickly gained their trust by showing them high-quality talent and a more efficient hiring process. Quickly, we were able to decrease recruiting agency expenditures by 50%. Our client developed a strong recruitment brand in the actuarial community, and established a sustainable and highly efficient candidate pipeline.
Both the hiring managers and HR department granted a 95% customer satisfaction rating for our service; one of the highest levels ever achieved for this department.
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