Here, there and everywhere: more and more, insurance sales recruiters look outside the industry for viable candidates.

Lance Osborne, vice president of field force development for Aflac, recalled a recruit he enlisted many years ago, a female manager at a fast-food drive-through. She'd been approached for a sales job through another Aflac agent and was considering a part-time position.

Knowing she was wavering, Osborne made it a point to drive up to her restaurant window on Christmas Eve. "I was fairly confident they were short-staffed on Christmas Eve, and they would need the manager to come in," Osborne said.

"When Linda came to the window she knew exactly why I was there," he said. Osborne told her Aflac would give her the things she wanted out of a job, "and one of those is to not work on Christmas Eve." "The next Monday she was in our office," Osborne said. "Today she's one of our top sales associates nationally." It's not unusual for insurance recruiters to go outside the industry for new talent. Teachers, small-business owners, even airline pilots and fast-food managers are up for grabs as recruiters dig deep to fill their sales ranks.

"If you look at the industry, the number of career agents and producers or advisers is shrinking as needs increase" said Emily Viner, field vice president, agency growth and advanced markets group at Guardian Life Insurance Company of America.

"Retaining talent isn't great in the industry; it's a challenge,' Viner said. "We've been lucky; our [retention rate] is a little bit more than double the industry's. It's higher than 60% in some offices."

Guardian employs some 3,100 financial representatives across the country, and all are career agents,Viner said. The average age of agents is now 52 to 54, she said.

"There's not a phenomenon, but it's certainly true to Guardian and peer companies that we have an aging sales force," she said. So when insurance recruiters don't get the candidates they need from inside the industry and new college grads don't pan out, they go after the career-changers.

"We're finding that there are tremendous sales professionals in the marketplace that, because of changes in their industries, are being faced with having to make changes in their career paths" said Wade Hampton, vice president of sales at American General Life & Accident Insurance Co.

Seeking and Finding

AGLA has been around for more than 100 years and has been recruiting from outside the industry "to great success" since the beginning, Hampton said. "While our value proposition does attract some quality people, such as agents and managers from inside the insurance industry, we're still recruiting the majority of our ranks from outside the industry."

Aflac structured its training program around career-changers, too. "It allows us to hire characteristics and traits as opposed to work history," Osborne said.

New York Life Insurance Co., with 120 general sales offices nationwide and some 8,000 non-captive agents, is actively recruiting new agents from the real estate industry with a campaign and a Web site come-on.

"With the cooling of the housing market, many of those working in the real estate industry, including mortgage brokers, will need to find new markets for rewarding careers," the company's Web site states. "New York Life Insurance Co. believes it has the answer"

Mark Pfaff, senior vice president in charge of the agency department at New York Life said, "We've always recruited from outside. It's where we get the bulk of our recruits. We do a little bit of internal recruiting with people looking to change companies, but the vast majority of newcomers will come from outside. We try to focus on specific markets."

Pfaff tells his potential real estate recruits two basic points to bring them in.

The first is: "As an experienced [life insurance] agem, you are getting residual compensation from sales you've made, versus when you sell a house, that's it" Pfaff said. "I tell them, 'Think about it. What if you received compensation or yearly renewals from every person who bought a house?'"

Secondly: "Our industry is just not as cyclical. People always have to do basic life insurance planning. When the stock market is up, they're looking at products that are equity-related and when the stock market is down, they're looking at fixed products."

New York Life recruited agents from pharmaceutical sales "when they were going through some of their changes a few years back," Pfaff said. The move to recruit from real estate began earlier this year.

Pfaff added that real estate agents have selling and closing skills that carry over well into insurance sales--as does their broad client base. They've made contacts while showing and selling houses, getting to know other Realtors and working with title agents and attorneys.

"Every one of those people--the title attorney, the mortgage broker--they have to make financial decisions, so they become an instant market," Pfaff said.

Viner had a similar take. "In the Northeast there are a lot of 'For Sale' signs that aren't going down," she said. "That tells me there are a lot of real estate agents available."

Playing the Fields

The ideal recruit, insurance folks say, has a desire for flexibility, an entrepreneurial spirit and a keen interest in creating wealth.

"There's never been more wealth being transferred from one generation to the next than there currently is," said Harris Fishman, president of First Financial Group/MassMutual in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. "There's never been a better time to be in insurance. It's what's making the career attractive, but it's not for everyone."

About half the candidates who come into First Financial are from outside the industry, Fishman said. The company seeks people who have demonstrated some level of success in their prior careers, such as an athlete who's already performed successfully in sports, he said.

The company also seeks managers from the restaurant and hospitality industries. "Someone who ran a restaurant but didn't have ultimate independence, who worked crazy hours dictated by the nature of the business, and who has dealt with employee concerns, payroll and so forth," Fishman said.

Many of Aflac's sales team of 69,000 licensed associates come straight from college, law careers, even from fastfood restaurant management--such as Osborne, who 19 years ago was managing a restaurant in Warm Springs, Ga.

"I was one of the ones looking for flexibility," Osborne said. "Really, we have people from all industries. We also attract a lot of moms re-entering the work environment."

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

Custom Qualifications

MassMutual targets three career fields in particular: airlines, pharmaceuticals and CPAs, said Scott B. Rich, assistant vice president of the net field-force growth department.

The company prefers people with previous sales experience--and lately, pharmaceutical sales in particular--because "they're in a perfect storm of layoffs right now. Pfizer is laying off 2,800 people this year," Rich said.

Also, with several generic drugs coming off patent and the industry's need to cut costs, the pharmaceutical industry is in a spiral, he added.

"They (potential agents) have a market clearly to go back to and work in the medical field," Rich said. "One of the key metrics of success in our business is having a key market to go back to."

Targeting the airline industry also seemed like a natural move.

"Delta has roughly 30,000 employees in Atlanta--pilots, flight attendants, public service areas. They all have directly transferable skill sets to come into our business because they have people skills," Rich said.

The airline's Cincinnati hub alone has provided six former airline pilots as MassMutual agents, each with a huge potential customer base. "They can go pilot-to-pilot," Rich said. "They know the language of the airline people. They know the benefits."

MassMutual's career agent force is expected to grow this year from some 3,700 agents to nearly 4,500, Rich said. "We're in a very good position overall right now, in a sweet spot for recruiting, borne out by our 10% compounded growth in the last two years," he said. "We're seeing a fair amount of people coming from the ranks of coaches and teachers as well."

The company is modifying its training to reflect new entrants, such as women, multicultural recruits, and the youth market. "That's the future," Rich said. "Demographics are clearly saying there's no denying that--our future has to include that or else we'll never be able to really build our market share."

AGLA's Hampton concurred. "We're also committed to recruiting, training and advancing women in our industry," he said. "Our recruiting strategy also focuses on finding more specialized individuals. For example, we are looking for first- and second-generation, dual-language individuals who can sell to the burgeoning multicultural market."

Furthermore, MassMutual has begun recruiting for franchisees, and Viner said Guardian, too, is seriously looking at the small-business owner.

Teachers are another viable option at Guardian Life, because they bring with them the ability to "help people understand financial instruments and what they can do,"Viner said.

"I'm an example of a person who came through education," said Pfaff, a former basketball coach. "One of the things teachers bring over is that if a teacher is teaching you about the Civil War, they're not teaching you everything about it. They're taking all of this information and condensing it down to what you need to know."

"I think that's what happens in our business," he said. "We don't tell you everything about an insurance policy. We tell you what you need to know. Like real estate agents--they don't open every closet and door and window, but they're giving you the concept of the big picture and why it fits you."

More people are interested in coming into the insurance field today because of "the opportunities the marketplace has with baby boomers hitting their peak earnings, the amount of wealth being transferred from one generation to the next, and the fact that our career offers all the things it does--flexibility and unlimited income potential," Fishman said.

Land of Opportunity

Guardian recently began to recruit from the military at the suggestion of a board member who's a retired military officer, Viner said. MassMutual also just began recruiting retiring military personnel and those who have just returned from duty overseas, Rich said.

For John Parham, a division executive vice president for Axa Advisors LLC and manager of its Nashville, Tenn., branch office, recruiting can be as sweet as a country song.

"The music industry is very big down here," Parham said. "In order to penetrate that market we are recruiting and hiring people from that industry who may be looking for a change. There's so much support to the music business here that can be a very natural crossover to our profession."

Axa's new hires have come from Sony-BMG Music Entertainment and Capitol Records, Parham said.

Health care is another huge Nashville-based industry from which Axa tends to cull its recruits. "We tend to pick those folks off too, because they can talk the language of physicians, ad men, medical personnel and things like that," Parham said.

Axa Financial has some 6,000 career finance professionals in retail distribution around the country, with 54 branches nationwide. Whenever he's interviewing, Parham watches closely to see if a candidate has a special appeal that others pick up on instinctively.

"I think they have to have a 'wow' factor--they walk into the room and people are naturally attracted to them," Parham said. "And they dress well, of course."

Key Points

* Insurance company recruiters often seek new field sales candidates from outside the industry.

* Recruiters look for new employees with "insurance-style" skill sets.

* Successful recruits come from real estate, mortgage brokering, pharmaceutical sales, small business, education and even the airlines.

Recruiters' Wish List

Across the board, insurance recruiters say they seek candidates who are:

* Bright and technically astute 

* Willing to learn

* Entrepreneurial

* Experienced in sales

* Naturally friendly

* Good listeners

* Able to explain big concepts easily

* Disciplined and self-motivated

* Confident and enthusiastic

* Honest

Learn More

Aflac Inc.

A.M. Best Company # 58003 Distribution: A network of state, regional and district sales coordinators overseeing insurance brokers and independent agents.

Guardian Life Insurance Company of America

A.M. Best Company # 06508 Distribution: Career agents, independent agents and brokers.

American General Life & Accident Insurance Company

A.M. Best Company # 06788 Distribution: Personal producing general agents, brokers, independent marketing organizations, agency system.

New York Life Insurance Co.

A.M. Best Company # 06820 Distribution: Career agents, independent agents and brokers, alternative channels.

MassMutual Financial Group

A.M. Best Company # 69702 Distribution: Career agents, broker/dealers, banks and wirehouses.

Axa

A.M. Best Company # 85085 Distribution: Career agency force, securities firms, banks, broker/dealers and financial planners.

For ratings and other financial strength information visit www.ambest.com.