Great Insurance Jobs’ Cofounder Roger Lear is here to help you overcome obstacles to your career and job search. This month, he offers insights on why you might be striking out amidst a hot job market.
Q: Everyone keeps saying the insurance job market is amazing for employees, but I don’t seem to have any luck landing a job. What am I doing wrong?
A: Currently, the insurance industry has over 30,000 open jobs across the country. If you break it down by profession, you will find numerous jobs in customer service and sales, followed by claims, technology, analytics, and underwriting. On top of that, your job search is now national, with insurance companies offering remote jobs in record numbers. Lastly, with over 30% of the insurance industry retiring in the next five years, you would think jobs would fall from the sky! For many job seekers, however, the job search struggle is still real.
Anyone applying to jobs and never even getting acknowledged will start to question if they are living in the twilight zone. Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of insurance industry job seekers who struggle to find a job in an industry with a 1.8% unemployment rate and many open positions. If you are in this category and want to get more interviews for your next great job, here are some reasons why it might be happening and how to resolve it.
You apply for a job, but your resume needs to be optimized for that specific opening. In the past two years, I have reviewed over 10,000 resumes. Eighty percent of resumes need key elements that allow hiring managers and applicant tracking system “robots” to immediately identify you as a star candidate. To fix this, read through the job description and highlight the job title and the skills needed to get this job. To optimize your resume, under your name, phone, email, and city at the top of the resume, make this job title your resume title. If the job title is commercial liability claims examiner, this becomes the exact title of your resume. Under your title, the next section is core competencies. This bullet point area will be all the skills you need to get this job. The only things you need to list in this area are the skills found in the job description. Together at the top of the resume, the title and skillsets are now designed to get you noticed in mere seconds.
No follow-up after you apply. If you apply to a worker’s compensation adjuster position in Atlanta with your dream company, one strategy that works well is to follow up with the claims manager in that office. The easiest way to do this is to use LinkedIn, find the claims manager in the Atlanta office, and send them a connection request letting them know you just applied to the workers’ compensation claims job. If you are a fit—make sure your LinkedIn profile is optimized—this will make the manager’s day.
You get the interview, but not the job. The number one mistake people make when interviewing is not communicating clearly the exact skillsets needed to get the job. Focus your interview preparation on actual job situations in previous positions that clearly show you know your stuff. For claims interviews, walk through a couple of your complicated claims demonstrating how you overcame challenges to close the claim.
Try out these tips, and I think you will be able to overcome the challenges you are encountering and finally land the job you have been searching for.