NU Online News Service, Aug. 23, 3:01 p.m. EDT

NEW YORK—The insurance industry suffers from an image problem when it comes to recruiting the best and brightest, and Marsh & McLennan Cos. says it is working to galvanize the industry to change that.

Kathryn Komsa, chief diversity officer for Marsh & McLennan, says the firm is encouraging carriers and insurance brokers to gather at diversity roundtable discussions to examine the issue of how to entice the younger generation into insurance careers.

The firm, which is the parent company of insurance broker Marsh and reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter, engaged at least 35 carriers along with a number of its insurance-broker competitors to discuss how to face the challenge of bringing bright and talented young people into an industry that is often overlooked as a career choice.

Next month, the group of carriers and brokers will hold another diversity roundtable discussion to work on who else they need to partner with, including insurance associations and educational institutions.

Orlando Ashford, Marsh & McLennan's chief human resource and communications officer, says the aim of these discussions is to diversify and expand the pool of candidates to make more talent available, “then fight over who gets it.”

Expanding the talent pool is only one aspect of the company's Corporate Citizenship Report for 2010 that it released today, giving an overview of the firm's strategy in the areas of sustainability, diversity and corporate social responsibility.

In a press briefing at the firm's corporate headquarters, Komsa explains that working on diversity issues to bring in new talent has been a major part of the company's workings for more than 25 years, but until recently, it lacked an “enterprise-wide strategy”

Recently, Marsh & McLennan has instituted a number of programs aimed at inclusion of people from various aspects of society to “create a more visibly inclusive culture.”

Other aspects of the company's Corporate Citizenship Report include sustainability and social responsibility.

Elizabeth Barry, chief sustainability officer for the firm, explains that the firm has developed several programs to deal with the use of resources from power usage to real-estate expansion.

But the crux of any true sustainability program lies in changing people's behavior and thinking about ways to reduce the use of resources.

“It is not about today, but about the future,” she says.