Pick of the Litter

If CIOs could put together their IT staffs like the NFL puts together its football teams, IT managers would be drafting the top students from around the country to join their squads. But insurance is not football, and CIOs are not general managers. The success of their recruiting efforts depends on a combination of factors: challenging technology, a career path for young IT employees, and often the ability to convince young people life in the middle of Nebraska is not so bad after all.

COLLEGE RECRUITING

The Westfield Group, in northeastern Ohio, has a solid recruiting relationship with several midwestern universities, according to Ed Largent, chief technology officer. From a technology standpoint, Largent has developed personal affiliations with many Ohio universities, visiting campuses to interact with students and faculty. “It's a great long-term strategy, but it's not going to produce a 20-year software architect any time soon,” he says.

Largent serves on an advisory board at the University of Akron and the school's Center for Information Technology and E-Business, an extension of Akron's college of business. The university formed this board with key IT executives from about 20 northeastern Ohio companies. The group meets regularly to discuss the curriculum, which Largent believes gives the business leaders a hook into what skill sets are being developed in the university's undergraduate program. “We are interactive with the students,” he says. “We make guest appearances in classes and lecture on various topics.”

Akron's advisory board has a curriculum committee on which Largent sits. “We review the MIS curriculum and provide input to the dean of the college and the faculty,” he says. “They take our input on it as well as anything else they might be looking at.”

One of the things the Akron advisory group is discussing is the trend toward declining enrollment in MIS and the number of computer science majors in the colleges. “The number is down significantly,” says Largent. “The university is looking to marketing programs to try to increase enrollment in those disciplines.”

Mutual of Omaha (MoA) also has built relationships with the academic world near its headquarters in Nebraska, and this interaction has given the carrier access to some good talent. Because of the area of the country in which it is located, MoA has aligned with the University of Nebraska and its honors program for students seeking simultaneous IT and business backgrounds. “We maintain a long history [with UN] from the inception of the [honors] program, and we've built a relationship with students as early as their freshman and sophomore years as interns,” says Jeff Schreiner, president of Omaha Information Services Co. (OISC), a subsidiary of MoA.

George Royse, vice president of strategic technology development for Mutual of Omaha, reports the IT leaders at MoA provide input to the universities in a number of ways. Royse has helped design some of UN's advanced DBA courses. “We got some of our database administrators together with the folks at the University of Nebraska-Omaha,” he says. “We literally have laid out a curriculum [the school] eagerly has accepted. It is taught to all students who go through there for DBA certification.”

In addition, Royse himself teaches graduate classes at both UN-O and Creighton University. “There are a couple of advantages there,” he says. “When students have gone through some of those classes, I get a chance to figure out exactly who is the cream of the crop. When students send their resume [to MoA], I go back to the grades. I have the inside story on that. That kind of partnership is what makes our recruiting program successful.”

FILLING KEY ROLES

Not all IT jobs are difficult to fill, but Largent asserts Westfield is starting to see challenges in finding talent for key IT roles. “It's not an across-the-board issue,” he says. “I wouldn't say we have difficulty recruiting and training IT professionals, but there are specific roles across the organization we've struggled with. If someone in one of those particular roles leaves the company, it's a real challenge to fill those positions.”

Largent lists positions such as software enterprise architect, program manager, and project manager among the high-quality IT leadership roles that are becoming increasingly difficult to fill. There are multiple reasons for this phenomenon, he explains, but they differ with each role. “In the architecture roles, our perception is that's a very competitive market to begin with, so there aren't hundreds of those folks running around,” says Largent. “We're competing with a smaller pool.”

Westfield's geographic location is part of the issue, Largent acknowledges. Although the company is approximately 30 miles from the Cleveland and Akron communities, he concedes the area, when compared with other parts of the country, is not an attractive spot for IT professionals with the skills needed for some of the roles on Largent's list. “It's not like we're completely in the middle of nowhere, but if you look at the demographic and economic trends in this area, it's not a good story,” he says.

The marketplace with respect to the demand for program management and project management positions fluctuates in cycles, according to Largent. “Three to five years ago we had no trouble hiring really good program or project managers, but that cycle turned, and it's a much more competitive market now,” he says.

Royse reports MoA is not worried about finding quality people to come Omaha to work for the company. “We haven't had too much difficulty in attracting top talent within the midwestern region,” he says. “We're very competitive [in terms of salaries and other benefits] in this region and don't have significant issues attracting that talent.”

COMPETING FOR TALENT

Competition for the best workers is another challenge. Westfield's home office is located near Progressive's home office in the Cleveland area. Several large national financial institutions also are based in Cleveland and Akron, including Key Bank and National City. “I'd say for the largest 10 to 20 companies in northeastern Ohio, it's not unusual to find someone who has been [interviewed by] a couple of those organizations,” says Largent.

Most of the companies have their own respective IT needs, but Largent believes when all the industries join forces–as they have with the University of Akron–they discover similar needs in hiring young IT professionals. “There are a lot more needs for ERP skills [with other industries] than what is normally found in the insurance industry, but overall there are no vast differences,” he says.

Westfield's strategy for attracting help isn't weighted toward hiring recent college grads. “We try to maintain a balanced strategy of recruiting people out of college and interns as well as experienced people where we need it,” says Largent. Traditional recruiting methods work well, with the exception of some of the strategic positions Largent has found to be increasingly difficult to fill. “If we're looking for an experienced Java programmer, we put the posting on our Web site and some of the standard [recruiting resources], and we usually get a good response,” he says.

Depending on the job, Walter Shaw, president of Grapevine Technology, a personnel consulting service, believes most hiring managers within the insurance industry do look for some insurance background, but as with any job, the most talented people get the job, whether they've worked in insurance or in a manufacturing business. “If they have the skill set, [insurers] will bring them on,” he says. “Whereas with the older technologies, if [insurers] are looking for a COBOL program, I'm sure they would look for some insurance background.”

KEEPING EVERYONE HAPPY

The financial success of Westfield over the years plays a huge part in keeping good people with the company, according to Largent. Another factor in keeping a happy and loyal IT staff is the environment and the atmosphere within IT itself, he explains. Westfield has a little more than 300 employees in its IT operation, with 50 to 100 consultants working at any point in time. “One of the things we've done in recent years is to focus on that environment, whether it's the physical work environment or the overall things that are driving employee satisfaction and empowerment,” he says. “If we can trend those positively, we think that will help us in the long run with retention.”

One strategy at MoA involves recruiting from a group of people who want to live in the midwestern area. “We learned that long ago,” says Royse. “We tried to recruit from different areas of the country. In many cases, they liked the company and the technology, but you have to make sure people want to live here and are up for the long haul.”

By focusing on midwestern colleges, Royse believes the strategy is paying dividends for MoA, as opposed to recruiting employees from other, more attractive areas and finding, a year or two later, the employee is not happy. “That's why we're trying to target the midwestern colleges,” he says.

John Patterson, senior vice president of operations and CIO at Baltimore Life Companies, claims his company's primary issue with IT staffing is retention and retraining the current staff rather than recruitment. “[The staff] has so much embedded business knowledge–how this place works, relationships,” he says. “We're working hard to retain that knowledge, move it to new technologies, and give folks a career path with us and the new technologies.”

Most of Baltimore Life's 20 IT employees have been with the company for at least five years. “We're trying to save that knowledge and move it to new platforms,” says Patterson.

LOOKING OFFSHORE

Insurers increasingly have focused on offshore alliances to serve their IT needs, but today some carriers are looking to import key employees rather than export jobs.

There is a great deal of talent for insurers to recruit within the United States, Shaw believes, but an increasing amount of help is coming from offshore. “I'm a big proponent of jobs in the U.S., but when it comes to dealing with some of the technical, intensive languages out there now, a lot of people are coming [to the U.S.] from overseas,” he says. “The work has to get done, and we've got a lot of folks from India who are qualified to work in this country. We've got some .NET openings right now, and sometimes it's impossible to find that talent here in large numbers. However, if you reach out to some of your [offshore] resources, where you can find talent from anywhere, they typically are coming from overseas.”

Going abroad, Westfield has developed relationships with India-based companies for more than 10 years, and the carrier's rate and product work for personal lines is done offshore, but Largent claims the company has yet to tap that avenue for some of the key roles. That could be changing, though. One of Largent's assistants is headed to China this summer, joining a consortium of people from other companies trying to investigate the potential of leveraging international talent. “Brazil, India, China, and Russia are potential opportunities, and we'll probably try to experiment there,” says Largent.

OFFERING CHALLENGES

Mutual of Omaha has approximately 700 people within the IT organization. In addition, the carrier's Omaha Insurance Services Co. subsidiary provides risk management and other services to companies inside and out of the insurance vertical. “The OISC is where we do unique things in terms of how we attract some of our talent here,” says Royse.

The subsidiary offers a number of the operational risk management functions Mutual of Omaha began as commercial offerings to other insurance companies, Schreiner explains. “Part of the rationale was we had unique things we did for the company that had market viability,” he says. “This was a way we could provide incentives to some of our top talent to come and work for us. Part of our strategy is to have them rotate and get an exposure to all kinds of different services.”

Royse indicates it's a real draw for Mutual of Omaha when the company can tell prospective employees not only are they working for an insurance company, but they also are working for a company on the edge–performing risk management and other work that OISC is doing.

The rotation practice is an important part of what the company does with IT personnel, affirms Royse. “We've rotated folks who have diverse backgrounds–folks in security, mainframe support, and other areas,” he says. “That rotation keeps our talented employees here. In addition, it also attracts the college students.”

The company started the rotation system a couple of years back, Schreiner reports. When the company hires employees who are more on the entry-level side of the IT organization, the company allows them to spend six months of their first two years going from one part of the IT organization to another. “They get a little exposure to the applications area, the infrastructure side, to my operation (the commercial side of things), and strategic development,” says Schreiner. “We feel the desire for most college grads is to get as much experience as they possibly can as quickly as they can. This gives them an opportunity to do that without jumping around from company to company.”

The rotation system also gives the company a chance to judge employees' strengths and weaknesses while offering them the opportunity to understand how these strengths and weaknesses translate to value for each of the operations they get to work for.

The rotation program is specifically targeted toward top talent, Schreiner adds. “That's an aspect almost all of the top recruiting candidates are looking for,” he says. “It gives them enough exposure and responsibility so they can gauge where they are in the business world. It helps them to see that firsthand in a short period of time and then to translate that to where the individual best fits. It gives them an 'in' on their own career growth.” Mutual of Omaha currently is rotating nine people in its operations.

CUTTING EDGE

To attract top employees, Royse believes a company must offer exciting technology possibilities. MoA is moving toward a service-oriented architecture and uses .NET and Java technology for development. “Since I teach some of that at UN-O, [students] kind of get the message we're moving in that direction.”

The carrier has not abandoned older technology such as COBOL, but MoA is using some of the advanced technology students want to work with professionally, explains Royse.

Because of OISC's role, Mutual of Omaha has less of a reputation as a traditional insurance operation because the subsidiary sells to other markets. That allows IT staffers who work at OISC both to tackle some cutting-edge technologies and to exercise their skills with different types of client relationships, notes Schreiner. “That's one of the aspects of the company that helps build and maintain our partnership with the top talent,” he says. “It's not just the students who get exposure to it; we also are attracting people with some level of experience. It gives us insight into people who would rather be more on the cutting edge.”

New technology has transformed Baltimore Life into what Patterson calls a “125-year-old startup company.” The company developed a formal business plan and, on top of that, laid a business technology strategy that specifies where the company is headed over the next few years regarding the technology infrastructure–particularly the Internet infrastructure, portals, imaging, and workflow. “We have a three-year plan they can see plotted out,” he says. “That's their career path.”

Baltimore Life went through a major decision last year to select its platform from among open source, J2EE, or Microsoft .NET. “For any number of reasons, we surprised ourselves and chose the Microsoft environment,” says Patterson. Since then, Baltimore Life developers have undergone a three-week boot camp with the Microsoft technology. “Some of them were ASP programmers, and some were DB programmers,” he says. “We are bringing them up from the bottom in the .NET world.”

After the training sessions, the developers have been working on some training projects, and the company had a Microsoft coach at the home office full time for about six weeks to help build the standards and coach the staff on trial projects. “It's seven or eight folks, so everything is on a small scale,” says Patterson. “It makes for a cohesive group. [The developers] own the environment, so it's up to them to develop the standards and the migration paths.”

Marketing themselves to potential employees with the latest technology can aid an insurer's recruiting efforts, but Shaw points out the reality is the client/server environment is just a microcosm of the big mainframe environment. “IBM still sells tons of mainframe computers to insurance companies primarily because the applications they have been running for years continue to be run on mainframes,” he says. “Insurance companies have big client/server environments, but they live and breathe with the mainframes.”

Finding the top talent to work for a company never has been easy and will remain a challenge for the insurance industry, but by targeting specific areas of the country, working with universities to help develop the skills they need, and investing in newer technology, insurers can find success.

Largent understands the insurance industry is not a target career path for most college graduates, but by establishing local affiliations with young people who actually do want to stay in the area, many will take notice of Westfield because the company is one of the most successful organizations in northeastern Ohio. “If we can get [job candidates] out here in some way, shape, or form–whether it's for a visit or an internship–they see the quality of the organization, the stability, and the potential,” he contends. TD