Across the GWV group we work with insurance pricing teams every week: Gerrard White recruits for them, Vermelo runs hiring for them, FlarePeople builds talent for them. So we'll say this plainly: the pool of pricing, actuarial and data people is small, everyone is fishing in it, and the people in it get approached constantly. Some roles you can fill with the right search and the right offer. Some you can't, at any price, on the date you need them. For those, our sister brand FlarePeople takes a different route. It doesn't find pricing talent. It makes it.
What is Recruit-Train-Deploy?
Recruit-Train-Deploy (RTD) is a workforce model with a long track record in technology, and FlarePeople runs the UK's only version built for insurance pricing. It works in three steps. Recruit: find people with the aptitude and attitude for pricing work, most of whom have never considered insurance. Train: put them through the Pathfinders Academy, a ten-week programme covering pricing skills and tools, the insurance sector, business acumen and the working skills that make a new analyst useful rather than just qualified. Deploy: place them in your pricing team on an initial 24-month contract, with the option to take them on permanently. Unlike a graduate scheme, they arrive trained for your world and contribute from the first week.
The general case for hiring attitude and training skills, and when not to, is in skills or fit: which to hire for and which to train.
Who FlarePeople recruits
People the traditional route misses: STEM graduates from a wide range of disciplines, ex-military leavers with analytical training and no obvious way into the sector, career returners, and career changers from other data-heavy industries. The selection is for how they think and how they work, not for whether they already know what a loss ratio is. That's also why RTD changes the shape of a pricing team: it opens the door to people who were never going to walk through the usual one, and the diversity of background and thinking follows from that rather than being bolted on.
What the Pathfinders™ Academy covers
The Pathfinders™ Academy is built around what UK insurance pricing teams actually need: general insurance pricing frameworks, personal and commercial lines, data science and machine learning applied to insurance, and the tools in daily use, including Radar, Emblem, Python and SQL. Alongside the technical work sits regulatory and commercial context specific to the UK market, and the communication and stakeholder skills that decide whether an analyst's work gets used.
Three routes to pricing talent, and when to use each
Hire it: For a senior pricing lead, an actuarial modeller with a specific line of business behind them, or a contractor for a six-month model rebuild, you need someone who already knows the work, and you need a recruiter who knows where they are. That's Gerrard White, the group's specialist insurance recruiter, for permanent and contract hires.
Run the hiring: When the problem isn't one role but the volume or the process, that's Vermelo: an embedded recruiter or an RPO that runs pricing and analytics hiring inside your team, with the reporting to show what's working. How we help insurers build a talent engine covers it.
Build it: For a capability gap you can see coming, a growing book, a new product line, a modernisation programme, a team that keeps losing analysts to the market, RTD gives you a cohort on a planned date, at a known cost, with people who won't be headhunted the moment they arrive. That's FlarePeople.
In practice they run together: FlarePeople builds the pipeline of analysts, Gerrard White finds the experienced and senior people around them, and Vermelo runs the hiring when there's a lot of it.
What RTD gives you
Pricing capability built to a plan rather than the market's timetable
A wider, more varied intake than the usual graduate route
People trained for insurance before day one, not on your time
A cost you know in advance, with the option to hire permanently at the end
Talk to FlarePeople
If you're planning your pricing team for the next two years and can't see where the analysts come from, get in touch with the FlarePeople team. Anthony Butler, anthony.butler@flarepeople.com | 07843 625 559.