2022 Six Step Success #5: Hiring : Building the Team That Builds the Agency

Hire twelve to eighteen months before you'll be in crisis without the seat filled. Define the fit profile in writing before posting the role. Build a thirty to ninety day onboarding path so the right hire actually performs.

That sequence prevents the capacity trap and the panic hire, the two failure modes that wreck most agency teams.

What are the two biggest hiring mistakes agencies make?

Most hiring mistakes in insurance agencies fall into one of two patterns, and they're roughly opposite problems.

The first is chronic understaffing driven by financial anxiety. The agency doesn't hire the people it needs because the owner is nervous about the fixed cost before the revenue materializes. This pattern keeps agencies trapped at whatever level the owner can sustain personally. The staff needed to grow the agency aren't there because growth hasn't happened yet, and growth can't happen because the staff aren't there. It's a classic capacity trap.

The second is reactive hiring that ignores fit. When the agency finally does hire, it's under pressure, someone quit, volume is overwhelming the team, a new producer is starting and needs support. Under that pressure, hiring standards collapse. The urgency overrides the judgment, and the agency ends up with someone who can technically do the job but isn't the right person for the team or the culture.

Both patterns are predictable and both are largely preventable with intentional hiring planning. Craig's framework for 2022 hiring addresses both.

How far ahead should you plan agency hires?

The antidote to the capacity trap is planning hires twelve to eighteen months ahead of when you'll be in crisis without them. This requires projecting growth and thinking about the staff capacity the projected growth will require, then hiring before the need becomes urgent.

This is psychologically difficult. Hiring someone before you feel the pain of not having them means paying for capacity that isn't yet fully utilized. For owners who run lean out of financial discipline or anxiety, hiring ahead feels like waste. Craig makes the counterargument directly: the cost of hiring ahead is modest and one-time. The cost of not hiring ahead, lost new business that the team couldn't process, retention problems from overloaded service staff, owner burnout from backfilling the gaps, is ongoing and compounding.

The practical planning exercise is straightforward. Where does the agency need to be at the end of 2022 in terms of policies in force and premium, given the growth goals in the plan? What staff capacity does that target require? What's the gap between current capacity and target capacity? And when does each hire need to be onboarded to be fully productive when the capacity is needed?

Working backward from the target date, accounting for sourcing time, interview time, and the ramp period before a new hire is fully productive, usually reveals that the time to start the hiring process is much sooner than the date when the capacity is actually needed.

How do you hire for fit and not just skill?

The reactive hiring failure mode, hiring under pressure without adequate attention to fit, is about allowing urgency to override judgment. Craig's position on this is consistent: a hire who is technically capable but wrong for the culture or the role is more expensive than being understaffed for a few extra weeks.

The key to avoiding this is having a clear definition of what you're looking for before you start the search, not just the skills and experience but the characteristics and values that matter for success in your specific environment. What does the person need to believe about service to thrive in your agency? What work style fits your team? What communication norms matter? What does success in the role look like in the first ninety days and the first year?

With that profile defined, you can evaluate candidates against it rather than just assessing whether they seem likeable and capable. The likeable and capable assessment is how agencies end up with technically competent people who are wrong for the team, because likeability and general competence are easy to detect in an interview and specific fit is hard.

What does effective onboarding look like for a new hire?

Hiring right means nothing without effective onboarding. A new hire who joins with genuine fit but is dropped into the role without structure is likely to underperform, not because they're wrong for the job but because they don't yet have the specific knowledge and context they need to do the job well in your agency.

Craig's minimum viable onboarding for 2022 includes: a clear written description of the role's responsibilities and success metrics, a structured first-week orientation covering systems and processes, a defined training path for the first thirty to ninety days, and a regular check-in schedule with the manager to surface questions and gaps before they become problems.

Agencies that take hiring seriously and then neglect onboarding are leaving money on the table. The investment in finding the right person is wasted if the person fails because they weren't adequately set up to succeed.

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