Stop Hiring for “Fit” in Your Insurance Agency (1250 words)

When you’re hiring in an insurance agency, the stakes are high.

You’re not just filling a seat. You’re deciding who will represent your brand to clients. Who will advise families on risk. Who will sit across from business owners when claims hit. Who will build trust in your community.

Most agency leaders will tell you they want the best person for the job. And that’s true. But if we’re honest, another question is often hovering in the background:

“Will this person fit in?”

Culture fit sounds harmless, even responsible. But more often than we realize, “fit” becomes shorthand for our own comfort. Familiarity. Similarity.

And familiarity may limit our success.

Take an Inventory of Your Defaults

Before you post the job, think about your ideal candidate for the role.

Pay close attention to the assumptions you’re making about what this person looks and sounds like, where they’ve worked, how they sell, what schools they attended, and who they already know.

Often, the best applicant for the job will look nothing at all like this “ideal candidate.” You’ll need to deconstruct this mental image if you want to see candidates clearly.

In insurance, this shows up in subtle ways:

• “We need someone who can walk into a room and command it.”
• “They need to be able to build relationships the way we do.”
• “They need to fit our client base.”

But what if “the way we do” is limiting your growth?

Culture Fit Creates Homogeneous Agencies

We tend to look for “culture fit.” Culture fit is great in theory, but it’s why we tend to have homogeneous organizations.

If everyone in your agency shares the same background, networks in the same circles, and approaches risk in the same way, you may get harmony—but you won’t necessarily get growth.

Insurance agencies serve increasingly diverse communities: first-generation entrepreneurs, multigenerational family businesses, gig workers, immigrant-owned startups, nonprofit leaders, tech founders, and more. If your team reflects only one slice of that market, you’re limiting your ability to connect, understand, and advise effectively.

Instead of culture fit, think in terms of culture contribution. Everybody should bring something to the team that no one else has. Maybe it’s experience serving a different market segment. Maybe it’s a background in another industry. Maybe it’s a communication style that reaches clients your current team struggles to connect with. If you hire somebody who can bring in a different perspective, make it your mission to ensure the team is working together in harmony. That’s leadership.

The “Beer Test” Problem in Hiring

Many leaders  admit to secretly administering a “beer test” in interviews. The “beer test” is a measure of likability and is a direct expression of our affinity biases.

In insurance agencies, this test often sounds like:

Likability matters in relationship-driven industries. But if likability is important to you, make it a factor in your criteria. Just don’t make it the only criteria, nor the most important one. Your goal is to choose the best candidate for the job, not the best candidate for you.

Remember: soft skills are teachable.

Often, managers think we can only teach technical skills—policy details, underwriting guidelines, quoting systems. But none of us was born knowing how to have empathy. We weren’t born knowing how to present to a room of business owners. Most of us weren’t born good listeners.

We learned.

So when you evaluate candidates, challenge yourself and your leadership team with this question:

“How can we help the highest-scoring candidate improve the skills they lack—whether technical or interpersonal?”

When you think this way, you open the door to candidates who may not mirror your current team but may outperform them in the long run.

Set Your Priorities Before You Interview

Make sure you have a clear understanding of the role’s responsibilities.

Next, consider the skills necessary to carry out these activities. List them all. Then ask a colleague to review your list.

Is each skill absolutely essential, or have you included your own biases as to “how” the job should be done?

Remove anything that isn’t absolutely essential.

Once you’ve settled on a list of required skills, prioritize them. Give each one a score from 0 (low) to 10 (high) to indicate how important each will be to your selection decision.

Later, you’ll score resumes and interviews against these criteria.

When you do this work in advance, you reduce the likelihood that your hiring conversation will drift toward comfort and familiarity.

Challenge Yourself with Predetermined Criteria

When all the interviews are complete, compare your scores with those of other interviewers. Be sure to talk about differences in the scores.

If someone has reservations about a particular applicant, dig into their concerns to find out why. Do those concerns reflect the limitations of the candidate—or the biases of the interviewer?

Be diligent in uncovering interviewers’ biases.

One way to check your process is to be very transparent. If you can clearly state how your “winning” candidate scored relative to other applicants, you’ve probably done a good job.

On the other hand, being unable—or afraid—to articulate what drove your decision is a sign that you made a biased hiring decision.

In a small agency, this discipline is even more important. Without HR guardrails, it’s easy for decisions to default to the owner’s instinct. Structure protects you from yourself.

Diverse Talent Elevates Performance

Nobody wants to be accused of being a “diversity hire,” because the implication is that the company lowered its standards.

Diverse talent doesn’t lower the bar.

On the contrary, to bring in someone who doesn’t fit the company mold, everybody has to amp up their own game to be more inclusive.

Diverse talent elevates everyone by bringing in a new perspective.

In an insurance agency, that might look like:

• A producer who opens doors to new markets
• An account manager who improves client retention through a different communication style
• A team member who challenges outdated assumptions about who your ideal client is
• A leader who sees risk differently and spots opportunity earlier

Homogeneity feels efficient. But over time, it creates blind spots.

You wouldn’t want to listen to an orchestra of all violins, no matter how well the violinists “got along.” To be robust and successful, your organization needs players of different kinds.

You are the conductor.

Your job is not to assemble identical performers. It is to ensure everyone’s contributions are emphasized and celebrated along the way.

The Real Competitive Advantage

Insurance is a relationship business. But relationships are not built on sameness. They’re built on understanding.

When you shift from culture fit to culture contribution, you:

• Expand your talent pool
• Improve your market reach
• Reduce turnover driven by exclusion
• Strengthen decision-making
• Increase long-term profitability

As long as you are in management, you will repeat this hiring cycle. Each hire shapes your agency’s future.

So the next time you catch yourself asking, “Will this person fit?” pause.

Ask instead:

What will this person contribute that we don’t already have?

That question doesn’t just reduce bias.

It builds a stronger agency.

Reprinted with permission.

Amy C. Waninger is the Founder & CEO of Lead at Any Level, where she helps organizations build inclusive, adaptable leaders at every level. She is the author of multiple books on leadership and change and works with organizations across industries to strengthen leadership capability during times of uncertainty. Learn more at www.LeadAtAnyLevel.com.