good evening i'm live goldstein and welcome to another edition of focus on my guest tonight is karen skilling's who's the talent acquisition manager for munich reinsurance america incorporated and we were talking about munich and also they've been around for a hundred years and we've talked a lot about what they're doing as part of their hundred year or so variation of their anniversary this year but before we get into that i want to talk a little bit about karen's background and as i mentioned before karen's a talent acquisition manager at munich and is a member of the u s regional talent acquisition team she and her team are responsible for all recruiting and college relations efforts that munich and you also work closely with the talent acquisition teams at affiliate companies american modern and hartford steam boiler to align on strategy projects and previously she was an h r business partner supporting many of munich's corporate functions prior to joining the company in two thousand and eight she held an h r general stroke at the social policy research company mathematica policy research taking time out of your day to come down to the studio talk to me so let's talk a little bit about munich for audiences and since many people don't know what munich reinsurance is why don't we just tell them why they've been around for a hundred years so what is made of sure so before i joined was i don't come from an insurance background it's the simplest definition is that it's insurance for insurance companies so reinsurance is were not really the face to the purchaser so insurance is something that people buy rights if you think about the  wildfires in california if one insurance company were to have had insurance on that they'd be out of business there's no insurance company large enough to handle that so on the back end reinsurance companies come in and they help spread out that risk or mitigate that risk less formal as i've been there so we've introduced a couple of new policies i would say flex forward was a one so we encouraged managers to start thinking about letting their employees work from home more often if it's possible if the job allowed  working remotely if they could so that's something that we start to do a much better job of the other thing is we have a dress for your day policy so instead of just like a jeans friday we took it another step starting earlier this year and we can now dress as we want for the day we're adults so we make the decision for meeting with a client we might dress up if we're going to be at our desk all day we might we be in jeans so it's you know this kind of you think of the company as maybe more of a formal professional company which it is but at the same time we can make decisions and kind of dress and be comfortable as we choose we have a fitness center on site we have a gorgeous campus we're also very green so munich in germany has a really strong mission to be paperless and to be a lot more green and we've really taken on that cause here in princeton where we park under solar panels which not only power the buildings but keeps us try when it's raining or snowing so that's but when when we have our own garden so some of the salad bar that's doubles come from the garden on our campus ok our fitness center and conference center were fully rebuilt a few years ago and the building is platinum leaves certified and if you're not familiar with those feelings it just means that says green is can be basically so we're really proud of all of those things when you leave your office the lights turn off right so we try to be as green as we can be on our campus which i think people enjoy as well it's not yeah it's an easy place to be during the day  so these some of the positions that we recruit for are pretty data in that they're structured say an actuary if we hire an actuary that's someone that had to choose life and health or property and casualty early in their career they've had to pass a certain number of exams that is what it is to become an accredited actuary and to rise in the ranks so actuaries kind of that sort of role has stayed the way it was and i see that going forward but to answer question most positions we've had to change the way we think first of all there's a talent gap in the insurance industry that's widely known so there are a lot of people who may be retiring in the next five to ten years and the most recent pol showed that when college students were asked how many were interested in surance or reinsurance four percent said yes only four percent yes well so we need to one get more people interested but two we had to start thinking differently about the types of candidates we were looking at for all different types of roles so we've really embraced looking at a diverse slate of candidates for roles we might have used to say give me the same person that did exactly the same thing in the same industry in the past we can't do that anymore  other thing is we've really embraced diversity as a whole in that you know you look at statistics mckinsey had a report recently that showed a company that's gender diverse ethnic clay diverse financially will do better by percentage  points so it's really something that we've started looking at broader profiles more diverse profiles for positions not that and that's reflected in the kids that you're looking to hire to absolutely right and where do you look as far as when you're looking say you're doing job fairs  drug markets are you looking at the traditional colleges universities or do you do alternate job fairs or you know how do you get how do you get your name out there so people that with you so a couple things we have a i will say that in in the reinsurance world munich reinsurance americas very well known for one of the largest reinsurers in the world so if you're in the business you know i mean if you're not familiar with reinsurance you have no idea who we are right here so we've had to one advertise for folks we want from outside the industry inside it's a little bit easier because there are a number of large players and it's kind of a finite number so we know each other so a lot of times we are pulling from other companies but that limits that diversity i just talked about so right we have a pipeline program coming right out of college u that is for graduate trainee s and we've done actuarial and claims and underwriting we're doing some predictive analytics so we have like a one of the have to to your rotation program where we look at college programs that have risk management or could be science it could be business administration we look for students that are really interested in getting into one of those fields and we tend to get a really nice response so we get to bring on students put them through a program where they do classroom training they do on the job training they travel to munich they meet international students and then by the time they come out of our program they're ready to go and some local programs that are wonderful certainly not an all inclusive list but some are temple st john st joe's they have really strong risk management programs that we have had a lot of success with the great yeah that's great and a lot of times you have a lot of students students do watch the show you know and they're wondering if they're watching i'm sure they're thinking well maybe that's something i have thought about you know that type of field you know insurance you know maybe if you sell the four percent are interested right maybe the perception you know needs to be changed but if those students are listening you know what majors some work experience are helpful for anyone that wants to get into the reinsurance or entrance industry so i think it's a really wide range depending on the field they want to go into right so risk management is the most obvious answer for those types of programs that prepare them really well for insurance types of roles there's actual actuarial science math stats econ now that analytics is becoming so popular anything that has to do with data science and that sort of thing we're looking at as well ok so  you need to be a good writer depends on the position ok yeah i mean for the most part yes there's a lot of communication that goes on either between employees or with clients so i would say most roles you should be but some a lot more than so i'll take that into parts of data analytics we've started hiring quite a few data scientists data engineers statistical model or every time i close a position another one pops up so we tend to embed them in the business or so we have it reinsurance side obviously but we also have a primary side and so we've started to put people into the business now some have insurance background and some don't and so the really have to learn the business because ultimately we want them to help us come up with solutions to  data issues or data sets that we need to find solutions for on the innovation side we've kind of gone full tilt and integration we have a division called new strategic markets this came about because we wanted to start looking at things like autonomous vehicles driverless cars they're not quite here but they're going to need insurance they're going to need all kinds of information right to be up and running and so we got in on the ground floor i would say with that but we needed a division that could take risks and not worry about a loss not worry about it not working out and our main pillars our main divisions really couldn't do that so we created this third division to take on these types of things so right now they're looking at autonomous vehicles they're looking at insurance on demand and it's really thriving we're adding to that division we're in the market talking about those things we're out in silicon valley with us so we have people out there called you know scouts and they're really just embedding themselves with startups learning what they're doing what they need you know is there a way we can partner either helping them with from an insurance perspective or even taking the product that they're creating sharing that with clients to help their customers or using it ourselves ok and how's that going to go for really well you know so interesting so different so refreshing just we have our standard products and then you see products popping up all over the place that are new or different and we're very used to working with large data sets ok there's no there is no data for driverless cars right so you have to figure out how an actuary going to price house an underwriter going to under experiences you know during the process and i think a lot of times people wonder like how does the whole insurance and reinsurance you know field business work you know how does it really if you really get through to somebody when you really really need them you know you have good customer service you know response as far as you know dealing with people yeah so for reinsurance we're never dealing directly with the public right because we're ensuring there terrence kearney so we have that really good relationship with our clients now a couple of our  affiliated companies like american modern and ohio or hartford steam boiler in connecticut they specialise specifically american modern deal directly with the public so they provide insurance for jet skis motor homes kind of like toys that people purchase right collector cars so their customer service is amazing they actually have this huge space where the customer service people will go and learn to  put back together maybe of the collector car or learn all the pieces of it so when someone calls and says my steering wheel x y z is all yes i've i've worked on that car i can you know it's it's pretty amazing what they do they're it's really important right so once you attract someone you need to retain them and so i think we do a nice job of that one of the things we do is work global company so in the u s our headquarters are in princeton and all of our work is domestic but really our parent is in munich germany and so we are in over we have sixty offices around the globe so people who are interested in that sort of thing maybe travel or in our rotation on assignment we have opportunities for that so they can travel to other countries the same time perhaps they don't want to do that people come here people around the world are interested in coming to the u s so there's that opportunity to interact with colleagues from around the globe we also have really strong employee resource groups so like a women's network a young professionals group we have a green team they're having a seed exchange this week i know it's a soup kitchen so you bring in seeds from different plants and then you exchange so if you have like a really nice tomato plant ok you might want to i don't know they're explaining to cut off part of it and then you can share that with other people and i'm going to go to it and find out but there are all different types even toastmasters right where you learn how to public speak it's ways for people to get up from their silo get up from their desk or people they talk to every day and find people on campus that they may want to connect with or didn't even know about because we have about a hundred people on the princeton campus ok who are up you read the blogs there unfortunately you know we do have bike rack company in here right now would you think they'd say what they feel about what they're most proud of at the company what you think they may say so our average tenure last time i checked was fourteen years so people see us as a place to stay grow hopefully retire from i think they're proud of that i think they're proud of the name we are a financially responsible company we are our product is really good we put a lot of pride into what we do we have really smart people who are also friendly it's a very easy place to be so i think that people enjoy working there it's not i said this before but it's an easy place to be during the day and i think we get nice employee referrals which speaks volumes right you wouldn't tell your friend to come work for us if you didn't think it was a good place to be so i think people are proud of not only our product but our campus that's good that's good so let's talk a little about the  anniversary we are looking forward so we've had some of vents where we've shown people kind of some of the products we're working on that are innovative maybe other divisions didn't get to see what others were working on fun stuff we've given out you know sweat shirts with one hundred on it our campus has been decorated colorfully with different hundred symbols on it so it's really brought a lot of life to the campus but it is kind of our opportunity to look forward and keep looking forward rather than to reflect back o during the course of the year so just those large events where we were doing words with products and things like that we've had a couple of those that were tied to the anniversary but nothing like we haven't really done a party like a traditional anniversary party it's more of these future focused right where we want to go right so has munich reinsurance really set that and you know develop a strategic plan over the next five years or have any vision for the future as far as you know where you want where you want to prepare to be the couple years from now i think it's a balance so part of it is all that innovation work i was mentioning earlier that is future focused on so you know autonomous vehicles aren't technically here yet right but we're ready and we're part of that the other thing is we need to be so if there's something in five years that we're not anticipating now right we want to be able to be in on that so it's kind of that balance of our current products are working so let's keep going with those let's create new products as we see a need an example as there was a flood product created within our reinsurance division that didn't exist after sandy there so there was this gap we saw and a need for this flood reinsurance product on the back end for insurers and so we created it and it's been a huge success so things like that we want to make sure we don't forget about our tried and true products but we also want to be quick on our feet to adjust ok so one of the terms companies are looking out for each for us you know why should they say you know what the company i want to go with is munich why would they want to go with munich as opposed to anybody else i think that we've proven ourselves over all this time you can look at our track history and see that we are strong our client management and our relationships are really strong we are responsive and i kind of said we don't have customer service for customers but we do have it for our clients and we are always at speaking engagements we are learning all the time in attending seminars our folks are out in the market quite a bit and so i think that we can provide it expertise we can provide advice some of our clients are smaller we call them regional clients sometimes they need a little bit more guidance than maybe like a big national company wide and so we approach those two differently right and so we custom we tailor to what our clients need ok well at present talk about companies and the services they provide as we have already done we talked about what they give back to the community you know is music and well the community  volunteer efforts or we organize in our main office that are also in our branches in chicago and new york we have a fence we put together that employees can just sign up for and the company has put them together whether it's  stop hunger now we went to a place called marty's place this year which is a place for retired animals yes so you can you should volunteer day there you can use it on your own the other thing we do is we have our summer interns put together a fund raising effort to establish further you know corporate structures throughout the united states is there any expansion ideas that are being floated around for the next hundred years or so and nothing that i'm aware of but it is something that's really important to our president our employees really do you value that you know when you asked earlier what are people most proud of you that's also one of them those lists fill up to volunteer on our volunteer days so i think that absolutely even marty's place that i just mentioned where the retired dogs go that's a new one that we just added so we're we have a charitable giving committee that reviews all of these things people can get matching donations for charities that they're involved with so i think that yeah there's no plans to stop any of that it's funny you should mention the animal thinks i know you very big at the animal rescue yourself and i have volunteered some for that's something that's near and dear to her it is i didn't even spearhead that one so someone else also as well but sure you're involved in it that are absolutely that's great that's great so anything else that we have missed about music that's going on right now that we just like the public to be aware of i think we touched on quite a few things i would say that if insurance is something armed reinsurance particularly about you've overlooked or not even thought of as a career path there are so many things you can do there even if you're not someone who is insurance focused course we have accounting jobs we have human resources jobs we have you know positions for people that may not want to directly work with insurance there are other opportunities for people as well so i would say give it give it a lock it will work out ok for all students out there you know the world of insurance is a growing field and it's something they should get a double look at and maybe something that you might wan out and contact karen and you know contact her at munich reinsurance and see what she has to say chris you know they're always looking for good people and you know would like to you know market the future generations to make sure that the current generation as they in and then we also find a lot of people respond to india dot com and between those two sources we tend to get a nice response we've started to think about focusing on targeted recruitment you know where else can we go for people who don't look at those two sites right and so we're still building our plan with that but we do i think linked in and indeed you touch so many people everyone should have access to that we tend to get a nice response not they were looking for for coming on time thank you for inviting us that's great well i'm a go through and i thank you very much for watching we are going to have some more guests coming on in future weeks and hopefully you will continue to watch us as we grow our station this  season of being on the air and we look forward to having many more seasons to come so until that time until next week i'm a ghost and thank you for watching stay healthy stay active stay focused and i'll see you next week have a good night