By hiring agents and advisors from diverse backgrounds, you can grow your business, make more money, and find creative solutions. Studies show that diverse perspectives lead to better ideas and improve sales performance and innovation.
Read on to learn how a diverse workforce can benefit your business and clients alike.
Diversity Improves the Bottom Line
Diverse recruits come from a variety of backgrounds, and this is important because clients come from diverse backgrounds, as well. Diversity on your financial services team leads to diversity in your clientele, as clients often feel more comfortable working with an agent or advisor who understands their values, goals, and perspective. Multilingual candidates can be especially valuable, as they can work with non-English speakers and people who prefer to do business in their first language.
According to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, a more diverse workforce directly leads to more profitability in financial services. A more diverse company is a more profitable one. According to the report, improving gender diversity also leads to improved outcomes in risk management and company culture.
Recruiting a Diverse Agency
One solution hiring managers might consider is the use of diversity recruiting strategies. Diversity recruiting is a metric-based recruiting system that can improve hiring practices that might be biased. Instead of hiring based on a purely subjective interpretation of how qualified candidates are, candidates are assigned points using a predetermined metric that is applied to all applicants.
Attracting a diverse workforce is also important for hiring and retaining top talent from the next generation of financial advisors and insurance agents, with over one-third of employees indicating that they would not apply for a job at a company that did not have a diverse workforce.
Key Takeaway
In today's competitive climate, businesses simply can't afford to keep a workforce of people with the same experiences and perspectives. To learn more about diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, visit the NAIFA's Talent Development Center.
