Insurance
Specialist recruitment for the insurance industry
Life, general and health insurers come to us for the specialist talent that is hardest to hire: actuarial, risk, analytics, audit, underwriting, claims and catastrophe modelling. We know insurance deeply, because it is where the firm was built and where most of our work has always been.
Why insurers trust us
Since 2014, insurance is our deepest market, with specialist depth across actuarial, risk, analytics, audit, underwriting, claims and catastrophe modelling.
Since 2014
insurance, our deepest market
80%
screening ratio, candidates we submit get interviewed
85%
joining ratio, offers that become joiners
7 functions
the connected system an insurer runs on
The answer
How does EliteRecruitments help insurance companies hire?
EliteRecruitments helps life, general and health insurers hire specialist talent across actuarial, risk, analytics, audit, underwriting, claims and catastrophe modelling, from specialist roles to leadership. Insurance is the firm’s deepest market and the industry where it has the strongest proof, because it is where the firm was built and where most of its work has always been. It serves insurers, reinsurers and their capability centres across India and international markets.
The firm was built on actuarial recruitment, which lives mostly in insurance, and over the years that grew into the full set of specialist functions an insurer depends on. So when an insurer comes to us, they are talking to a recruiter that understands the business, the regulation and the way these functions actually work, not a generalist who treats insurance as one more sector.
That depth is why insurers come to us for the roles that matter most and are hardest to fill. Pricing and reserving actuaries, risk and model specialists, the analysts building an insurer’s data capability, the auditors and controls professionals, the underwriters pricing new and complex risks, the claims leaders, the catastrophe modellers, these are the specialist hires that decide how an insurer performs, and they are exactly where our depth is greatest.
The talent challenge
Why hiring experienced insurance specialists is so hard
Six pressures shape insurance hiring. The map below shows them at a glance, and the detail follows.
The retirement wave
Decades leaving at once
Actuarial squeeze
Long path, small pool
Hybrid demand
Insurance plus AI skills
Regulation spikes
IFRS 17, ESG, solvency
Attraction gap
Young talent looks elsewhere
Process friction
Slow offers lose candidates
Talent supply
The retirement wave
Insurance is going through one of the most significant talent shifts in its history. Across life, general and health, employers are competing for increasingly scarce specialist skills while managing an ageing workforce, evolving regulation and rapid technological change, and the hardest roles now stay open longer. The sharpest pressure is the retirement of experienced professionals: senior underwriters, actuaries, claims specialists and risk experts are leaving with decades of technical knowledge, and the pipeline of qualified successors stays thin.
Talent supply
The actuarial squeeze
Actuarial talent is the most constrained pool of all. The long qualification path, rising demand from insurers, reinsurers, consulting firms and financial institutions, and growing specialisation within the discipline mean organisations often compete for the same small group of experienced professionals, and similar shortages are emerging across underwriting, claims, catastrophe modelling, cyber risk, compliance, data science and risk management.
Market pressure
Hybrid demand, regulation spikes
Technology is reshaping roles faster than many organisations can adapt: employers increasingly need people who combine deep insurance expertise with analytics, AI, automation and digital capability, and those hybrid profiles remain scarce. Regulation adds complexity of its own. IFRS 17, evolving solvency frameworks, data privacy, ESG reporting and financial crime rules have created sustained demand, and hiring tends to accelerate around each new requirement while the supply of qualified candidates rarely keeps pace.
Operating environment
The attraction gap
Attraction is a challenge at both ends of the career. Younger professionals often see insurance as less innovative than technology, FinTech or consulting, which makes early careers pipelines harder to build, while the strongest senior specialists are passive candidates reachable only through targeted search rather than advertising.
The bottom line
Slow processes lose strong candidates
Employers must also navigate rising salary expectations, counteroffers and slower candidate mobility, and lengthy internal processes or unclear role definitions can lose strong candidates to competitors who simply move faster.
The functions we recruit
The specialist functions we recruit for insurers
An insurer depends on a connected set of specialist functions, and we recruit across all of them, linking each to the depth behind it.
Actuarial
The function the firm was built on. Pricing, reserving, capital, IFRS 17 and actuarial leadership across life, general and health insurance, the core of how an insurer prices risk and protects its balance sheet. This is our deepest area.
Actuarial practiceUnderwriting and Claims
The two ends of the insurance promise: underwriters pricing risk across traditional and emerging products, and claims professionals making good on the promise.
Underwriting and ClaimsRisk and Financial Advisory
Insurers run sophisticated risk functions, from enterprise and capital risk to model, market and operational risk, alongside the finance and advisory work that supports the business.
Risk and Financial AdvisoryAnalytics, Data and AI
Data and analytics now sit at the centre of insurance, shaping pricing, underwriting, claims and customer decisions. We recruit the analysts, data scientists and engineers building this capability.
Analytics practiceCatastrophe Modelling
For insurers exposed to catastrophe risk, the modellers, cat underwriters and exposure specialists who quantify the risk of large scale events are a specialist and scarce talent pool.
Catastrophe ModellingAudit, Controls and Compliance
Insurers need strong internal audit, controls and compliance functions as governance and regulation grow more demanding.
Audit practiceTechnology and Leadership
Insurers are modernising their technology and building engineering capability, and they need senior leaders across every function.
IT, Technology and LeadershipEach function links to its specialist practice, the insurance buyer’s route into the depth behind it.
Why insurance leaders choose us
Why insurance leaders choose EliteRecruitments
Insurance hiring is different from general recruitment. Many insurance roles need specialist technical knowledge, real industry context, and an understanding of how the functions fit together. Insurers work with us because insurance is our deepest market, because we understand actuarial, risk, analytics, audit, underwriting and claims as connected functions rather than separate silos, because we assess genuine technical capability rather than job titles, and because we focus on long term fit and lasting relationships across the insurance talent ecosystem rather than one off placements. We support both individual specialist hires and broader team building across insurance functions.
At a glance
The insurance functions we support
Core functions and the emerging, growth areas insurers increasingly hire for.
Core functions
Actuarial. Risk. Audit and controls. Underwriting. Claims. Catastrophe modelling.
Emerging and growth areas
AI and analytics. Data governance. Model risk. Automation and digital claims. Digital transformation. Capability centre leadership.
Across the value chain
From pricing and underwriting at the front to claims and reserving at the back, we recruit the whole insurance system.
The whole of insurance
Across life, general and health insurance
We recruit across the full breadth of insurance. In life insurance, that means pricing, valuation, reserving and product actuaries, alongside the risk, analytics and underwriting talent life insurers need. In general insurance, it spans pricing and reserving for property and casualty lines, underwriting across commercial and personal lines, claims, and catastrophe modelling for exposed portfolios. In health insurance, it covers the pricing, analytics and underwriting roles particular to health and medical cover.
Each part of insurance hires a little differently, and we understand those differences, the distinct skills, qualifications and market for life, general and health roles, rather than treating insurance as a single undifferentiated market. That is part of what a specialist insurance recruiter brings that a generalist cannot.
The future of insurance talent
The boundaries between actuarial, analytics, underwriting and technology are becoming less distinct. Insurers, and the InsurTech businesses reshaping the market, increasingly want professionals who combine domain expertise with analytical and technological capability. You can see it in pricing and underwriting analytics, catastrophe and risk modelling, and AI enabled claims. Because we recruit across actuarial, analytics, underwriting and risk together, we can help insurers find this hybrid talent. More on our InsurTech, Analytics and Risk pages.
Building in India
Insurers are building in India
A growing part of insurance hiring is happening inside capability centres, as international insurers build their actuarial, risk, analytics, audit and technology functions in India rather than only at home. This is one of the clearest trends in insurance talent today, and one where our depth across every insurance function, combined with our capability centre experience, is especially valuable.
Because this is now such a significant part of how insurers hire, we cover it in full on a dedicated page. If you are building or scaling an insurance capability centre in India, our insurance capability centre page shows how we help, from the first specialist hire to a full centre of excellence.
Who we serve
Who we hire for in insurance
Life, general and health insurers, from established carriers to newer entrants building their teams. Reinsurers, whose specialist pricing, capital and catastrophe needs we cover in depth on our reinsurance page. And the capability centres where insurers are building their functions in India. We work with insurers at every stage, from a single critical hire to building a function from scratch.
Most of our insurance work is in India, where our depth is greatest, and we also support insurers in the UAE, where we are active and growing, and selectively in the UK and the USA. Where an insurer is hiring across borders, the corridor between India and these markets is a natural part of how we work. See our India and UAE corridor pages.
How we assess
Specialist judgement, not keyword matching
Insurance roles are easy to get wrong if you only match on titles and keywords, because so much depends on the specific skills, qualifications and domain a role really needs. We assess genuine insurance expertise, the actuarial, risk, underwriting or analytics depth a role demands, alongside fit, before any profile reaches you. That discipline is why our insurance placements last: we screen at an 80 per cent rate and our candidates join at an 85 per cent rate, and since 2014 we have had to return fewer than fifteen fees because a placement left early. For an insurer, that means the specialist you hire is far more likely to be the right one, and to stay. See how we work
Founder led
Led by a founder who knows this industry first hand
EliteRecruitments was built by Shagun Gupta, and insurance is the industry the firm grew up in. She founded the business on actuarial recruitment, which lives at the heart of insurance, and built it into a firm covering every specialist function an insurer needs. She presides over all four specialist practices, with her deepest personal expertise in risk and genuine depth in analytics and audit, and she stays close to the actual work rather than managing it from a distance. Actuarial is our foundation; it is not our limit. For an insurer, that means dealing with a firm whose founder understands the business from the inside.
Proof
Representative insurance searches
To show the breadth of what we recruit for insurers without naming clients, our insurance mandates regularly include pricing and reserving actuaries, IFRS 17 specialists, risk and model professionals, insurance analysts and data scientists, underwriters across lines, claims leaders, catastrophe modellers, and insurance leadership, across life, general and health insurers.
Pricing Actuary
Life insurer · Mumbai
Catastrophe Modelling Analyst
General insurer · Bangalore
Head of Risk
Insurer · Gurugram
IFRS 17 Specialist
Life insurer · India centre
An illustrative insurance search
Challenge. A life insurer needed to strengthen its actuarial and risk functions at the same time, including hard to find IFRS 17 and model risk expertise, against a tight market. Approach. We drew on our deep insurance network, screened on genuine technical and domain depth, and matched on long term fit. Outcome. The roles were filled across both functions, and the senior hires are still with the insurer and have grown in their roles more than two years on.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
How does EliteRecruitments help insurance companies hire?
Is insurance EliteRecruitments’ main industry?
Does EliteRecruitments recruit across life, general and health insurance?
Does EliteRecruitments help insurers build capability centres in India?
What insurance functions are hardest to hire, and can EliteRecruitments help?
Why use a specialist insurance recruiter instead of a general recruitment agency?
Do candidates pay any fees?
Start a conversation
Talk to us about your insurance hiring
Whether you are hiring a single specialist, building an actuarial or risk function, or scaling an insurance capability centre, we would like to help. Insurance is the industry where our expertise runs deepest and where our specialist model was built, with the strongest proof and network, and a founder who understands it from the inside.
Thank you, we will be in touch shortly.
Your note goes to Shagun and the insurance desk directly.