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Diversity in Actuarial Recruitment: Current Barriers and Practical Interventions

Breaking the Barrier: Diversity and Inclusion in Actuarial Recruitment

The actuarial profession has spent a decade talking about diversity and publishing data on it. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, with more than 34,000 members in 129 countries, publishes demographic data on its key boards each year and has reported on the diversity of the profession as a whole. The conversation is not new. What has changed less is the hiring brief, and the brief is where most of the narrowing happens.

This guide is written for employers who hire actuaries and actuarial students, in insurance, reinsurance, consulting and pensions. It sets out where the pool gets narrowed, usually without anyone intending it, and what can be changed at each stage. It does not offer a diversity programme. It offers a hiring process that stops excluding people it never meant to exclude.

Why is diversity in actuarial recruitment still a problem?

Because the route into the profession is long, expensive and dependent on early access to information, and because hiring briefs tend to describe the last successful hire rather than the work.

Qualifying takes years of examinations alongside full time work. Exam fees, study leave and materials are usually paid by the employer, which means the first job decides whether the person can afford to qualify at all. A candidate who did not hear about the profession until after university, or who studied at an institution recruiters do not visit, starts behind and stays behind.

The second cause is quieter. When a team has hired the same profile for years, the brief for the next hire describes that profile: the same degree subjects, the same universities, the same number of exams passed by the same age. None of this is required by the work. It is required by habit. Our guide to recruitment practices for 2026 sets out why diagnosing the brief before sourcing matters more than any other step, and that principle applies here with unusual force.

Where does actuarial hiring narrow the pool?

At five points: the degree filter, the exam count, the university list, the interview case, and the first year after joining.

Stage

What usually happens

What it excludes

Degree filter

Actuarial science, mathematics or statistics required

Economists, physicists, engineers and computer scientists who pass the same exams

Exam count

A minimum number of passes for the grade

Career changers and people whose first employer did not fund study

University list

Sourcing from a fixed set of institutions

Strong candidates from everywhere else, which is most places

Interview case

A technical problem in the interviewer’s own specialism

Candidates with equal ability in a different line of work

First year

Study support left to the line manager’s discretion

People without a network who do not know what to ask for

Each of these is defensible on its own. Together they select for a person who found the profession early, studied the expected subject at an expected place, was funded through exams and had someone to show them how the system works. That is a narrow group in any country. In India, where the profession is growing quickly and the qualified population is small, it is narrower still.

How does this play out in India?

In the Indian searches we work on, the qualified actuarial pool is constrained, employers fund the exams, and insurers and global capability centres are competing for similar profiles.

That combination makes every proxy in the brief more expensive than it is elsewhere. A degree list or a fixed set of institutions removes a larger share of a smaller pool. Employers who insist on a qualified actuary for work that a student with the right exams could do under supervision are competing for the same few people while those who could grow into the role go elsewhere. The wider brief is not a diversity measure in India. It is the only way to staff the function.

What does a wider brief look like?

A wider brief describes the work, states which requirements are essential for the first year and which can be learned, and removes proxies that stand in for ability.

Start by writing down what the person will actually do in the first twelve months. For a pricing role, that may be building and checking models, presenting to underwriters and documenting assumptions. Then ask which of the listed requirements is evidence of ability to do that, and which is a proxy. A degree subject is a proxy. Exam passes are evidence of one kind of ability and nothing else. A named university is neither.

Replace the proxies with observable evidence. Instead of a degree list, ask for demonstrated quantitative work, in any field. Instead of a minimum exam count, state the exams the role needs within a year and offer study support to reach them. Instead of a university list, source from the exam pass lists and the professional bodies’ student registers, which are open to everyone who has passed.

This is not lowering the bar. It is describing the bar accurately, then measuring people against it rather than against a memory of the last hire. The candidates it admits still have to pass the same case and the same exams.

How should actuarial candidates be assessed?

With a structured case that resembles the real work, scored on defined criteria by more than one interviewer, and with the same case given to every candidate.

Unstructured interviews reward familiarity. A candidate who sounds like the interviewer, studied where the interviewer studied and worked in the interviewer’s line of business will be rated higher on average, and the panel will not notice. A structured case removes most of that advantage.

Give every candidate the same problem, drawn from the role rather than the interviewer’s specialism, with an incomplete data description and one constraint. Ask what they would check first, what assumption they would challenge, how they would explain the result to a non actuary. Score problem framing, technical reasoning and communication separately, before the panel discusses the candidate. Disagreement between scorers is useful; it usually points at a criterion that was never defined.

Our inclusive hiring playbook covers the general method for structured, evidence based assessment across roles. The actuarial specific point is that the case must not favour one line of work. A life pricing problem given to a general insurance candidate tests familiarity, not ability.

What keeps people in the profession after they join?

Funded study time that is actually protected, a named mentor who is not the line manager, and a route to work that uses the person’s judgement before they are fully qualified.

Attrition among actuarial students is rarely about ability. It is about the gap between promised study support and the support that survives a busy quarter. Employers who ring fence study days, publish the exam budget and track pass rates by cohort keep more of the people they hired. Those who leave it to line managers lose the students who did not know they were allowed to ask.

Mentoring matters more for people without a network in the profession. The IFoA’s Actuarial Mentoring Programme exists for exactly this reason, and an employer can run the same idea internally: a qualified actuary outside the reporting line, meeting the student regularly, whose job is to explain how the profession works.

What should an employer change first?

The brief. Everything downstream inherits it.

Take the next actuarial vacancy and rewrite the requirements as first year outcomes. Remove the degree list and the university list. State the exams needed within twelve months and the support offered to reach them. Replace the interview with a structured case. Then measure the shortlist against the one before it. In our actuarial searches, widening an unnecessarily narrow brief has often created more movement than simply increasing outreach against the same brief.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Do we need an actuarial science degree requirement?

No. The professional exams test the required knowledge. Many qualified actuaries hold degrees in mathematics, economics, physics, engineering or computer science, and the degree filter removes them before anyone speaks to them.

Yes, if the case reflects the work at the level being hired. Experienced candidates are usually the strongest supporters once they see that it replaces guesswork about fit with evidence of ability.

Compare the composition and quality of the shortlist before and after the brief was rewritten, then track first year retention and exam progress by cohort. Measure the process, not the headcount.

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