How to Hire Underwriters: What Insurers Get Wrong in the Brief

Underwriting is the job an insurer cannot afford to fill badly and usually fills in a hurry. For insurance employers, underwriting sits alongside actuarial, claims, risk and analytics as one of the specialist functions where a poor hire can affect performance long after the appointment is made. The consequences of a poor hire arrive slowly, in a book that performs worse than it should for years, which is exactly why the decision gets less scrutiny than it deserves. The role is treated as a seat to fill before renewals, and the brief reflects that.

This page is about the hiring decision itself: what a good brief for an underwriter looks like, how to tell judgement from throughput at interview, and what an insurer can offer when it is competing with larger carriers for the same few people. If you want to know how we run an underwriting search, that is on our underwriting and claims recruitment page. This is the thinking that should happen before the search starts.

Why is underwriting hiring different from other insurance hiring?

Because the person is paid for judgement under uncertainty, and judgement does not show up on a CV.

Most insurance roles can be assessed on what someone has done. Underwriting is assessed on how someone decides. Two underwriters with identical experience can produce very different books, because one prices the risk in front of them and the other prices to hit a volume target. The CV cannot tell you which is which. Employers therefore hire on years, lines and systems, all visible, and hope the judgement comes with them. The failures are expensive because they are invisible for a while: a soft book written in a hard market looks fine until the claims arrive.

What goes wrong in the brief?

Three things: it asks for the line rather than the skill, it describes authority vaguely, and it prices the role for the last hire rather than this one.

The first error is requiring the exact line, product and market at once. That describes a handful of people, all employed and most being retained. An underwriter with strong technical grounding in a neighbouring line moves across in months. The method transfers; appetite and wordings take time to learn, and that is a training problem rather than a hiring one. Insurers who relax the line requirement and keep the technical one fill roles. Those who do the reverse do not.

The second error is silence about authority. Experienced underwriters read a brief for one thing above all: what they will actually be allowed to decide. A brief that lists systems and lines but says nothing about limits, referral thresholds or how the role sits against the head of line is describing a role the candidate cannot evaluate, and the strong ones decline.

The third is pricing the role at what the last person cost. Underwriting pay moves with the cycle and with scarcity in the line. A brief priced two years behind runs for six weeks and is then corrected under pressure, the most expensive route to the right number. If the package sits below market, say so in week one and fix it, the first rule in our note on the recruitment practices shaping 2026.

What should a brief for an underwriter contain?

The book, the authority, the reporting line, and one honest paragraph about the state of the portfolio.

• The book. Lines, size, distribution, and whether the role is growing it, remediating it or holding it. Those are three different jobs and candidates self select accurately when told which one it is.

• The authority. Limits, referral rules, and what changes after twelve months. An underwriter moving for more authority needs to see it in writing.

• The reporting line. Who reviews the work, how often, and what happens when the underwriter declines a risk a broker or a sales lead wanted written.

• The state of the portfolio. If the book has a problem, say so. Underwriters who join a remediation knowingly stay; those who discover it in month two leave, and tell the market why.

• What must be present against what can be learned. Wordings, systems and appetite can be taught. Pricing discipline and the willingness to say no cannot.

How do you assess judgement at interview?

With real risks, real declines, and a question about the one that went wrong.

The most useful hour in an underwriting interview is spent on cases, not the CV. Put two or three risks in front of the candidate, one of them marginal, and ask how they would price it, what they would need to know, and where they would walk away. The reasoning matters more than the answer, and a candidate who reaches for the tariff before asking one question about the exposure has told you what you need.

Then ask about a risk they declined and were pressured to write, and what happened. Underwriters who have never been in that position are either very junior or not being candid. Finally ask about the risk they wrote that went badly. The candidates worth hiring have a specific answer. Our note on filling a role against finding a fit covers why this kind of assessment outperforms the CV across specialist roles; underwriting is the clearest case.

Where is the scarcity?

In technically strong mid career underwriters with authority, and in anyone who combines a specialist line with a willingness to relocate.

The middle of the market is where insurers lose the most time. Trainees can be grown and heads of line are a known set. The senior underwriter with authority, who could run a line in three years, is the hire most briefs describe and fewest close, because the people who fit are not applying anywhere. For roles at this level, a retained search can make more sense than relying on advertising, because the strongest candidates are usually passive and need to be approached directly.

How should an insurer compete for underwriters it cannot outbid?

On authority, on the book, and on the quality of the referral conversation.

A regional or smaller insurer will rarely win a bidding war against a global carrier. What it can offer is real: earlier authority, a book the person can shape rather than inherit, and a short line to the people who decide appetite. Those attract one kind of underwriter and mean nothing to another, so say them plainly.

The other lever is the process. Underwriters assess for a living and notice a sloppy one. A case based interview run by someone who knows the line, a decision in days rather than weeks, and an offer that matches what was discussed all signal an employer worth joining. In a market this small the opposite signal travels too.

What about claims?

The same logic applies, with one difference: claims hires are assessed on how they handle the file that should not be paid.

Claims professionals face a version of the same test. The technical work is learnable; the judgement about when to settle, investigate or decline is what an insurer pays for. Claims briefs make the same errors and the fix is the same. Where the reporting burden on insurers has grown, as our note on the reporting standards talent gap describes for the UAE, claims and underwriting hires increasingly need to understand what their decisions look like in the accounts as well as on the file.