Sourcing niche actuarial talent for a leading UK financial services group

The client

Our client is one of the UK’s leading financial services and asset management companies, safeguarding its clients’ financial futures around the world. Its products and services include life insurance, investment management, pensions, annuities and lifetime mortgages.

The challenge

Despite having several actuarial providers in place, the client was struggling to secure actuarial talent of the right quality. Having already worked with the client for a number of years when she joined us at the start of 2023, Jo Frankham, associate director at Eames Consulting, saw an opportunity to revitalise the relationship and work with them again.

The solution

Based on our network of actuarial professionals, built over two decades, and our dedicated actuarial recruitment team covering the entire talent market, we demonstrated that we could provide multiple high-quality CVs for every role within a short timescale. Utilising her longstanding relationship with the hiring managers and talent acquisition team, Jo was able to have Eames Consulting added to the client’s list of providers in April 2023.

The result

“It’s not about the volume of hires – it’s about the complexity of the searches and the quality of the candidates. For those niche roles that are harder to fill, our genuine market knowledge and quality relationships allow us to quickly identify and source the best actuarial talent on the market.” Jo Frankham, Associate Director, Eames Consulting

Only 20% of the client’s actuarial roles in 2023 went out to agencies. We filled 35% of these roles across the business, making us their top actuarial provider for the year.

The client’s strong reputation in the UK insurance market is reflected in the high number of applications it receives for every role and the calibre of talent we’re asked to provide. Where we’ve particularly been able to support them is with their more challenging roles, which have remained open for some time or are particularly specialist in nature, requiring deeper market knowledge and a quality network. In these instances, fortnightly calls with the TA team have helped us to refine their requirements. Some skillsets are not immediately evident from a LinkedIn profile, which is where having an in-depth relationship with the candidate is particularly important. On one particular junior role, we presented so many quality candidates that the client decided to make multiple hires.

The future

We have regular conversations with the TA team, even when we’re not working on a role, to understand how they’re getting on and to share market info and salary data. This is all part of being a holistic talent partner providing a service that goes way beyond recruitment.

We’ve made over 15 quality, highly specialised placements from analyst up to senior manager over the last two years. Having demonstrated the quality of our network, the depth of our knowledge and our comprehensive coverage of the market through our actuarial team, we’re well placed to support the client with their future actuarial recruitment needs.

If you’re looking for a new opportunity or to hire the right talent for your team, please contact Jo at Jo.Frankham@eamesconsulting.com.