So far 2013 has been a busy and costly year in terms of catastrophic events and catastrophe response expenses. According to this recent article from Insurance Networking News, this year is currently on track to be the most expensive year, globally, for CAT-related losses. To date, we’ve experienced 460 loss-related natural hazards, which is a ... Year of the CAT: Is Your Catastrophe Response Plan Ready?
Do you have a formal work-at-home policy? Do you allow your employees to work from home at all? The work-at-home and telecommuting debate is top of mind. An announcement from Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, that employees would no longer be allowed to telecommute has drummed up significant media coverage. This provision to Yahoo!’s work ... Why Work-at-Home Works for Us: A Look at Telecommuting
On February 6, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stated in a letter to the American Medical Association (AMA) that there will be no more delays to the ICD-10 deadline. The following day, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) submitted a letter to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Acting Centers for CMS Administrator ... Ready or Not, Here it Comes
We made an exciting announcement this week that I consider a great milestone in our firm’s history. The Jacobson Group is going to merge with ejsSearch, the London-based insurance executive search firm specializing in assignments in the London, broader European and international markets. Through this union, we will become the leading international search and staffing ... A Great Milestone
The Jacobson Group and Ward Group have completed another iteration of the Semi-Annual Insurance Labor Market Study and the results offer a telling picture of our industry’s current landscape. Eighty-six percent of companies polled expect to grow revenue in the next 12 months. Likewise, 56 percent of respondents intend to increase staff. Both of these ... Semi-Annual Labor Market Study: The Results Are In!
The year’s first issue of PULSE of the Labor Market, the monthly supplement to our quarterly newsletter, is out and you can view it here. While the BLS reported an addition of 2,400 jobs in the insurance industry in December, the unemployment rate crept up to 3.7 percent. The average industry unemployment rate in 2012 ... PULSE of the Labor Market in 2013
At the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC) Operations Conference this year, we moderated a panel on a topic that we here at Jacobson hold close: succession planning. We brought a dynamic panel of CEOs and a board chairman together to share their personal insights gleaned from all stages of the succession process. The ... The ROI of Succession Planning
With its ruling released on June 28th, the Supreme Court has, absent an unexpected legislative repeal, cemented the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) into U.S. law. Now that the judicial challenges have run their course, there is some clarity around the impacts this law will create. In the short term, I view this ... Impacts of the Supreme Court Validation of PPACA
This year, The Jacobson Group is celebrating a remarkable milestone: our 40th anniversary. My father founded the company in 1971 to provide the niche professional recruiting services that the insurance industry required. Through aggressive expansion in the following years, the company accommodated client needs and widened its scope of services to include executive search, work-at-home ... 40 Insurance Labor Market Stats
Our business at times offers great insight into the concerns of the industry. Unusually large numbers of ‘permanent’ job openings in a specific area across multiple organizations usually mark a shift in industry trends. For instance, the growth of the use of predictive modeling, primarily in P&C personal lines, led to an emphasis on recruiting ... On Death and Taxes
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that they intend to push back the ICD-10 healthcare compliance deadline by one year to October 2014. Naturally, this news was greeted with mixed reactions. Many say the delay is necessary as organizations struggle with a massive undertaking to meet the 2013 deadline. Opponents to ... Consequences of the ICD-10 Delay
At The Jacobson Group, we take a couple of different approaches to understanding the changes in the labor market within our industry. Looking backwards is relatively easy as we can simply compile the monthly BLS data that focuses on the insurance industry and see what happened – in fact we do just that and release ... March PULSE: A Look at the Labor Market