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Building a remote insurance sales team isn't a traditional choice, but when we considered the benefits — more flexibility for agents, a larger pool of top-tier applicants, and increased productivity — the addition of a virtual sales division made sense for the company I work for, Clearlink.
With remote work opportunities increasing by 115% in the United States between 2005 and 2015, we recognize that flexibility is important to employees. We've found that having a virtual sales team creates a competitive hiring practice as well as measurable benefits for our business.
As we've built our virtual teams, we've consistently looked for opportunities to do a better job through the hiring process. If you're considering creating a virtual sales team or are currently building one, we've found that the following four steps are crucial to finding, training, and keeping a top-tier team.
1. Create a relevant application process.
Our virtual roles are different than our brick-and-mortar ones, so we create entirely different job profiles for each. For our virtual roles, we target computer-savvy candidates who are self-motivated and looking for a nontraditional work environment. We purposely set up the application process to be entirely virtual, without video connection, to mimic the all-chat environment that candidates will work in if hired.
Know what specific skills your candidates will need for a virtual role and set up the application process to resemble their work environment as much as possible. If a virtual sales platform is new to your company, take the time to understand the environment you want to create before trying to hire employees.
When we open a virtual job posting, we receive several thousand applications — significantly more than we get for a brick-and-mortar role. This gives us access to top talent from different geographic areas. That's always exciting, but we still need to accurately represent what remote roles look like to make sure we're consistently finding people who will fit well in these roles.
2. Adapt the interview process to find the right talent.
Because we get such a high number of qualified applicants for our virtual roles, we need to narrow down the pool much more than we do for brick-and-mortar roles, so we've adapted the process along the way. Candidates we want to move forward with receive a Berke assessment test right after applying, and we eliminate all but the highest scorers as we move forward in the hiring process.
By contrast, we've seen insurance carriers hire candidates with assessment scores significantly lower than our candidates' due to a lack of applicants. Our robust application process allows us to hire more qualified applicants and demonstrate a competitive advantage to our potential clients.
As next steps, we take candidates through a panel interview, which sets expectations for the role, and then a one-on-one interview. We try to ensure candidates with prior experience are open-minded and haven't already created strict habits and opinions about how they think insurance sales should work. Watching for red flags that a candidate won't be receptive to training at this point will save you time and training costs down the road.
Joe Orr is the executive vice president of insurance at 
