SPS Insures LISI Hiring Success
Six years ago, a small business in San Mateo, Calif., took a giant leap into a market it thought it knew well. Along the way, it found itself forging through unfamiliar territory.
On the other side of the country emerged a capable guide, Success Performance Solutions of Lancaster, Pa., a workforce consulting firm specializing in online employee assessment solutions.
LISI, an insurance wholesaler, bought a company in southern California in 2000, significantly increasing its presence in the market as well as the size of its work force.
LISI is a service-oriented venture founded by 1977 by Phil Lebherz, chairman and chief executive officer. Its clients are insurance brokers looking for the best packages to offer employers in a state that mandates health-care coverage be available to all of its 6.5 million residents.
LISI leaders believe in what they have to offer and were ready to take on the market.
They also were eager to spread the company’s family-friendly and community-focused culture to each of its five new offices.
Word spread quickly.
“We found people really liked us and wanted to work with us,” said Becky Patel, president. Today, its work force has grown by nearly 600 percent, as it services thousands of brokers.
But call it a blessing in disguise … in reverse. Suddenly, LISI, a company that considers itself a swami in the new age of employee satisfaction, had a people problem.
LISI knows the insurance business, but Success Performance Solutions knows people.
Success Performance Solutions’ mission is to “help employers take the hassle and guesswork out of hiring and managing employees,” according to SPS founder and president Dr. Ira S. Wolfe.
LISI’s nucleus sales force, born and thriving in San Mateo, was struggling to clone itself at its five other office sites. But employees weren’t all on the same page. What was happening in Los Angeles was not being matched in Sacramento, said Patel, who has been with LISI for 22 years.
LISI decided to create a model of its top-selling sales people, and hire candidates who fit the criteria.
“We needed a sales force that can understand the various insurance concepts and offer the best possible solution for customers,” said Arash Farahvashi, LISI’s strategic business development manager. “We want sales people who are savvy and can think fast on their feet,” he said. “It’s not easy to find that.”
Wolfe used his proprietary Criteria One® process, a whole-person approach to finding and hiring the right people for the job. His approach looks beyond education and experience, focusing on essential competencies as well as behavioral styles, business values and skill related personality traits. The outcome is a predictable method to match employees to the job, team and company culture.
Success Performance Solutions developed a profile of LISI’s top-producing salespeople that LISI used for recruiting, screening and interviewing both outside and inside salespeople.
LISI’s model plan worked. Almost too well.
Outside sales grew so strong that inside sales people were being handed 75 percent of the customer-service demands. “Customer service is what determines whether our business relationships last,” Faravashi says. Not all sales folks are effective in the customer-service world of perpetual follow-through. “As time passed, we realized something was not right,” Patel said. “We realized we had to change the inside sales position to a customer-service one.”
LISI turned again to Success Performance Solutions. Wolfe took the salesperson recruitment model and modified it to screen LISI’s inside sales people, or those who had become the company’s de facto customer service employees.
It turned out some of those inside sales people were suited for field work. Some realized they were in the wrong job altogether, and others identified their customer-service strengths. “Ira blew our minds,” Patel said. “He put us on the offensive rather than the defensive.”
Guided by Success Performance Solutions, LISI formed teams made up of two salespeople, or regional sales managers, and a customer-service representative.
Success Performance Solutions’ proprietary systems enabled LISI to align people who would create solid teams, Faravashi said. “Ira helped us match the right personalities. For example, putting a detail-oriented person with a big-picture guy,” he said.
“We have the right people, and now we have the right system in place that motivates our employees,” Patel said.
The next step for LISI was to assess its office managers. Again, some found they were better suited for other things and left the company, mostly on good terms. Yet others have stayed and have identified areas where they are strong as well as where they need to learn and improve.
“Success Performance Solutions brought us clarity,” Patel said. “Now we are going one step further and asking top management to go through management and leadership assessments.
Faravashi agreed. “Working with Success Performance Solutions, our training is systematic and improvement at LISI is ongoing. The whole bottom can fall out without the right process,” he said.
Wolfe said: “Our whole process ties people to a business’ strategy. We help a company find the people with the skills that get the company where it wants to go.”
As a next step, Wolfe just completed an employee engagement survey for LISI, their first since 2002. With the rapid growth in workforce and business, Patel wanted to understand the effect all the changes might have had on employee morale.
“We are applying Success Performance Solutions’ system at every level,” Patel said. “When you understand what you have to work with, you have more tools to succeed.”
About LISI
LISI has been in business since 1977 and is California’s largest general agency with six offices statewide: San Mateo, Sacramento, Fresno, Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
Visit www.lisibroker.com.
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