Requesting a (Second) Hire

Career Topics General
1

Hey all,

I find myself in a position of being a solo actuary at a small company. In brief, it is somewhat of a startup that split off of another mid-size insurer to specialize in a branch of the business.

I’m basically doing my best at completing 2 jobs. It’s briefly sustainable, but I can’t see myself sticking around past 2026 if I’m doing it all myself. I need another hire.

I expect my upcoming performance review will be very strong, and I need to make this clear. We have plans for children, and I can accept that a handful of weeks per year will be in the 50-60 hour range, but the current pace can’t keep up. I would find another job before we have a kid.

We’ve delayed having a kid until the time is right. Without inviting snark that “you’ll never be ready”, I don’t think we’re ready to go in today, but we’re approaching that point. I’ll delay through 2026 to finish out the difficult year-end at work, but that’s it. I’m not putting off through 2027 for a job.

However, the company, while not tanking, is not rolling in free cash. I’ve brought up the idea of a new hire to my boss (the CFO) a few times, and he has always responded in the positive direction, but never with a date attached. He mentioned hiring perhaps a non-exam data analyst or a student headed toward ACAS. (It’d be important to me that if we get a student, they get their study time.)

But I’m looking for ideas on how to approach this. I have a few projects in mind I’ve wanted to do, but don’t have the time. My boss is aware I’m working significantly beyond 40 hours at the busy times, and gives me free PTO - but it’s never close to compensating, and I’m betting this year I’ll roll over my max allowed PTO anyway.

I can always step out to another job. However, this job is giving me a lot of opportunity, and the salary is better than what the surveys would indicate for my resume. So I’d really rather convince my boss to hire another analyst.

Any tips to turn this from a whiny desire to a serious request to be considered? I don’t want to imply I’d leave, but also, I’d leave.

2

Hi! You’re me 3 years ago! (sorta)

I was the only actuary for 1.5 years after taking the job (many 50-60 hr weeks for a year or so). Hired a data person first for efficiency gains/modernizing, and an actuarial student more recently. I did not have the same hurdles with respect to indecision on hiring though. They kinda let me do what I want for the most part. My advice there would be to put in the prep work on a job posting, and pitch the actual posting/job description (and projected salary) as opposed to pitching the idea of a job. If you present something more concrete, you’ll get a more concrete answer if nothing else. The sincerity of putting it together should be a trigger for senior management.

I’m assuming you may have had prior experience with hiring folks given you’ve found yourself leading this spinoff, so I don’t know if you’re looking for general hiring advice. I’ll stow that for now.

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I have not had experience leading a hiring process, though have been involved in interviews and had input into the process. Would be my first time handling the whole process, though.

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The first thing that comes to my mind:

  • List out your current duties and split them into three categories:
    • Things a (qualified) actuarian should do
    • Things a (qualified) actuarial-student could do
    • Things a data-person can do
  • Attach approximate time/costs for you to complete things
  • Attach approximate time/costs for someone else to complete the same thing

From there, you should have the information in a form that you can lay out to your leadership the benefits of an additional hire or two . . . especially on the time-to-deliver-product side of things if not actual cost savings.

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You probably have as much, if not more, exposure to it than I initially did then. My first hire was the first hiring exposure I’d had since I was hired previously. My biggest hurdle was no remote offering. We’ve always been hybrid post-covid. There appear to be a decent number of student candidates available otherwise. Credentialed folks didn’t appear to want to move without a real incentive to do so (be it money, type of work, ‘promotion’ or change in leadership responsibilities) that was different than that incentive being available at an existing workplace, even if in the future.

I do agree with VA…identify the tasks you want to hire for first, and filter your discussion points from there, both to management and potential candidates.

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I’ll have to think on how best to break my workload out into “stuff I should primarily handle” vs. “could let somebody else do”.

I’ve spent a year going through the broken and unique one-off shit to make the processes relatively uniform and stable. By the time we’ve hired somebody, ideally somebody could learn to set up the quarterly files and get them to where the data looks correct and complete for me to review, rather than me doing everything from the initial data loads.

They’d do initial reconciliation of our files against the general ledger and bring to me any situations they couldn’t figure out, then once data looks reconciled, I’d take over. That would spread the burden of quarterly sprints and give me more time to actually think about things. In between quarters I have a number of things I can think of that need improvement, but I’ve never had time.

I’ll keep thinking on this.

Just thinking out loud a bit. Thanks for the advice thus far.

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7

Yep. We’re the same. :laughing:

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