Another spring, another flood of new college graduates. Yet a job market study completed by the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows only 40 percent of businesses overall anticipate an increase to their rates of college hiring this year, and 60 percent plan no increase or a reduction. That means it should be a buyer's market for employers–including insurance agents and brokers. Yet our industry continues to struggle, as it has for years, to attract recent college grads. In fact, the Griffith Insurance Education Foundation reports that the number of students coming into the workforce is only filling 10 to 15 percent of the insurance industry's current need.

Read "Hiring the next generation."

The agents and brokers at Assurex Global, which includes more than 110 independent firms worldwide, have emphasized the importance of a thoughtful, planned approach to reach this younger generation, known as millennials. Not only do they bring vigor and energy to a firm, but the recent Young Producer Study, conducted by Reagan Consulting, shows a healthy agency has a weighted average shareholders' age below 55 and a weighted average producers' age under 50. As a group, millennials are confident, focused and team-oriented. They're loyal, too–a 2006 New Paradigm study shows college graduates hope to have "one or two" rather than "many" jobs over the next 10 years.