By Doug Blair, Managing Partner — The Blair Kenner Group

Here’s a question most claims organizations never ask until it’s too late: what would happen if your VP of Claims gave notice tomorrow?

Not a hypothetical crisis — a real one. The announcement comes on a Tuesday morning. By Wednesday you’re in triage, and by Friday you’re realizing that the institutional knowledge that person carried wasn’t documented anywhere. The search that follows will take three to five months if everything goes well. In the meantime, someone is stretching to cover a role they weren’t built for, carrier relationships are getting managed on autopilot, and your claims outcomes are quietly drifting.

Most organizations in the P&C claims ecosystem treat executive hiring as a reactive event. A vacancy opens, a search begins, a hire is made, and the process ends. That model made sense in a more stable talent environment. It doesn’t hold up anymore. The bench is thin, the talent pool is specialized, and the organizations that wait until they have an open seat are consistently behind the ones that don’t.

There’s a better model. I call it the Always-On Bench — and it’s one of the most valuable things a claims organization can build.

What the Always-On Bench Actually Is

The concept is straightforward: instead of starting a search when you have a vacancy, you maintain a live, curated picture of the senior claims talent in your market — before you need them.

That doesn’t mean keeping a list of names in a spreadsheet. It means having active, ongoing awareness of who is performing well at competing TPAs, who is two years into a role and might be open to the right conversation, who just led a strong claims transformation at a regional carrier, and who in your network is positioned to step into a Director or VP role if the opportunity presented itself correctly.

For organizations that engage BKG on a retained basis, this is part of what we bring. We maintain a database of more than 60,000 professionals in the P&C claims ecosystem. We’re in regular contact with senior claims leaders who aren’t advertising that they’re open to a move — because the best candidates never are. When a client vacancy opens, we’re not starting from zero. We’re starting from a warm pool of vetted relationships.

But the model goes further than database access.

Flipping the Sequence

Traditional executive search follows a fixed sequence: a seat opens, a job description gets written, a recruiter is engaged, a search begins. Every decision is made in response to a vacancy.

The Always-On Bench flips that sequence. Instead of writing a job description in response to a departure, the most strategic claims organizations are asking a different set of questions on a rolling basis:

• Where are we most vulnerable if a key person leaves in the next 12 months?
• What does the next generation of claims leadership look like inside our organization?
• Who in the external market could accelerate our strategy — not just fill a role?

When you answer those questions before a vacancy exists, your hiring decisions become strategic instead of reactive. You’re not replacing someone under pressure. You’re selecting from a curated set of relationships that have already been identified, qualified, and in some cases, cultivated over months.

The difference in outcome is substantial. Time-to-hire compresses. Candidate quality improves. And the mis-hire rate drops — because you’re not making a $300,000 decision in 90 days under pressure.

Who This Model Fits

The Always-On Bench is most valuable for claims organizations where leadership continuity is tied directly to performance outcomes — which, in the P&C claims world, is most of them.

TPAs are the clearest fit. When a VP of Claims or Director of Operations leaves a TPA, the impact is felt immediately across carrier relationships, adjuster performance, and file quality. There’s no margin for a prolonged search when the business is built on execution. Having a pre-qualified bench for those roles is not a luxury — it’s risk management.

IME and medical management companies face a similar dynamic. The leadership roles that drive quality, compliance, and client retention are narrow and specialized. The talent pool is small. Proactive relationship-building is often the only way to access the best candidates before a competitor does.

Regional carriers and MGAs with dedicated claims operations benefit from the same thinking, particularly as they navigate the technology transition. The leaders who can run a claims operation and drive a platform migration simultaneously are rare. Identifying them before you need them is worth the effort.

The Practical Step Forward

You don’t have to implement a full talent strategy overhaul to start benefiting from this model. The most practical entry point is a simple conversation: where are your leadership vulnerabilities in claims right now, and which roles would hurt most if they went open tomorrow?

That conversation — which we have with clients regularly — almost always surfaces two or three roles that deserve proactive attention. From there, it’s a matter of building awareness in the right talent pools before urgency forces a compromised decision.

The claims talent market isn’t getting easier. The organizations that build their bench before they need it will consistently outperform the ones that don’t.

BKG places executive talent exclusively in the P&C claims ecosystem — TPAs, IME firms, medical case management, bill review, and claims technology organizations. If you’d like to think through your claims leadership bench, let’s talk.