For many insurance industry firms, the talent squeeze has become a major HR problem. In Australia, some stakeholders see it as a strategic threat reaching across broking, underwriting and claims, with the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) warning that nearly 30% of the current workforce will be at retirement age by 2030. At the same time, Aon’s 2025 Australian risk survey ranked “failure to attract or retain top talent” and “workforce shortage” as among the country’s top business risks. Across the Tasman, Hays reported 85% of hiring managers in Australia and New Zealand have skills gaps and in New Zealand those gaps are especially pronounced in financial and insurance services, where 51% of employers report them.
In this difficult hiring market, Marcus Pearson (pictured), CEO of Lockton Pacific, argues that privately owned firms can take a markedly different approach to recruitment when talent is scarce and the pricing cycle is soft.
“This is one of the advantages I really see for Lockton in the region and the market here, and that is a couple of advantages we leverage by way of our family private ownership," said Pearson. In a market where publicly listed competitors can be constantly pressured to defend margins, manage investor expectations and show capital discipline, Pearson is effectively arguing that ownership structure itself can become a recruitment strategy.
The argument lands at an interesting moment. Conditions are not uniformly bleak: Australia’s broader vacancy fill rate has improved, according to Jobs and Skills Australia, suggesting recruitment difficulty has eased somewhat since 2023. But that does not mean specialist talent is suddenly abundant, especially in advisory-heavy sectors such as insurance and financial services. In New Zealand, meanwhile, financial services is growing in economic weight, with the FSC saying the sector contributed NZ$16.1 billion to GDP in the year to June 2025 and supported 73,146 filled jobs as of September 2025, up more than 16% since May 2019. Growth, in other words, is continuing even as the skills pipeline stays tight.
Pearson suggested that this is precisely where private ownership can matter.
“We’ll run our margins deliberately and quite significantly lower than our publicly traded competitive peers, because it’s reinvested back in," he said. That reframes lower margin not as underperformance but as deliberate talent strategy. If a broker can keep investing through a downcycle, hire before demand fully arrives and avoid jerking between expansion and retrenchment, it may look more attractive to experienced producers and specialists who are tired of budget freezes and periodic cost cuts.
Lockton has often said its private ownership allows it to prioritise clients and people. For FY2025 it reported global revenue of $4 billion, with a five-year CAGR of more than 16%. Pearson’s argument is that the real competitive benefit is not just growth itself but the ability to turn growth into confidence for recruits: stable messaging, long-term investment and less fear that the next margin squeeze will be paid for in headcount.
However, publicly listed and large-scale insurers are investing in talent. Suncorp’s FY25 annual report says it kept investing in AI fluency, reskilling and employee wellbeing; 67% of Reskill graduates secured a new role at Suncorp within 12 months, and 94% remained employed by the group. Tower in New Zealand, another listed insurer, said in its 2025 annual report that “our people come first,” reported an employee engagement score of 8.2 and said it ranked in the top 5% for peer relationships in the global finance sector. These are not signs of organisations that have abandoned workforce investment.
But Pearson’s critique could be aimed more at capital structure. Aon’s annual filing says it continues to focus on “higher-margin, capital-light” businesses and to maximise value for shareholders; it repurchased 8.4 million shares for US$2.7 billion in 2025 and paid dividends as well. Marsh McLennan tells shareholders it targets raising its dividend each year and repurchasing enough stock to reduce share count; in 2024 it repurchased 4.3 million shares for $900 million and highlighted more than 900 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion over the past decade. That could illustrate Pearson’s broader point: listed firms operate under a financial architecture that naturally keeps margin, buybacks and shareholder returns in constant view.
“This year I will expand our workforce by 20% just from recruiting when most of our competition are taking headcount out," he said. "It’s not a target, but to hit our top-line growth number, we know we need to keep investing ahead of the curve, and I did the maths and that’s roughly what it will work out to.”
If that plays out, the privately owned advantage is not merely rhetorical. It means using a soft market to buy capability while others defend earnings.
