Ask any insurance HR director in Brussels or Antwerp which vacancies stay open longest, and the answer rarely changes: technical underwriters and experienced claims specialists. Not leadership roles. Not IT. The quiet, essential middle of the technical organisation — the people who price risk and settle it.
We place these profiles for a living, on both sides of the Belgium–Netherlands border. The difficulty is not a temporary blip that a better job ad will fix. It is structural, and it rewards a fundamentally different approach to hiring.
Why the pool is structurally tight
An ageing technical workforce
A large share of Belgium's underwriting and claims expertise sits with professionals who joined insurers in the eighties and nineties, learned the craft over decades, and are now approaching or entering retirement. Their knowledge — of wordings, of local market practice, of when a file smells wrong — was built on the job, over years, often within a single company. When they leave, that knowledge does not transfer through a handover document. It leaves with them.
Insurers know this. Most have succession gaps in their technical teams that they discuss internally but rarely advertise. That is one reason some of the searches we run in underwriting are quiet ones.
Few graduates enter technical insurance roles
The pipeline problem compounds the retirement problem. Insurance is not a destination career for most Belgian graduates. A strong quantitative or legal profile leaving KU Leuven, UGent or UCLouvain hears from consulting firms, banks and Big Four practices long before an insurer's technical department crosses their mind. Underwriting is barely taught as a discipline; claims even less so. The result is a thin intake at the bottom of a pyramid that is losing people at the top.
The companies that do train technical talent well — and a handful of Belgian insurers and specialty players genuinely do — become, in effect, the market's finishing schools. Which leads to the third structural feature.
The poaching circle
Because almost nobody enters the market and experienced people rarely leave it, the same names circulate between the same employers. A senior non-life underwriter in Belgium can usually list the five or six realistic alternative employers for their specialisation without pausing. Their current employer can list them too. Everyone is recruiting from everyone, salaries ratchet upward in small increments, and the total pool does not grow by a single person.
This matters for hiring strategy. When the pool is closed, the question is not "how do we attract applicants?" It is "how do we become the most credible next step for a specific, known set of people who are not applying to anything?"
Why job ads fail for these profiles
Post a vacancy for a marketing manager and you will drown in CVs. Post one for a medical underwriter, a marine claims specialist or a senior liability adjuster and you will hear mostly silence — or worse, applications from adjacent profiles who want to become the thing you need, when you need someone who already is.
There are three reasons, and none of them is the quality of your ad.
The people you want are employed, busy, and not looking. A good claims specialist is measured on their portfolio. They are not browsing job boards on a Tuesday afternoon. Passive is the default state of this market, and job advertising only reaches the active fraction — which, for technical insurance roles, is small and often not the fraction you want.
Discretion cuts both ways. In a market this small, applying somewhere is a risk. Candidates assume — often correctly — that word travels. A senior underwriter will have a careful, off-the-record conversation with someone they trust. They will not upload a CV into a portal that may be screened by someone who knows their manager.
The ad describes a role; the candidate is weighing a life. For someone with fifteen years in a stable technical position, the real questions are about the quality of the book they would inherit, the underwriting authority they would hold, the person they would report to, and what happens to their pension build-up and their notice period. A vacancy text answers none of that. A conversation with someone who knows both sides does.
What actually works
Network-led search, before anything is advertised
The searches that close fastest start from a map, not a posting: who holds this specialisation in Belgium (and, where relevant, the Netherlands), who is credibly movable, and who should hear about this role from a voice they already know. That is the core of how we run contingency search for technical roles — the network comes first, and advertising, if used at all, is a supplement.
A credible approach sounds different from a recruiter cold call. It names the discipline correctly, understands the difference between a technical and a commercial underwriter, and can answer the candidate's first three questions without checking. Specialists respond to specialists. That is not a slogan; it is the observable difference in response rates.
Realistic role scoping
Many "impossible" vacancies are impossible because the scope is. A brief asking for deep pricing capability, portfolio management, broker-facing polish and people leadership in one mid-level salary band is describing three people. Part of our job — and any honest recruiter's — is to push back at intake: what does this role actually need on day one, what can be grown, and what does the realistic market for that profile look like in salary and title?
The best hiring managers treat that conversation as calibration, not criticism. The searches that follow it succeed. The ones where the wishlist survives intact tend to restart three months later with a humbler brief.
Speed of process
When a genuinely strong technical candidate becomes available, they are available briefly. Every additional week of process is a week in which their current employer counters, another insurer moves, or plain inertia wins. The mechanics matter: interviews scheduled within days rather than weeks, a maximum of two or three rounds, decision-makers in the room early, and an offer that arrives while the candidate's motivation is still warm. We have watched excellent candidates lost to nothing more dramatic than a four-week gap between rounds.
Counter-offer handling, from day one
Assume the counter-offer. In this market, a resigning underwriter or claims manager is almost always countered — the employer knows exactly how hard replacement will be. The time to address it is not resignation day; it is the first conversation. Why is this person genuinely open to moving? If the honest answer is "salary only," a counter-offer will likely keep them, and everyone's time is better spent knowing that early. If the reasons are structural — a ceiling on authority, a book they've outgrown, a strategy they don't believe in — no counter-offer fixes that, and the move holds.
The pattern behind all of it
Technical insurance hiring in Belgium is a small-pool, high-trust market. The levers that work — network, credibility, realistic scoping, speed, honesty about counter-offers — are all versions of the same principle: treat the candidate as a known professional making a considered move, not as an applicant responding to an ad. The employers who internalise that fill roles that their competitors leave open for a year.
If you are hiring in underwriting, claims or another technical discipline and the usual channels have gone quiet, we should talk. You can see how we work with employers at /employers, or browse the roles we are currently running at /jobs to get a feel for the market. The first conversation is free of charge and, if you prefer, entirely off the record.