Category: Blog

The Adjuster Shortage Is Not a Hiring Problem

Ask any claims executive about their biggest constraint and the answer is people. Experienced adjusters are retiring faster than they are being replaced, institutional knowledge is walking out the door, and every carrier is recruiting from the same shrinking pool. The industry has diagnosed this as a talent pipeline problem and responded accordingly: training academies, university partnerships, recruiting campaigns.

The investment behind those efforts is real. The ASE Education Foundation was just awarded a $25 million, four-year workforce development grant from the US Department of Labor, and community colleges are running high school summer camps to feed collision programs. Those efforts are worthwhile and insufficient, because the diagnosis is incomplete. The claims industry does not just have too few adjusters. It has a workforce model that guarantees the shortage will be felt at the worst possible moments, no matter how many people it hires.

Claims demand is spiky by nature. A hail system generates thousands of assignments in a weekend across three states, then nothing for a month. A workforce built on fixed, geographically anchored employment can only respond to that pattern two ways: carry permanent capacity for peak demand, which no CFO will fund, or staff for average demand and fail during every surge, which is what actually happens. The shortage the industry experiences during CAT events is not primarily a headcount gap. It is the predictable output of matching a fixed-supply model to a variable-demand business.

The retirement wave sharpens a second design flaw: expertise is trapped in geography. A thirty-year appraiser’s judgment is valuable everywhere, but a field-only model can apply it exactly one driveway at a time, in one metro area. As experienced people become scarce, the cost of confining each one to a service radius compounds. Virtual and desk work is usually discussed as a cost play. Its more important property is that it is an expertise-distribution technology: it lets scarce judgment touch files anywhere, and it keeps veterans producing years after they stop wanting a truck and a ladder.

So the strategic question is not how to hire the old workforce back into existence. It is how to build claims capacity as a network rather than a roster: a core of employed professionals, an elastic layer of independent field capacity that expands under surge, and virtual and desk workflows that let the most experienced people cover the most ground. That model treats spiky demand as the design input rather than the exception, and it treats every experienced adjuster, wherever they sit, as capacity the whole operation can draw on. The industry’s talent crisis is real, but it is being aggravated by nostalgia for a staffing model built for a different demand curve. The organizations that thrive through the retirement wave will not be the ones that recruited hardest. They will be the ones that redesigned how capacity works, so that the people they have, and the people they can reach, are never in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sources
  • ASE Education Foundation, $25 million four-year workforce development grant from the US Department of Labor (2026).
  • Repairer Driven News reporting on collision repair education pipeline programs (2026).

Silence Is the Most Expensive Part of a Claim

The claims industry prices many risks with precision. It has actuarial tables for hail, models for hurricanes, thresholds for total losses. It has never seriously priced the risk it manufactures internally every day: the cost of a policyholder who does not know what is happening with their claim.

Watch where claims actually go wrong. Department of insurance complaints are rarely filed over the settlement number alone. They are filed after weeks of unreturned calls. Attorneys enter files not at the moment of disagreement but at the moment of uncertainty, when a policyholder concludes that silence means something is being hidden. Escalations, supervisor demands, social media blowups: trace them backward and the trigger is almost never the outcome. It is the gap between updates, and the story the policyholder wrote to fill it.

That last part deserves emphasis, because it is the mechanism. A claim with no information is not experienced as neutral. People fill silence with the worst available narrative, and every additional quiet day makes that narrative more adversarial. By the time contact resumes, the organization is no longer managing a claim. It is managing a relationship that has already been renegotiated, in absentia, on the worst possible terms. The eventual cost shows up as attorney involvement, longer cycle times, higher settlements and lost renewals, none of which get booked to the line item that caused them.

Which is why status visibility should be reclassified. The industry files communication under customer experience, a soft discipline with soft budgets. The evidence argues it belongs under severity control. An update that costs nothing to send prevents cost chains that run to five figures. Proactive visibility, showing the policyholder that the appraiser arrived, that the estimate is in review, that the next step has an owner, is one of the few interventions in claims with essentially no downside and compounding upside. It is loss adjustment expense working as loss prevention.

There is an honest objection: sometimes there is nothing new to report. But that mistakes what an update is for. “Still in review, next step is X, here is who owns it” is information, and it is the exact information that keeps the policyholder from writing their own version. The standard worth adopting is simple and measurable: no file goes silent. Not no file goes slow, which is sometimes outside anyone’s control, but no file goes quiet, which never is.

Claims organizations audit indemnity accuracy relentlessly and audit silence never. Yet silence is the one variable that turns routine files into expensive ones, and it is entirely self-inflicted. The cheapest severity program in the industry is telling people what is happening. It is remarkable how few operations are built to do it.

Modern Vehicles Broke the Repair-Versus-Total Math

For decades, the repair-versus-total decision was arithmetic at the margins. Most damaged vehicles were obviously repairable, a small share were obviously gone, and appraisers spent their judgment on a thin band in between. That world has quietly ended.

The industry’s largest claims dataset, analyzed in CCC Intelligent Solutions’ 2026 Crash Course report, put total loss frequency at a record 23.1 percent in 2025, the highest ever recorded, with average repair costs climbing toward five thousand dollars. Calibrations for camera and sensor systems now appear on more than a quarter of repairable appraisals, up 30 percent in a single year, each adding hundreds of dollars and another step where documentation can fail. Meanwhile the fleet keeps aging, which pushes vehicle values down while repair complexity pushes costs up. Those two curves are converging, and every point of convergence turns another band of vehicles into borderline calls.

Nearly one in four claims now ends in a total loss, which means the borderline is no longer the margin. It is the job. And that changes which moment in the claim carries the most leverage. The industry has spent years optimizing the back half of the file: repair cycle time, shop throughput, supplement management. But when a growing share of vehicles sits within a calibration or a hidden-damage finding of the total threshold, the decisive act is the first appraisal. A thorough one, with complete photographs and calibration requirements captured up front, routes the vehicle correctly on day one. A thin one sends a doomed repair into a shop, burns weeks, and arrives at the same total loss with rental, storage and teardown costs attached.

This is why supplement frequency deserves more attention than it gets. A supplement is often described as a cost event. On a borderline vehicle it is really a decision-quality event: evidence that the original appraisal missed enough of the damage picture that the repair-versus-total call was made on incomplete information. As repair complexity rises, every missed calibration line and undocumented sensor is not just dollars added later. It is a wrong turn taken earlier.

The operational conclusion runs against the industry’s reflexes. The instinct under cost pressure is to make the first inspection faster and cheaper. The math now argues for the opposite: make the first inspection more complete, because the expensive error is no longer a slow appraisal. It is a wrong one. Front-loading appraisal quality is the cheapest severity control available in a market where the totaled quarter of the claim volume is decided, one borderline vehicle at a time, by how good the first look was.

Vehicle technology will keep compounding this. Collisions themselves are getting rarer, with Allstate’s driver data showing the average US driver now goes 10.86 years between crashes, but the vehicles involved carry ever more sensor content spreading through the fleet faster than vehicle values are rising. Fewer claims, each more complex and closer to the total threshold: the borderline band widens every model year. The organizations that treat the first appraisal as the highest-skill, highest-leverage step in the claim, rather than a commodity task to be compressed, are positioning themselves on the right side of arithmetic that is not going to reverse.

Sources
  • CCC Intelligent Solutions, Crash Course 2026 report (total loss frequency, average repair cost, calibration frequency).
  • Allstate America’s Best Drivers data (collision frequency of once every 10.86 years for the average US driver).
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