Two Cyber Markets, One Talent Pool: Why Underwriting Hiring is Getting Harder

20Cyber insurance is a fast-growing but still evolving part of the insurance industry. Globally, it generated around $15 billion in premiums in 2024, but the U.S. market saw a modest pullback after years of rapid growth. The NAIC Report on the Cybersecurity Insurance Market shows that cyber insurance is no longer one single product, but rather split into three products. While structurally written as primary, excess, and endorsements, the more meaningul divide today is between standardized admitted business and complex E&S placements. So what does that mean for talent?

The cyber insurance market is maturing, but it’s still complex. Growth has slowed after a huge surge, prices are stabilizing, claims are rising and getting more complicated, and risk is still difficult to model. Given the split in the market, there is now a need for two different types of cyber underwriters:

• Admitted: Process-driven, high-volume, and automation friendly
• E&S/Complex Underwriters: judgement driven, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to structure programs and negotiate

These skill sets don’t just differ, they often conflict.

E&S insurers dominate the market, holding about 57% of complex, high-limit business while the simpler ones move toward standard insurance markets. E&S hiring requires experience with poor data, ability to make decisions without relying fully on models, and understanding aggregation risk. However, most underwriters were trained in the admitted space and very few have deep E&S cyber portfolio experience. E&S teams are already feeling the pressure because this skill set is rare and not easily developed quickly. The industry doesn’t have enough people who can combine technical, analytical, and commercial underwriting thinking. So, the cyber talent shortage isn’t just about a lack of people, it’s about a lack of clarifying what “cyber underwriting” actually means and as the market splits, your hiring strategy needs to follow.

The same candidate can rarely do both well. Managers are frequently coming to me with frustrations with candidates having cyber experience, but not the right kind. What we’re seeing is that cyber underwriting hasn’t just become more complex, it’s become more specialized, and the talent market hasn’t caught up to that shift yet.

A typical LinkedIn search shows hundreds of cyber-related underwriting roles in the U.S., but a closer look shows a much smaller pool of true cyber underwriting positions, most of which are concentrated amongst a handful of major carriers competing for the same talent. Based on market mapping and internal analysis, we estimate that the talent pool for these hundreds of jobs is around 1,000 – 2,000 people. When you break that down even further, ~50% are experienced in the admitted space, ~40% have experience with complex, excess or E&S, and the remaining ~10% are concentrated in strategic roles or have experience in both. As a result, what looks like broad hiring market is in fact a highly constrained, competitive market, where multiple carriers are competing for a limited number of specific candidates and the job advertisements aren’t breaking these roles down to advertise them to match the increasingly specialized segments of this space.

So, where are hiring managers winning? The industry must first evolve hiring definitions, cyber underwriting specifically needs to be broken into two groups (admitted vs E&S.) When talent is scarce, these misaligned job specs create unnecessary difficulties and longer hiring cycles with applicants who don’t align to your business model. Hiring managers who define roles precisely within these spaces are more successful. Additionally, as mentioned previously, the talent pool has not grown at the same rate as the demand for cyber insurance so waiting until a role is urgent to begin that search is too late. In a market where pricing is stabilizing and cliams are becoming more complex, getting these hiring decisions wrong directly impacts underwriting performance. Successful managers are building pipelines that align with their market segment early.

Acumen is adjusting our approach to meet this demand for specialized cyber underwriting talent by screening candidates specifically for admitted vs E&S experience and then providing our clients with a unique candidate pool that’s designed to meet the market segment your business is operating in. We’re proactive, not waiting for this limited candidate pool to come to us, but using our network to have conversations early, and providing our clients with exclusive, hard to reach talent.