Since 1912 Liberty Mutual Insurance has been helping people preserve and protect what they earn, build, own and cherish. Keeping this promise means the Boston, MA-headquartered company is there when our policyholders throughout the world need the most support.

Today Liberty Mutual is a diversified insurer with operations in 30 countries and economies around the world. The company is the fifth largest property and casualty insurer in the U.S. based on 2015 direct written premium data as reported by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Liberty Mutual is ranked 78th on the Fortune 100 list of largest corporations in the U.S. based on 2014 revenue. As of December 31, 2015, the company had $121.7 billion in consolidated assets, $102.5 billion in consolidated liabilities and $37.6 billion in annual consolidated revenue.

Liberty employs more than 50,000 people in approximately 900 offices throughout the world, and offers a wide range of insurance products and services, including personal automobile, homeowners’, accident and health, commercial automobile, general liability, property, surety, workers’ compensation, group disability, group life, specialty lines, reinsurance, individual life and annuity products.

Susan Renee Johnson is a senior Liberty management system consultant with Liberty Mutual’s Liberty Management System Development Program. Prior to her current role Johnson enjoyed a progressive career with Liberty Mutual, managing at every level within the company’s customer response center operations, as well as having managed sales support and customer service in Liberty Mutual’s direct response sales centers.

Prior to joining Liberty Mutual in 1998, Johnson served for 12 years in the U.S. Air Force as a management engineer, specializing in manpower and resource planning for administrative, medical and logistics support functions. After an honorable discharge, she was a licensed Pennsylvania realtor and founder, owner and operator of a small business. She earned both her Bachelor of Science in business management and master’s degree in management from the University of Phoenix.

 

African-American Career World

How is diversity part of your company culture?

 

Johnson

Liberty Mutual’s senior leadership understands and supports an important tenet of diversity and inclusion (D&I): that the power of our collective differences and similarities sparks innovation and globally competitive ideas. So to further strengthen the company’s welcoming environment and drive awareness of key inclusion topics, our D&I team intentionally broadened the definition of diversity to include all of us and developed a comprehensive D&I framework that connects employee engagement, innovation and market competitiveness.

Employees at Liberty are encouraged to apply a D&I lens to everything they do for our employees, customers and community. As part of this framework, Liberty Mutual has established six employee resource groups (ERGs) that are open to everyone, including the most recently launched Valor@Liberty for veterans, current service members and their allies.

In early 2015 Liberty’s D&I team rolled out an unconscious bias awareness program to all 40,000-plus U.S. employees, offering skill-building for recognizing and managing unconscious bias to improve communication and work relationships. The principles of this are now being embedded into management, learning and development and onboarding programs, as well as day-to-day conversations between managers and their employees and employees and their peers.

Recently Liberty’s D&I team launched a large awareness campaign called The IMPACT tour to drive their message across the enterprise. IMPACT is an acronym that stands for Innovation, Mindset, Personal Commitment, Alignment with our Principles, Customer/Community and Talent. The goal was to involve all employees and make everyone accountable for building a more inclusive work environment. The tour visited multiple U.S. cities and held in-person sessions to illustrate the business case. It was made more inclusive by the fact that the department used live-stream and on-demand technology to make the sessions available to all employees.

 

African-American Career World

How does Liberty Mutual recruit and attract a diverse workforce?

 

Johnson

Fostering diversity and inclusion through partnerships to engage the community and increase awareness is a significant part of our strategy. Liberty Mutual strategically partners with target schools and, as part of those partnerships, attends their diversity job fairs. We partner with the multicultural center and other student groups to build our diversity strategy on campus.

Our relationships with organizations such as the National Black MBA Association, the Association for Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA), Junior Achievement (non-profit youth organization) and American Corporate Partners (non-profit organization dedicated to assisting veterans in their transition from the armed services to the civilian workforce) all help us bring in a wide range of talent and experience.

These partnerships also help us better serve our customers and strengthen our company.

Many of our employees are actively engaged in leadership roles as members or volunteers in these organizations. For example, the executive co-sponsor of our African Origin ERG serves on the advisory board of the National Black MBA Association and the executive sponsor of our Hispanic/Latino ERG is a senior vice president of human resources who sits on the ALPFA Boston Corporate Advisory Board.

In addition, many of our employees serve as mentors to veterans through the American Corporate Partners (ACP), which helps veterans return to the workforce. Veterans are a recruitment target for us, and we run an internal campaign to expand awareness of the program and recruit additional volunteers.

 

African-American Career World

How does Valor@Liberty help you further your recruitment and retention goals?

 

Johnson

An important part of Valor@Liberty’s mission is to build a community of military service members, veterans and allies at Liberty Mutual that contributes to the personal and professional growth of its members.

The group spans all genders, ages, races and positions at our company. Valor@Liberty provides a common voice for our group, a place where we can learn from each other, develop professionally and work together on external initiatives and programs we care about deeply.

With Valor@Liberty we also aim to make Liberty an employer of choice for military members -both those transitioning into the civilian job market and those still serving or who have served in the past.

According to the American Council on Education, as we draw from troops in places like Afghanistan, ‘approximately 1.5 million service members will be making the transition over the next three-to-five years.’ We want those service members to view Liberty Mutual as a top employer at which to start or continue their careers.

 

African-American Career World

What is the best piece of advice you can offer to help other veterans achieve their professional goals?

 

Johnson

Be proud of your military training and accomplishments! Veterans bring so much to the table that the corporate sector needs. A veteran should consider his/her skills and abilities that apply to both the military and civilian workforces, like a strong work ethic, consistency, team work, reliability, ability to think critically and flexibility. Then veterans need to broadcast these strengths to others when networking or interviewing for a corporate/civilian role. It’s like learning to translate one language into another.

From my seven years as a mentor through American Corporate Partners, I’ve noticed one of the most difficult things for our transitioning veterans to master is making that critical connection in their mind between the skills they learned in the military and how they can sell those skills during an interview. This can lead to difficult conversations with recruiters and hiring managers, and ultimately leave veterans feeling discouraged.

When they learn how to translate their military skills to the corporate world, veterans feel much more confident before (and after!) interviews.

 

African-American Career World

How would you describe Liberty Mutual’s culture? Why is it a great place to work?

 

Johnson

First, Liberty Mutual recognizes the power and value of our collective differences. Second, our senior leaders have demonstrated their support to leverage that power through the creation of the office of diversity and inclusion and the launch of employee resource groups like Valor. These are just two of the many reasons that I love working here.

As a woman who identifies with a few different affinity groups, I’m sensitive to the need for broadening the definition of diversity and to applying the D&I lens to everything we do for our colleagues, customers and community. I’ve been with the company for more than 18 years, and I’m proud to be an employee at this very exciting time in our company’s evolution.

 

African-American Career World

What types of jobs are you seeking to fill?

 

Johnson

Liberty Mutual has between 700 and 1,000 open job positions at any given time. While we need to fill ‘typical’ insurance roles such as actuarial, sales and claims, we’re just like any other large corporation and offer careers in information technology, accounting, legal, marketing, finance and human resources. With a goal of hiring 25,000 new employees during the next five years, we have a lot of career opportunities available.

 

African-American Career World

How can our readers post their resumes online for job opportunities at Liberty Mutual?

 

Johnson

Go to our career website, libertymutualgroup.com/careers, for all of Liberty Mutual’s latest job listings.