With the opening up of Hong Kong's high-talent and talent schemes, more and more young people in the mainland choose to become Hong Kong drifters. In the middle of last year, more than 100,000 applicants from various talent channels were submitted, and more than 95% of the approved applicants were from the Mainland. But whether it is a high-talented, gifted, or IANG visa, when it comes to renewal issues, the insurance industry has become the first choice for many people due to its low threshold and high rate of return. According to data from the Hong Kong Insurance Authority, the number of licensed insurance intermediaries in Hong Kong increased from 114007 at the end of March last year to 116,040 at the end of July, an increase of more than 2,000 in four months. Among them, there are many mainland port drifters:
Get out of the system and go to Hong Kong to sell insurance
In August 2023, Wheat left his job within the system. A few years ago, I had done enough HR, and Mai wanted to go abroad for graduate school, but because of the sudden outbreak of the epidemic, he went to the other shore by mistake and was admitted to a public institution as a clerk. Wheat's work is 9 to 5, the benefits are good, it is very stable, and the requirements of the leadership are simple and clear: no mistakes can be made, things must be done, and they must be decent. As a member of the post-epidemic public examination compilation wave, Mai first felt that he had made the most correct life choice in this era by mistake. But within the system, wheat feels more of a tear.
"When I report to the leader, everything has to be smooth, just like kneading the dough, and the dough is kneaded very smoothly. But at the same time, many complicated and trivial things accumulate day by day, and communication is very time-consuming. ”
However, the post-90s wheat still feels that personal value and growth are very important, "Those old fritters in public institutions, they have polished a set of survival rules, I don't want to be such a person, I don't want to think about how to do Tai Chi all day long, I want to fight." This time she wants to leave the mainland and go to Hong Kong. Compared to the mainlanders who poured into Hong Kong after the pandemic, wheat is an outlier. She has not graduated from college for a few years, she has little work experience, her education level is average, and her self-awareness is not very clear. ”
Wheat has a lot of negative impressions of the industry: it needs to go around with customers, develop downlines, and many insurance company employees are like pyramid scheme scammers, very undignified. Although he still has a prejudice against the industry, he decided to give it a try for the sake of his Hong Kong identity.
Unlike most jobs in the financial industry, the entry threshold for the insurance industry is low. There is no requirement for permanent residence status in Hong Kong, no academic qualifications and professional restrictions, and the only requirement is to pass the Insurance Intermediary Qualification Examination, commonly known as "examination license". After being recommended by his manager, Wheat became a distributor for an insurance company. In recent years, in order to attract more high-achieving mainland students and Hong Kong students to join and actively explore the mainland market, many insurance companies have also provided additional "financial planning packages" for high-quality and talented groups, which can give up to more than HK$4 million in three years. In the observation of wheat, the proportion of highly educated people from the mainland is very large. In Mai's team, the female student who won the first place in performance graduated from the University of Chinese in Hong Kong with a master's degree, returned to work for an Internet company in the mainland for a while, and then returned to Hong Kong to join the insurance industry. Wheat, who graduated from a bachelor's degree, became the person with the lowest education in the team.
Freedom is Mai's first impression of Hong Kong's insurance industry after joining the company. The complete freedom and flexibility of working hours also means that the boundaries between work and life are completely broken. When he first joined the company, he was very anxious and deeply frustrated: "I've worked hard, but I just can't get anything done." There is no strict management system, which means that everything needs to be tried and wrong, the method of insurance sales, how to open to customers, and what to do if you experience setbacks in the early stage...... Career knowledge such as this needs to be explored. When she first entered the insurance industry, she traveled back and forth between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, had no time to cook by herself, and her meals were very expensive, and she neglected to contact her parents and friends, and secretly cried for several nights. "Once when I was sick, I took a taxi to the customer's house to sign an order, and when I got out of the car, I had to carry my luggage by myself, and I felt very aggrieved and lonely at that time, and the feeling of being adrift in a foreign land was very uncomfortable. In terms of contact with her colleagues, she also has a lot of language and cultural differences with her colleagues in Hong Kong and local customers. Most of the insurance agency teams working in Hong Kong are in contact with local middle and high net worth individuals, and the training also has different requirements for the team. In terms of mindset, Mai felt that she was not very comfortable, and later she took the initiative to switch her business to mainland customers. However, in Mai's view, as long as she works steadily in the insurance industry, it is not difficult to get the monthly salary of a normal office worker in Hong Kong, and nearly half of the employees in her team earn at least 50,000 yuan a month. "As long as you are willing to work hard in this industry, there are many channels to get customers, and all roads lead to millions of annual salaries, it depends on how you choose. ”
If the performance is not achieved, there is no need to stay
According to statistics, about two-thirds of Hong Kong insurance intermediaries choose to leave their jobs every year, which is also an important reason why Hong Kong's insurance industry needs to absorb a large number of talents all year round. Mai believes that there is a 28 principle in Hong Kong's insurance industry, and 80% of people will choose to leave within six months of joining the company. Chen Chen, who went to Hong Kong to sell insurance, is one of these 80%. Chen Chen originally worked for an internet company in Shenzhen, but at the end of 2022, he was ready to switch jobs to other companies, but he failed to change jobs and was hit hard, so he turned his employment attention to Hong Kong. Chen Chen didn't know much about selling insurance, but he wanted to start again as soon as possible after falling into the dilemma of being unemployed, and just when the annual quota of the Hong Kong Quality Migrant Scheme was abolished last year, he got a job as an insurance agent in Hong Kong with the help of a friend. Switching from the Internet to the insurance industry was not an easy task for Chen Chen. In the first half year, he encountered a performance bottleneck. "I mobilized friends and family to buy, but this model can't last, use up the network, don't develop more customer resources, the next step is no performance. Sales work is not something that everyone can adapt to, there is no follow-up after being rejected, and the ability to seize opportunities is too weak. Later, Chen Chen decided to move back to the mainland to develop clients, and he had to travel back and forth between Shenzhen and Hong Kong almost a day or two, sometimes staying at a friend's house. "After about a month, I can't hold on, it's difficult to sign a bill, I'm tired of commuting, it's hard to rent a house, and I'm living in a six-square-meter cottage, with a monthly rent of about 5,000 Hong Kong dollars", last summer, Chen Chen didn't go back to his home in Shenzhen for two months. One of the main reasons why Hong Kong's insurance industry attracts talent is the high salary. In Hong Kong's insurance industry, everyone's performance pressure is closely related to the basic salary. The insurance agent's company will set corresponding performance requirements for each employee, and if the requirements are not met in that month, no wages will be paid until the standards are met. Because the insurance agent did not have a basic salary, coupled with poor performance, he did not expand his customer base, and Chen Chen's insurance sales work in Hong Kong also encountered a crisis. At the beginning, he earned less than 15,000 Hong Kong dollars a month, which was directly "cut in half" compared with his previous work in the Internet industry. Many of Chen Chen's colleagues are also from the mainland, and two of them even earn more than six figures a month, which is quite devastating. Chen Chen "learned" from them in order to improve their performance, and found that one of them had previous experience in private equity investment companies and had accumulated a lot of contacts, and the other was a rich second generation who graduated with a master's degree in Hong Kong, not only paid out of his own pocket, but also obtained a lot of insurance policies from the circle.
This year, Chen Chen's company was unable to send a letter to help him renew his status because his performance and income were not up to standard, so he left Hong Kong and tried to return to Shenzhen to find a new job. A one-year job selling insurance in Hong Kong did not brighten his resume, but instead became his career negative equity, which he regretted a little. At the beginning of March, in an interview with a company in Shenzhen, HR asked him where he had been going for the whole year last year, and he answered truthfully, thinking that this year-long experience in the Hong Kong insurance industry could slightly improve his competitiveness in the workplace. Later, Chen Chen deleted this experience from his resume, only saying that he had been gap for a year, but this made his employment situation more difficult. Now Chen Chen is still running around in various interviews in Shenzhen.
采访/撰文:Echo, Jonas
编辑：Sebastian
Image courtesy of Visual China