DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CURRENT POSITION TO JOIN NATIONWIDE
BACKGROUND
I had been a Nationwide insured since 2002 and had always been pleased with the service I received as a customer, thus when I was looking to leave my position as a Claim Specialist - Bodily Injury at State Farm after about 4 years, Nationwide was the first place I applied - BIG MISTAKE.
TRAINING - DOES NOT EXIST
Nationwide openly admits that they prefer to hire candidates who have worked for the big carriers: State Farm, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, etc., because these companies provide excellent training on policy, coverage, liability, evaluations, negotiations, and settlement strategies. Nationwide does not provide any sort of in depth training whatsoever. I was flown out to Colorado for 2 weeks for “training” which consisted of an entire week dedicated to learning their version of Guidewire’s ClaimCenter, while the second week consisted of getting system access, a brief overview of the THIRTEEN states I would be handling, some quick hitters about each state, a brief training on settlements, and then I was sent home to figure it all out.
RESOURCES: DO NOT EXIST
Nationwide lacks an enterprise wide resource on the standard claims process for the states you will be handling. They pride themselves on the OneNote guide which was created by a L2 adjuster, and although it is helpful on a topical level, it is insufficient for the situations you will encounter. For example, you handle TX claims and receive a claim with an AL loss state, there is no enterprise resource for AL, so they will tell you to send a task to someone in the Central Zone to answer your question - not good enough! You are supposed to trust someone’s word on statute of limitations, minors settlements, UIM/UM thresholds? I don’t think so. Remember, your quality assurance scores will be based on the accuracy of your files, thus any errors will come back to you and only you.
SYSTEMS - ARCHAIC AND UNSTABLE
Nationwide’s version of Guidewire’s ClaimCenter is the very basic version and will be the bane of your existence: constant freezes (at least an hour per day of system outages - you are salaried, so all of this downtime is on your dime), during this time, policies will be unverified which will create a tremendous amount of extra work, claims come in with inaccurate policy in force information, you are unable to associate participants and providers, parties to vehicles, etc. Their system is a nightmare. Trying to gather the policy documents is another tedious process since the policy is not available in ClaimCenter - you have to either call policy services and ask them to email the policy to you or go on a wild goose chase through the various systems hoping to find what you need.
WORKLOAD
If you are hired as a L1 associate, you will receive attorney represented and non-attorney represented soft tissue injury claims for 1st and 3rd parties. The metric is to obtain 7 first party contact settlements per month. Scheduled releases/agreement and releases and medicare eligible claims do not count towards this goal. A significant portion of your claims will be attorney represented or 1st party, thus your chances to obtain a first contact final settlement can be slim. You will have a desk of approximately 80-150 claims, you are expected to call to verify injury and treatment status on attorney represented claims every 30 days, set up PD, take the lead on PIP (take insured statement for the PIP adjuster), call on new claims every single day, and on existing claims every week or two. You will quickly be working 10-12 hour days to keep up with demand and to account for system issues and outages. On average, you can expect to receive 3-4 new claims per day. This doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize how much work they want for each stage of the claim, having to hunt down and verify information, and constant system issues. When COVID-19 first happened, the VPN was so overloaded that it took 1-2 hours just to sign in.
MANAGEMENT AND TEAM
There are 2-3 managers in the Western Regional Claim Zone that are truly wonderful (one recently left to work at an engineering firm - HUGE loss to Nationwide), and the majority of your teammates will be wonderful and helpful as well (I made four amazing friends during my time at Nationwide and I still talk to them and get together with them frequently). When you take PTO or a team member takes PTO, a backup will be assigned. This is fine if the team member you are covering for is on top of their activities and workload, otherwise your phone will ring non-stop and you will get tons of emails about their claims, all while falling behind on your own work.
BENEFITS
You will accrue 5.5 hours of PTO per pay period, they offer a pension and 401k match (50% match up to 4%), United Healthcare health plans, and a they make a contribution to your HSA. You are required to work a holiday, you will not get paid extra for doing this; however, you will receive a day off to use within 30 days.
FREQUENT LAYOFFS
Nationwide lays off, FREQUENTLY. I started working for Nationwide 11/2019 along with 6 other BI adjusters who came from State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Allstate, or internal promotes. In May 2020, those of us who were hired externally were the first to be laid off, supposedly due to Covid. I was provided with three weeks of severance pay and the PTO I had acquired in 2020, my 2019 carryover PTO was forfeited. They also paid for my health, dental, and vision insurance for three months after I was laid off. I came to learn that Nationwide frequently lays off every 6 months or so. They tend to hire from the big carriers and use these employees to get their claim counts down, or in some other way help their bottom line. They do not handle layoffs based on performance, rather they base it on tenure: last in is the first out. Myself, along with the others that were hired along with me were top performers, frequently acknowledged by upper leadership for the number of first contract settlements and were appointed as subject matter experts - none of this mattered. If you are working for one of big carriers, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR POSITION TO COME TO NATIONWIDE!!!!!!! There is no stability or job security with this company and you will be disappointed by their archaic systems, backwards structure, and complete lack of infrastructure and technology.
