Kemper is a company that only cares about its stockholders and daily stock price so if you are low level employee, don’t count on the yearly performance reviews to give you a decent raise as they want to divert that money in buying up all the carriers they can to inflate their stock price.
When I started with Alliance United several years ago, we got actually rewarded with at least cost of living raises if you did well in your yearly performance review. We also had a holiday party and a summer picnic/Universal Studios day outing amongst other things prior to Kemper acquiring us about 3.5 years ago. Then they threw all that out of the window (in addition to someone in my position losing an extra 5 vacation days a year) to “cut cost”. Kemper does not give out bonuses (that’s saved for guys like the CEO Joe Lacher) to its employees nor any thing that resembles cost of living increases if they decide to. In fact, our health premium costs increased faster than our raises so most of us actually lost money working for Kemper. Even after the corporate tax cuts a couple years ago combined with almost a full year of increased stock performance, instead of rewarding its employees, they bought Infinity instead to further increase its stock price. After some blowback, they gave in and rewarded its top performers a whopping 1% increase. So if you are thinking of applying here because everywhere else is not hiring, expect your salary to stay pretty much stagnant until you leave. Even with promotions, you “may” see a small increase.
In regards to the actual claims environment, expect to have the load management/pending of at least 2 (in my case, 3 since I was there a while) normal adjusters at other companies expect you to handle whilst getting barely paid like 1 (compared to my new current job where I get paid 10% more to handle half of this aforementioned pending). On top of that, they are so metrics driven that they set unrealistic goals and expectations given your pending (these goals also change on a monthly basis depending on the mood of the claims vp). Not sure if this is on purpose or they’re just out of their minds, but I’d lean towards on purpose so they can penalize you later on in your yearly performance reviews to give an excuse on why you didn’t earn their measly raise that’s not even enough to cover the rising cost of your health insurance. They do this because they do not value you as an employee and see you as replaceable and think they can hire anyone off the street and train them as an employee who has years of experience. They want to cut costs on “labor” because every dollar that goes into labor, it’s another dollar taken away from investing to boost their stock price. This is also evident by their daily and weekly threats to fire and lay people off. Sorry, but you can’t replace years of experience of handling bodily injury negotiations with the same attorneys as well as attending depositions and small claims appearances with a metric system.
This leads me to training, this company relies on its experienced adjusters (if there are any left) to help train new hires. They should be too busy to train you and not what they’re getting paid to do, but they will because their team managers will write them up if they don’t. This would be a nice segue into team managers (Team managers are really supervisors). As most of the decent ones with loads of experience have either been laid off or left, most of the current ones leave a lot to be desired. I experienced a lot of questionable decisions and actions that could be fined by the California DOI. Imagine having a bodily injury supervisor who has only 5 years of total claims experience who lives outside of the state where 99% of the claims are being handled. I guess when none of the experienced ones want to be here, you have to prematurely promote from within. Or just sleep/have affairs with your superiors which is going on as well.
Overall, the daily unnecessary stress and expectations they put on you is not worth the (lack of) reward. Lots of other companies give out yearly cost of living raises and profit sharing bonuses so look elsewhere for employment.