BerniePortal Eliminates Need for Benefit Booklets

As a benefits broker, you’re always looking for ways to grow your book of business and enhance client experiences by providing the best service possible. Educating employees on their benefits is an integral part of your role as a trusted broker. Before benefits administration systems, one of the only ways to educate employees was by creating and distributing benefits booklets. Many employers are so used to benefit booklets that they can’t imagine going through the enrollment process without them. 

But now, your role is becoming more digitized. BerniePortal’s recruiting feature can help you go completely paperless while maintaining and improving the quality of your service.

No More Benefit Booklets!

Yes, you read that right. BerniePortal eliminates the need for benefit booklets. 

With benefits administration systems, employees were able to digitally view their benefits information. The only thing stopping you from getting rid of benefit booklets were candidates, who did not have the same access as employees. But thanks to BerniePortal, the candidate issue has been eliminated. Using BerniePortal, candidates can review benefits information during the interview process, similarly to how active employees can. 

Candidates can see the details for all of the lines of coverage an employer offers, including the ones they care most about, such as health, dental, and vision coverage. Each page includes summary plan descriptions that candidates can download and videos explaining how different lines of coverage work, like dental insurance and FSAs.

Let’s break down why that’s so huge! 

1. BerniePortal will save you time and money.  

According to some of our brokers, on average, it takes 3 hours to create one benefit booklet, which means that a broker with 300 employer clients, will spend 900 hours a year creating benefit booklets! 

That’s nearly half of the 2080 work hours found in a year, making creating benefit booklets about half-a-year’s worth of work. 

After all that work, most employees no longer look at the booklets because they know all their benefits information is in the benefits administration system. Additionally, finding the right time to hand out benefit booklets can be difficult. If you hand them out at the beginning of a renewal meeting, employees will likely flip through them rather than listen to your presentation. The last thing you want is for employees to draw conclusions instead of listening to what you have to say. Suppose you pass the booklets out at the end of your renewal presentation. In that case, employees will naturally throw them away after you tell them all their benefits information is in their benefits administration system. 

Besides the time you’re wasting paying someone to develop the benefit booklets, you’re probably spending thousands of dollars every year printing them, not to mention the environmental waste involved in printing benefit booklets– all money that could be better allocated elsewhere. 

2. BerniePortal will help you reduce the risk of compliance errors.

Because you’re human, there’s a very real risk that either you or a member of your agency has put something inaccurate in the benefit booklet. On the other hand, you will have worked really hard to ensure that BerniePortal accurately reflects the employer’s package. 

If a benefit booklet hasn’t been thrown away (yet) and is floating around with inaccurate information, you have no way of retrieving or correcting it. Thus, you can run into some costly compliance issues. One broker learned this the hard way. 

True story: A broker once put in a client’s benefit booklet that the company’s life insurance policy included spousal life insurance, but it didn’t. Unfortunately, one of the employee’s spouses passed away. The employee asked HR about the spousal life insurance, and they informed him that the policy didn’t include that particular benefit. Because the employee saw spousal life insurance in the benefit booklet, the brokerage paid the claim to make up for the mistake. 

No one wants to be in that situation. It’s not good for HR or the broker. With BerniePortal, you don’t have to be. 

3. BerniePortal helps ensure benefits information covers everything employees and candidates need to know. 

Employees can log into the benefits administration system and view their benefits, but candidates typically can’t. Candidates usually have additional questions about their benefits that HR can’t answer. HR may talk them through payroll deductions and health plan deductibles, but ultimately, HR will have the candidate call you (the broker) to answer their questions.

What if one of your clients has a candidate who wants to see what benefits the employer is offering before accepting the job? You could use a benefit booklet, but the booklet can’t cover everything and is not personalized to each candidate. For example, the booklet can’t tell candidates how much an age-banded health plan will cost for them and their families based on all of their ages. However, BerniePortal allows you to offer candidates a transparent view of their individualized benefits, ultimately saving time for you and your employer client.

Why Promote BerniePortal Recruiting to Your Clients? 

People don’t want to work for an organization that doesn’t care about them, and candidates feel more secure in understanding their benefits before accepting a role. Providing such a tremendous paperless resource helps HR show they care that employee and candidate questions are being answered, even if they can’t answer them themselves. 

Beyond how BerniePortal can streamline your role, it can offer a wide array of tools for your employer clients. With BerniePortal, employers can: 

1. Post automatically on the most popular job sites, such as Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster, Google Jobs, and more to increase the number of candidates their job postings bring in. 

2. Customize knock-out questions so they don’t have to personally review unqualified candidates, which saves a lot of time. 

3. Create and brand a careers page that ensures the jobs listed are correct, which minimizes confusion. 

4. Track candidates through every step of the application and hiring process, ensuring hiring managers and HR are on the same page.

With BerniePortal, your clients will appreciate the time you’ve saved them and the solid reputation you’ve helped them build. 

Additional Resources: 

• Brokers’ Corner Podcast—watch and subscribe to the Brokers’ Corner podcast, which dives into the topics that affect your agency and industry and identifies strategies so you can protect and grow your book of business 

• BerniePortal Brokers’ Council—a council of benefits brokers from across the country that advises BerniePortal on industry concerns, trends, and the ways technology can best support their agency and employer groups 

• BerniePortal for Brokers—leveraging technology to increase your agency valuation and support your employer groups is easier than ever with BerniePortal’s software solution, built for brokers by brokers