Less than a year ago, Safeco’s recruiting department looked a bit different than now. It didn’t exist.

It’s true. Safeco launched its centralized recruiting model in July of 2006. The 7,500-employee insurance company now has what National Recruiting Manager Cynthia Xamonthiene considers a well-oiled recruiting team. All of the firm’s 14 recruiters (a dozen of whom will be roaming around the ERE Expo here in San Diego) report to Xamonthiene, as well as three sourcing specialists.

Xamonthiene says it’s a “recruiter-centric model” that allows four recruiting coordinators to spend their time getting administrative work off the backs of recruiters, and allows Xamonthiene time to spend removing roadblocks from recruiters. The recruiters are divided both by geography as well as by function, such as legal recruiting and IT recruiting. “The recruiters really are recruiting,” she says. Safeco was able to attract Ginny Eagle (who Xamonthiene calls “amazing”) to head the team.

Using a VirtualEdge system (something else Xamonthiene considers amazing), the recruiting team is looking for customer-service employees, field adjusters, catastrophe-team members, and others in places such as Indianapolis, Spokane, and Seattle. The latter is where Safeco’s based and is a city Xamonthiene calls a “recruiting mecca.”

The new Safeco recruiting team has begun building the company’s employment brand. Tactically, that means such things as putting together collateral, including a special brochure just for higher-level positions. More conceptually, it means communicating what working at Safeco’s all about: employee development, opportunities to get promoted from within, and innovation.

True: Insurance isn’t always associated with innovation. But Xamonthiene touts the company’s Open Seas think-tank as an example of the opportunities available to innovate at the company, where starched shirts were once the norm.

Meanwhile, Xamonthiene’s team is trying to reduce time to hire. “It’s a candidate’s market,” she says. “If we have a hiring loop that’s going to take too long, it’s going to put that hire at risk. [We need to] be able to be quick and know what it is we’re looking for and make that decision quickly.” Safeco uses FurstPerson in assessing employees.

Xamonthiene will be adding one new hire, an executive recruiting manager, to the team. She’s looking for someone with a “consultative background” with the “ability to build executive recruiting within our organization.”

Despite that hire, she says that the many Safeco recruiters are going to the ERE Expo not to recruit recruiters, but to learn from people outside of the insurance field. “As of April 2,” she says, “I am fully staffed.”