Big Interview: Helena Evans, Criterion Adjusters

Managers throughout her career have pushed Helena Evans to overcome her hesitancy to climb the ranks to reach the role she has today – managing director of Criterion Adjusters.

Recalling her return to loss adjusting after a career break at the turn of the century to raise her three young children, she says: “When I started back at work, I wouldn’t even speak in a meeting. So, there’s no way I would imagine I would be in this position.”

Looking back at her career, she says: “I suppose I’ve just been approached each time to do a new role and I said: ‘I can’t do that’.”

When asked does she still feel that way or have the number of times she has been asked to step up the loss adjusting ladder changed her perception of her abilities, Evans says she has gotten to the stage where she thinks she’ll “give it go”.

She adds: “It’s nice that people I work with believe in me. Maybe it is a bit of imposter syndrome.”

Not the norm

A common cause of imposter syndrome is discrimination.

Evans entered the insurance industry back in 1991 and when asked if she encountered sexism, she shares how a customer whose roof she checked complained to her boss that her skirt was too short to climb a ladder.

She observes that the complaint: “wasn’t true. I’d never have worn a short skirt. That annoyed me because it was a lie and what was the relevance? It was to try and put me down”.

Customers, back then, would sometimes also ask: “to speak to a man with some qualifications or something like that”.

Much of the sexism was implied, she observes, with customers assuming when she called up to arrange a visit that she was the secretary rather than the loss adjuster they would meet.

She says: “It [sexism] was more implied than to my face. Some people told me they expected a man in a suit. Sometimes it was just a look of surprise.

“We sometimes have to report to insurers on the percentage of flat reef in the house. I asked to go upstairs because I saw they had a little dormer window and I needed to measure it.

“He said: ‘No, my wife wouldn’t like it if I took you upstairs.’ That made me feel really awkward because I thought: ‘I’m only going upstairs to measure your roof’.”

Evans reckons that sort of behaviour still continues today, adding what it repeatedly did was emphasise to her she wasn’t the norm or people’s perception of who a loss adjuster should be.

Rather than make her feel excluded, she observes it made her more adamant she would succeed in this profession.

Captain of Criterion

Evans has succeeded, despite the economic challenges and operational changes to the way loss adjusters work in the last few years.  

She joined Criterion Adjusters as head of specialist services back in 2020, just six weeks before then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson told everyone to: “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives.”

Evans says: “I met the team and then we all got shut away for weeks. That period was quite good as previously adjusters may have been a bit nervous with video technology. Maybe they thought insurers would think: ‘We don’t need adjusters. We can do this all digitally with videos’.”

On how her adjusters work today, she says: “We use video technology as a digital tool. There are some smaller claims where it’s good, it saves you getting a boat to an island off Scotland but what you can’t get from video calls is the fraud element or underwriting risks.

“It’s sort of helped make insurers realise that you need feet on the ground… seeing people in their own space. That is also a better way to get to know someone and get them to trust you.”

With Covid plus Brexit causing double digit inflation, supply chain issues, plus the availability of tradespeople being an issue, Evans observes her team of adjusters have played a vital part in helping customers understand “a tricky period” for high-net-worth claims since she took the reins of Criterion Adjusters in May 2023.

“You’d have proven tender and then months later it would all go up because they’d have to spend more on materials. That was quite different,” she says.

“It’s levelled out now – the actual building costs – so they’re not rising, but in high-net-worth houses, in particular, the luxury goods or high-end materials are expensive just because of inflation. Their claims are higher, and their premiums are higher.”

Accommodation costs have increased as well.

“In the high-net-worth world, obviously the accommodation costs are high. It can be £25,000 to £30,000 a month to rent a property or more,” she observes. “That gives you quite a challenge on making sure work is completed within the time frame.

“On a normal house it doesn’t matter as much if the works go on for a little bit longer.”

To rise to the challenges and growth opportunities of the post-Covid economic climates, Evans says she has taken on her “number two”, Neil Stephens, director and head of major loss and operations.

“We’ve always done major loss, but we’ve never really promoted that we do it,” she says. “We are one of the few high-net-worth adjusters that do major loss in-house whereas some other companies move it to their major loss team, who aren’t necessarily used to dealing with high-net-worth clients.

“We’ve dealt with a couple of multi-million pounds manor house fires. We have had really good feedback on how we dealt with them. So that’s an area that we’re sort of promoting a bit more with clients.”

On other growth areas, she says Criterion has helped the marine division of parent company Charles Taylor.

She says: “They had a claim for a super yacht, with loads of contents. It’s like those sort of niche areas [where there is potential for growth].”

High points

While her eye is firmly on prospects on the horizon, when asked to look back at her career to-date she claims the crest of the wave was becoming the second female president of the Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters in 2021.

She says: “It is something I didn’t ever expect. To me, the president, had always been CEO or an important person.”

On her engagement with Cila today, she is supportive of the body’s Manifesto pledge to encourage more members to progress beyond certificate or diploma levels plus the commitment to build on the work of Women in Cila to push for a more diverse, inclusive loss adjusting sector.

“People assume you’ve got to know all about buildings and be like a surveyor. You do have to know that, but the important thing is the people skills,” she says. “You can train people to on the technical side.”

She adds: “I think if more women realise that if you like helping people, if you like listening to people and talking and resolving a problem then it might be something that they would be more attracted to than if they just assume ‘I couldn’t because I don’t know about buildings’.”

Evans began her career in claims at RSA, after her mother informed her that her teenaged ambition to work in marketing, advertising or graphic design may lead to nothing given the fierce competition to enter those industries.

“She was a teacher and said: ‘Why don’t you come to my careers fair at school?’ There was a stand on insurance. I just thought that looks like a safe job. I didn’t fully appreciate what it [insurance] was and I just wrote to lots of different insurers.

“I got the Yellow Pages out and wrote to load of insurers after my A Levels finished and then started at RSA. I had been there about a year, and they said they were going to shut our office and that we’d all be at risk of redundancy in about a year.

“They allowed us to look for other jobs. I remember having seen adjuster reports land on the desk with all these slips. Back then you used to take what an adjuster said as ‘they know what they’re doing’. They were revered.

“I just applied and luckily my manager at the time that that took me on, he’d worked alongside a female when he was about 19 or 20 and he said she was good, so he thought he would give me a try.

“I kind of fell into insurance and never heard of adjusting until I started in claims.”

Once you are in adjusting, Evans observes if you last six months then you tend to stay.

She says: “You either hate it or you love it.”

She acknowledges that at the time she got her first role in adjusting her parents weren’t overly keen on the thought of their young daughter entering stranger’s homes following the disappearance of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh.

“My parents, because I was still living at home, were worried,” she says. “They didn’t say they didn’t want me to do the job, but I don’t think they did. It was kind of a worry then, especially as there were no mobile phones. With adjusting though, it was someone that had a policy.”

On whether the need to travel to a claimant put women off loss adjusting, she acknowledges that was one of the reasons why when she became a mother she decided to step back from the sector.

She says: “You can be thinking that you’ve got an office day and there’s a fire. The fire always tends to happen at 4.50pm on a Friday. They’re never quite nearby. If a claim comes in though, you have got to go out.”

Balance achieved

While Evans may claim her career highlight was being president of Cila in 2021 to 2022, she truly lights up when she talks about her return to the sector after caring for her young children.

When she restarted full-time loss adjusting work in 2010, she decided to sit her Cila exams and observes: “I did think: ‘Why am I doing this? I kind of wanted to prove to myself, I could still do stuff like that. I wasn’t just Mum.

“I remember feeling really guilty going back to work because I had stopped to have them. When I passed my Cila exams my eldest [child] said: ‘I’m really proud of you’.

“I felt guilty [going back to work], but actually I was being a bit of a role model.”

She beams when she recalls her three children attending her Cila president’s lunch and laughs when I ask did any of them follow her lead and enter insurance.

Evans says: “My eldest has gone into the police. She did apply for some fraud roles in insurance at the same time as applying for the police.”

However, she is aware part of her legacy is showing others how achieving a top job in loss adjusting is within their reach if they push themselves.

“If I could do it [pass Cila qualifications] when I had three young children then you can do it,” she says.

“In my Cila [president’s] speech I said my one piece of advice is believe in yourself. You can do it.”

Future vision

On what the future holds for the profession, she says she can see low value volume claims could become more automated with loss adjusters needed for the complex, bigger value claims or to assist vulnerable customers.

She says as artificial intelligence reshapes the sector, this emphasises the need for those who are already working in adjusting to get their exams now, upskill to do major loss or other sorts of specialism so that they will always be in demand.

On what her own future holds, and whether it will still take someone more senior to encourage her to take the next leap in her career, she insists she won’t go looking for another role as she loves leading Criterion but adds she has “become more confident” adding now: “I realise what I can do.”