Abstract Based on the underlying intentions of life insurance, if managers of insurance companies truly understands the importance of insurance to the society, their management philosophy would be grounded on care for the needs of the public and implement such philosophy as their management objective. Yet, according to the year 2004 statistics published by the Life Insurance Association of the Republic of China, the average insured value of new life insurance contracts is merely NTD 780,000 in 2004. The average insured value of effective contracts is NTD 780,000, while the ratio of insurance coverage is 166.3% (effective contract divided by total population). This indicates that the average payout for every death is only NTD 1,290,000, indicating significant inadequacy of life cover. There is a popular saying in the insurance business, ¡§birds would be found where there are trees, and business achievements would be found where there are people¡¨. The majority of sales departments in life insurance companies focus on achievement of new contracts; new staff will bring sales to the company. Increased rates of ineffective policies arising from low retention rate of new salespeople, lack of professionalism among salespeople, or inadequate service were not considered. Therefore, insurance salespeople are not only the key elements in the business achievements of insurance companies, but also the key personnel underlying long term performance indices. The objectives of this study are: 1)What are the characteristics of salesperson that exhibit excellent performance? 2)Which recruiting channel recruits the best insurance salesperson? 3)What are the methodologies for recruiting and selecting insurance salesperson? 4)What are the impacts of such recruiting methods on the performance of the insurance company? 5)Are the insurance salesperson recruited through such channels appropriate to the needs of the company? A case study is adopted as the research method. The subject company ¡V Prudential of Taiwan (POT), clearly understands that business performance is grounded on having professional insurance salespeople. Hence the long term business objective of POT is to recruit and nurture professional life insurance planners, which is different to the management approach adopted by majority of the insurance companies in Taiwan. The recruiting and selecting methodology of the case company was studied. The business philosophy, sources of recruitment, recruiting and selecting methods and processes were reviewed. Furthermore, in-depth staff interviews to gain their viewpoints on recruitment were conducted. Results of the study into the recruitment methodology and interviews were compared to reflect the results of long term key performance index of insurance company. The findings of this study are: the long term performance index of POT, namely staff retention rate, individual average insured value per new policy, insurance company retention rate, persistency rate of the policy, rate of passing staff qualification tests and, MDRT membership qualification rate, the incremental rate of the premium income, were all rated above competitors. ¡iKeywords¡j Prudential of Taiwan¡ALife Insurance¡ARecruiting¡ASelecting¡ALifePlanner