The recruiter seemed like a great lady with a fantastic opportunity to get started in insurance. The way she made it sound, the company would pretty much hold your hand while you got licensed, went through training, and started building a book. Nowhere did she mention that the $2,500/month "subsidy" was actually a loan that the agent has to repay if they don't meet their quotas. Likewise, the training program and "Farmer's Virtual University" don't give agent's half the training as some of their (much larger) competitors. Since starting a career in insurance and having worked in both the captive and independent settings, I've come to find out what I suspected was true during the interview process; all their promises of support, too easy to fail, "inflation- & recession-proof" business, and wildly successful agents aren't at all true. The recruiter's job is to sell people on being a Farmer's Agent. They're not HR reps, they're just territory sales staff for corporate who will say anything to get uninformed, unemployed, and desperate people to buy into their guarenteed success fantasy.
The Farmer's Business Model is to Hire as many Agents as possible, get them to write 30-40 policies for their friends and families, hope 1 or 2 stick and can grow beyond their circle, then kick the rest to the curb in debt and make them pay back their "subsidy". I met a guy in my P&C licensing class who got fooled into this after leaving a road maintenance job and that's exactly what happened to him. Do yourself a favor and do some research into other agent's experiences, then check out what other companies have to offer. Or better yet, get some experience in the business working for someone else before taking on the financial risk of becoming an agent. Ask yourself why in God's name a company that large would want to hire people with no insurance licenses, let alone experience, to be agents?
At the end of the day, if it sounds too good to be true, then it is.