This role isn't for you if:

❌You would be satisfied running an excellent HR function.

❌Your best work happens in a functional lane.

❌You would rather protect people from this change than prepare them for it.

❌You think some tasks are beneath you (this one is very important)

❌You are fluent in one archetype and treat the other four as lesser versions of it.

❌You lead through your team rather than alongside it.

Still here? Here's the description that most HR professionals will stop reading mid-way through.

Your best work here will never be seen. It will only be felt.

Clients have felt it for decades. They cannot point to it, cannot name it in a renewal meeting, and stay anyway. Every invisible thing has a structure underneath it holding it up.

You would build that structure, during the largest change our company has been through in fifty years.

What is actually happening

Encore is becoming an intelligence company. Not a company that added AI.

Here is what that means in practice. Roughly 90% of the tasks, not the jobs, that fill our people's days can be automated. What remains is the 10% only a person can do: judgment, relationship, the call at eleven at night, the thing a client feels and cannot name.

That 10% does not stay 10%. Every role here is about to become larger, more skilled, and more human than it is today, powered by expertise the intelligence layer amplifies. Every role will 10x its 10%.

That is the opportunity. It will not survive a memo, an announcement, or a training module.

The big job

Nobody experiences a transformation. They experience what happens to their own work, their own standing, and their own sense of whether they are still needed here.

So this job starts with understanding what we are building deeply enough to translate it. What does the intelligence layer change for a Carer in Toronto who has done the same expert thing brilliantly for eleven years? What does it change about how she is hired, developed, measured, promoted, and paid? What does she need to hear, from whom, and how early?

Get that wrong and automation arrives as a threat. People protect their tasks, hide their expertise, and stop telling you the truth. Get it right and the same automation arrives as growth, for everyone.

That translation, for every role, in every country we are in and every one we are about to be in, is the big job.

Why the invisible matters more, not less.

Everything about our business that can be measured, a competitor can copy by Friday. Rates, tools, tech, service levels, response times. That is also precisely the 90% the machines are about to take.

Which leaves us competing on what is left. The part nobody can see.

Our ambition is not to be the biggest or the cheapest.



It is to be the most loved place to work in and the most loved company to work with.

Love is never seen. It is only felt. That is why most companies do not build for it, and why the ones that do are impossible to compete with.

Your mandate is the system that makes ours inevitable. Consistent means it usually happens. Inevitable means we built something that produces it whether or not anyone remembers to.

The design problem

Our people are Pioneers, Makers, Carers, Guardians, and Anchors. A Pioneer without an Anchor is engaging starts and no twenty one year clients. A Guardian without a Pioneer is very safe and slowly irrelevant. A Carer without a Maker is heroic effort with nothing underneath it that scales.

Most systems flatten that. One scorecard, one axis, one language everyone learns to speak to survive it. Within two cycles everyone sounds the same, and the difference that made the whole thing work is gone. That risk multiplies during a transformation, when people are already guessing at what the company now rewards.

Build the opposite. Five kinds of excellence, each growing into its own expanded 10%.

You inherit a capable HR team and a working function. Payroll runs. Policy exists. Compliance is always ongoing. That team is yours from day one, and for our clients in financial services and insurance that floor is not administrative hygiene. It is the reason clients trust us with their people and their data. HR compliance, employment risk, and policy across four countries have to be right the first time.

Sharpen it. Never mistake it for the job.

Because the mandate sits above it.

The system that moves people upwards. Every person here should be more capable, more valuable, and more themselves after three years at Encore than on the day they arrived. By design, for everyone, in four countries today and more of them every year.

That system spans the whole of a person's life here: how they are hired, onboarded, developed, coached, promoted, and reskilled into their expanded 10%. It is what makes every leader at Encore an exceptional people builder. It is the difference between a transformation that lifts [headcount] people and one that leaves half of them behind.

You lead the full people function and report directly to the CEO. Dedicated talent acquisition capacity is your first build.

Beyond that, the role is deliberately unspecified. We could write you a tidier list,



but you would find out in week three that we made half of it up.

Requirements

Who this is An intrapreneur. You build inside a company with the ownership of someone building their own. You see the gap, sketch the thing, pressure test it, and arrive with it half built. You have shipped at least one thing nobody asked for that everybody now depends on.

A creative systems thinker. You see what a structure rewards, what it quietly punishes, and where it will crack under growth. Your redesign is rarely the obvious one, because you know the obvious one has usually already been tried.

Curious enough to learn the machine. You will not build the intelligence layer. You do need to understand it well enough to sit with a twenty year employee and tell her exactly what it means for her, without flinching and without overpromising.

Someone who trusts the unquantifiable. The most valuable things in a company are the hardest to put on a slide, and the easiest to cut when someone is looking for savings. You have defended them in a room full of people who wanted a number, and won.

Someone who cares about the sum. Individual brilliance is easy to admire and easy to lose. What holds your attention is what only exists between people: the seam, the shared standard, the reason a team is better than its best member.

Someone with an instinct for who's worth betting on. Culture is protected one hire at a time. Not from the resume. From the question they ask back, what they are curious about when the pressure is off, how they describe a failure. That instinct is built from experience, emotional intelligence, self awareness, curiosity, and real business judgment. It is the hardest thing to hire for, and it is why this role exists.

You have led people through a real transformation, not a reorganization with a new logo. You have coached leaders directly and can name what changed because of it. You have carried HR compliance and employment risk across borders in a regulated industry, and know the distance between a policy that reads well and one that holds under real pressure.

None of those are character flaws, they are just other jobs.

Encore

Founded in 1976. Led by the same CEO since 1987. Family owned, WBE certified, trusted by enterprise clients in financial services and insurance who measure partnerships in decades. Every service delivered by our own team, across centres of excellence in the Americas.

Montreal. Hybrid, with a real preference for time together. The best parts happen IRL.

That is the vision. Moving every person here upwards into it, without losing what is intrinsically human, is the part nobody sees.

If you already know where you would start, we should talk.

📌 Senior Director of People (Montreal)
🏢 Encore Corporate Travel
📍 Montreal