Senior Director of People

For 40 years, Encore Corporate Travel has helped CFOs, CPOs, and travel leaders reimagine business travel—simpler, smarter, and more personal.

With 24/7 Traveler Services, proprietary technology, proactive program management, and integrated Meetings & Events, Encore delivers clarity, control, and care across every experience.

As a proudly woman-owned, independent company, Encore moves fast, solves harder problems, and grows with intention, never compromising on the personalized service that sets it apart.

Job Description

This role isn't for you if:

• Youwould be satisfied running an excellent HR function.
• Yourbest work happens in a functional lane.
• Youwould rather protect people from this change than prepare them for it.
• Youthink some tasks are beneath you (this one is very important)
• Youare fluent in one archetype and treat the other four as lesser versions of it.
• Youlead through your team rather than alongside it.

Still here? Here's the description that most HRprofessionals 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 arenewal meeting, and stay anyway. Every invisible thing has a structureunderneath it holding it up.

You would build that structure, during the largest change our company has beenthrough infifty years.

Whatis actually happening:

Encore is becoming an intelligence company. Nota 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 aperson can do: judgment, relationship, the call at eleven at night, the thing aclient feels and cannot name. That 10% does not stay 10%. Every role here is about to become larger, moreskilled, and more human than it is today, powered by expertise the intelligencelayer amplifies. Every role will 10x its 10%. That is the opportunity. It will not survive a memo, an announcement, or atraining module.

The big job:

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

So this job starts with understanding what we are building deeply enough totranslate it. What does the intelligence layer change for a Carer in Torontowho has done the same expert thing brilliantly for eleven years? What does itchange about how she is hired, developed, measured, promoted, and paid? Whatdoes 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 sameautomation arrives as growth, for everyone.

That translation, for every role, in every country we are in and every one weare 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 byFriday. Rates, tools, tech, service levels, response times. That is alsoprecisely 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 mostloved 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 buildfor 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 thatproduces it whether or not anyone remembers to.

The design problem

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

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

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

You inherit a capable HR team and a working function. Payroll runs. Policyexists. Compliance is always ongoing. That team is yours from day one, and forour clients in financial services and insurance that floor is notadministrative hygiene. It is the reason clients trust us with their people andtheir data. HR compliance, employment risk, and policy across four countrieshave 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 daythey arrived. By design, for everyone, in four countries today and more of themevery 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 isthe difference between a transformation that lifts [headcount] people and onethat leaves half of them behind.

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

Beyond that, the role is deliberately unspecified. We could write you a tidierlist, 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 someonebuilding their own. You see the gap, sketch the thing, pressure test it, andarrive with it half built. You have shipped at least one thing nobody asked forthat everybody now depends on.

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

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

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

Someone who cares about the sum . Individual brilliance is easy to admireand 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 bestmember.

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

You have led people through a real transformation, not a reorganization with anew logo. You have coached leaders directly and can name what changed becauseof it. You have carried HR compliance and employment risk across borders in aregulated industry, and know the distance between a policy that reads well andone 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 measurepartnerships in decades. Every service delivered by our own team, acrosscentres of excellence in the Americas.

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

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