IAMPHENOM Session Recap: Intact's HR Technology Story

If you missed out on attending our inaugural IAMPHENOM Conference earlier this month, don’t worry. We will be posting highlights on each of the sessions in upcoming weeks.

To kick off our IAMPHENOM session highlights, Ed Newman, Phenom People’s very own Chief Evangelist and the most interesting man in HR, sat down with Intact Financial Corporation. The panelists included: Aviva Kraizel, Director of Talent Management; Denise Thompson, VP of Human Capital Management; and Fanie Lauzon, Director of HRMS/HRIS.

During the session, these three key players from the technology and talent acquisition teams dive into Intact’s story, drivers behind the need to improve their HR technology, why they chose Phenom People, and the successes and challenges behind implementing new technology.

All three key players had different perspectives to add to the discussion.

Intact’s Story

Denise started by sharing a little information on Intact's background. Intact is a well-known and reputable auto, home, and business insurer in Canada. They have 15,000 employees throughout Canada and the U.S. To put things into perspective, Intact insures one out of every five Canadians.

Insurance is not about things; It's about people. People that work with our customers are critical.

- Denise Thompson, VP of Human Capital Management

As a result, Denise shared that there are three classes of employees that are really high need: data scientists and actuaries, customer service, and tech folks. In order to attract and engage with top talent in these three areas, Intact needed to improve both the candidate and recruiter experiences.

The Why

When it came to implementing new tools and technology, Aviva plays the role of the internal evangelist – the internal champion. She shared the main reasons for choosing Phenom People’s TRM Platform. First, they had a need for a mobile career site but still needed responsiveness and a positive candidate experience.

Additional reasons included: Phenom’s vision; robust candidate and applicant data; a platform that could deal with the “talent pendulum,” meaning too many applicants for the call center but not enough applicants for other high need positions; and a platform that all stakeholders (recruiters, managers, sourcers) could benefit from.

You had me at machine learning.

- Aviva Kraizel, Director of Talent Management

The Challenges & Successes

Fanie handles all of the HR technology systems for Intact and plays a crucial role in the planning, implementing, and on-going support of new and existing technology.

During the panel discussion, Fanie shared that one of their challenges focused on PeopleSoft, which is a legacy system. They had a lot of technical challenges with the system. Recruiters were unable to perform searches on the existing database, and the application for candidates was too cumbersome. The system did not allow resume parsing, so candidates were dropping off instead of retyping their resume information into the system.

As a result of the implementation of the Phenom People’s TRM Platform, Fanie stated that they were able to provide recruiters a better tool that is simple to use. In addition, the candidate experience during the application process was improved significantly.

When asked what really helped make this implementation successful, Fanie answered:

We involved recruiters at the beginning. When we chose the provider

and throughout the entire decision-making and implementation journey, we involved the recruiters.

When we were making decisions ourselves, we did that with the recruiter’s mindset first.

- Fanie Lauzon, Director of HRMS/HRIS

This panel discussion proved to be very engaging and insightful to the hundreds of talent acquisition leaders and teams in the audience. Many were captured taking notes, and there were a lot of questions at the end. And, although Intact has their own unique story, there were many takeaways for other organizations.