How Assurance IQ saved money while scaling headcount 10x with ChartHop

How ChartHop helped Assurance IQ:

Assurance IQ helps consumers navigate the sea of insurance options with unbiased, personalized recommendations.

Elton Sun is the People Operations Manager at Assurance, running their HR tech stack and building integrations between platforms. In this role, he blends technology and data to better support Assurance’s people operations. 

Using people analytics to scale up for better operations

Initially, Assurance had what was akin to an agency-model for their workforce. It had a small, tight group of full-time employees to manage corporate functions and relied on a large fleet of independently contracted agents to sell insurance products. 

However, as business gained momentum, the company needed more full-time employees – both corporate employees and agents – to scale operations and support customers. In the span of two years, Assurance ramped up hiring 10x, increasing headcount from 200 to roughly 1,600 full-time employees to meet the needs of its growing business.

To bring transparency and clarity to the planning process, Assurance implemented ChartHop.

The nightmare of spreadsheets

In the early days, Assurance’s People and Talent teams tracked hiring plans for all departments in a spreadsheet. In addition, each department head had their own list of open requisitions, budget and target start dates. The Recruiting team would manually update the hiring plan as people were hired. Manual inputs and competing trackers often led to discrepancies. Elton tells us the process was messy to organize and unsustainable.

We moved all of our hiring plans into ChartHop because the platform has strong permissioning and security set up. This makes it easy to create a single data sheet within the Headcount Planning module and send it out to business partners, which gives them visibility into the confidential data that they need. Being able to get super granular with role-based access controls is something I haven’t seen with other solutions.

Elton Sun

People Operations Manager

Real-time hiring plan with an ATS integration

As Assurance grew rapidly, keeping track of all the moving pieces of its hiring plan became increasingly challenging. Because there was no direct sync between job requisitions created in their ATS and the overall plan that lived in spreadsheets, it became difficult for recruiters to know which requisitions were approved and which could delay new hires. This led recruiters on a game of telephone to get answers. 

Now, all jobs at Assurance are created in ChartHop, which opens a single requisition in their ATS via a direct sync. This integrated workflow prevents misunderstandings around which roles have an approved budget, driving significant cost savings each year.  

A shared space for C-suite to collaborate and have visibility into hiring plans

Assurance is on a mission to help consumers improve and protect their financial wellness. As it continues to grow and scale, teams are finding new value in the visibility ChartHop offers – for example, identifying the right people to collaborate on cross-functional programs, welcoming new employees and celebrating work anniversaries.

Elton concludes: “Our executives are in ChartHop almost as much as the People and Recruiting teams. It helps them to keep track of hires, encourage cross-team collaboration, share feedback on headcount, advance culture initiatives, gain visibility into spend and more. We have found value in ChartHop at all levels of the organization.”