People & Talent, Lead

Emerge is building Southeast Asia's specialist insurance intermediary for new and emerging risks. We run a group of commercial insurance brands across Malaysia, Singapore and Labuan, on AI and with a small, sharp team.

In an intermediary business, our people and what they know are the product. We win when our team gets sharper every quarter: better at understanding risk, better at advising clients, better at using our tools. Today, the founders do all the hiring, training and people work alongside everything else, and that limits how fast we can grow.

We need one person to own it: bring in the right people, build the training and culture that keeps raising our skills, and later run the incentive system that rewards our sales team.

This is a Lead role. You will set up the people function from scratch, own its results, and work directly with the Group CEO. It is not an HR admin role.

• Own every open role from start to finish: role scorecard, job post, sourcing, screening, interviews, offer and start date.
• Hire for our internal team across the group: account executives and sales, placement and technical roles, operations, technology, and graduates.
• Go out and find great people instead of waiting for them to apply: direct outreach, referrals, universities and industry networks.
• Keep a bench of promising people so we never start a search from zero.
• Run a clear, fair process so the team interviews and decides consistently. Push back when a hire is wrong, even if the seat is empty.
• Learn why candidates say yes or no, and feed that back into how we hire.

• Own the first 90 days for every new joiner: what to learn, who to learn from, and what good looks like by day 30, 60 and 90.
• Build and run the Emerge Academy: a repeatable training path in product and class knowledge, placement, client handling, compliance and our AI tools.
• Run a regular internal learning rhythm (for example, weekly sessions and case reviews) with our Head of Placement, business leads and insurer partners, so the whole team keeps getting better, not just new joiners.
• Get people through fit and proper checks, licensing and the insurance qualifications their role needs (MII, CII or equivalent), and track progress.
• Measure whether training works: time to first placement, exam pass rates, and manager feedback.

• Help define and write down how we work: our values, how we make decisions, what good looks like. Then make it real through hiring, onboarding, recognition and how we deal with problems.
• Build a culture where intermediaries want to build their careers: learning is constant, credit is fair, and people are backed.
• Turn that into our employer brand: job posts, LinkedIn content, referral programme and campus talks.
• Notice early when someone is unhappy. Run exit conversations with every leaver and bring the lessons back to the CEO.

• Set clear goals for everyone, with a regular check-in rhythm between people and their managers.
• Run the review cycle and help managers give fair, specific feedback. Managers make the final call. You make sure the process is consistent.
• Coach first-time managers on how to run 1:1s, set expectations and have hard conversations.
• Build career paths for both tracks: sales and client-facing (account executive to account manager to team lead) and technical or operations.
• Support pay decisions with market data, and keep offers and raises consistent.

• Work with the CEO and finance to design commission and incentive plans for the sales team that reward the right behaviour: new business, retention, profitable placements and compliant selling.
• Run the plans: targets, tracking, monthly or quarterly calculations, payout sign-off and clear statements for each person.
• Handle credit-split questions and disputes fairly and quickly.
• Review the plans every year against results and market practice, and recommend changes.

• Own employment contracts, policies and people records, with outside counsel where needed.
• Keep people processes in line with our regulators expectations for licensed intermediaries (Bank Negara Malaysia, Labuan FSA and MAS where relevant).
• Keep things confidential. Always.

Must have

• 5 to 8 years in recruitment, talent or people roles, with at least some of it in-house at a startup or growing company.
• Proof that you can find people who were not already looking.
• Experience hiring sales or client-facing people.
• Hands-on experience building at least one of: onboarding, a training programme, goal setting, performance reviews or career paths.
• Good judgment about people, and the ability to explain it.
• Comfortable with numbers and tracking. You will run incentive calculations, so you must be accurate.
• Calm in hard conversations with candidates, team members and managers.
• Clear and warm in English and Bahasa Malaysia.
• Uses AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT or similar) every day.

Strong advantage

• Experience in insurance, banking or financial services.
• Experience designing or running commission or incentive plans for a sales team.
• Experience building a training academy or graduate programme yourself.
• Insurance qualifications (MII, CII), or willingness to complete one.

The kind of person who thrives here

• You measure your success by how the people you hired are doing a year later.
• You would rather push back on a hiring manager than fill a seat with the wrong person.
• People trust you, because you are fair and you keep things confidential.
• You like building from scratch and do not need a big HR team around you.
  

• The first people role in a fast-growing specialist intermediary, with a direct line to the Group CEO.
• Room to build the function, and the team under it, as the group grows.