Leave Specialist

Sparrow is the first high-tech, high-touch employee leave management solution. Our mission is to make it simple for companies to provide their employees with all kinds of leave (i.e. family, medical, etc.).

Currently, the leave management process is painful and inefficient for everyone. Company leaders struggle to keep up with regulations and processes that change frequently, and the employees going on leave are overwhelmed by bureaucracy at an exceptionally important juncture in their career. Sparrow transforms this ordinarily tedious, error-prone, complex to remain compliant, and time-consuming process into a 30-minute end-to-end experience saving teams time (20 - 40 hours per leave) and money (up to $30K per leave).

Sparrow is headquartered in San Francisco but all employees work remotely across the country. Sparrow is a diverse, highly talented, and supportive team. Together, we are hardworking, collaborative, smart, and humble—after all, we’re solving real problems.

As a Leave Specialist, you will be the primary contact for employees of companies we service and will manage a leave of absence from start to finish. You will also play a critical role of supporting your peers and Sparrow team members.  

What your day to day will look like:

• Manage a portfolio of leave of absences, short-term and long-term leaves, from inception to completion for employees in the US and Canada across multiple companies using established Leave of Absence processes.

• Maintain ongoing knowledge of State, Federal, and an array of Company leave policies, including FMLA and ADA, short-term and long-term disability plans. You’ll be responsible for ensuring employees are aware of their responsibilities and reviewing eligibility, certification, and benefits.

• Communicate directly with third parties when necessary, preserving the confidentiality of employee medical documentation and files.

• Interface and collaborate comfortably with a variety of key stakeholders to maintain relationships, including employees, HR, payroll teams, managers, HR Business Partners, through various methods of communication (phone, email). 

• Maintain complete and accurate internal records of leave requests and documentation of best practices.

• Partner with our internal payroll teams to ensure employees are paid accurately and on time. Includes building, analyzing, and communicating clear payroll information to employees and HR teams.

• Partner with our internal claims management team to file and manage claim filings with states and private disability insurance providers.

• Use a combination of tools to manage, communicate and update all stages of a leave.

• Work with the Customer Experience department to ensure a consistent level of service, utilizing resources and adapting to process improvements to enhance employee and employer experiences. Maintain key metrics, including Service Level Agreements and Customer Satisfaction.

• Actively participate in team meetings providing feedback, solutions and suggestions.

Attributes of a successful candidate who will excel at supporting our customers:

• Strong collaboration and communication skills that allow you to interact comfortably with internal cross-functional teams, and customers. 

• You excel in active listening, empathy, and approachability. 

• Be comfortable moving between multiple tasks in a quick succession.

• Be adaptable to process and product improvements in a growing start-up

• Able to utilize resources to identify answers to common employee or employer questions about the leave process

• Maintains internal systems and processes. 

• Demonstrates strong customer service skills. Represents the company voice with customers, listens empathetically to understand customer needs and provides impactful solutions. 

• Understand and interpret basic payroll calculations with the ability to break down these calculations in an easy to understand manner.

In collaboration with the Sparrow team, build a better product:

• Collect and share product feedback that you receive during customer interactions.

• Evaluate our impact throughout the lifecycle of each leave.

• Implement process improvements to resolve inefficiencies and address customer pain points. 

• Provide and seek negative and positive specific feedback to your peers, supporting your team's growth and development. 

• Superior organization skills and detail-oriented. You're able to track various tasks from different leaves and ensure nothing gets lost. 

• Outstanding verbal and written communication skills. Clear, empathetic communicator able to balance rapport and problem solving. You are comfortable communicating through email, chat, and phone calls.

• People person. Remarkable degree of empathy and interpersonal intuition, and strong, active listening skills. More than 2 years of client-facing experience where relationship-building is valued.

• Learner's mindset. Highly self-directed, adaptable, and up for feedback and implementation in a fast paced, always changing environment. 

• Proactive. You're always anticipating what might come next and how better to support the Leave Specialist team. 

• Systems-oriented. Always thinking of how you can improve processes to make the team even more efficient. 

• Trustworthy. You act with discretion and can be trusted to handle confidential information appropriately.

• Relentlessly Optimistic. You believe in and work for the possibility of change and are unyielded by uncertainty and roadblocks. 

• Empathetic. You lead with empathy, and understand each situation from our customers perspective and approach with compassion. 

• This is a full-time hourly, non-exempt position. Compensation ranges from $22.25 to $27.50 per hour and is based on your legal state of residence. 

Our work at Sparrow is impactful. We help People teams with one of the hardest parts of their job, and we support employees at a time when they need it most. We’re driven by our mission, much like a nonprofit, but with the resources and scale of a fast-growing venture-backed company.

Sparrow is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. While we are united by our excitement for the mission and product, the diversity of our experiences is one of our strengths. The Sparrow team is made up of people with all types of backgrounds, and we have teammates in 40 states and counting. To learn more about the Sparrow team and its benefits, check out our careers page.