Driving America Forward with Izel Prince
“Imagine a scenario where an employee uses a single platform from candidacy through exit, and everything in between, including things like onboarding, benefits selection, and more. Our team is focused on building solutions like that, which will ultimately improve and enrich the employee experience at Zum.”
Izel Prince
People Operations Manager
Zum
Izel Prince is a seasoned People Operations manager, with nearly ten years in the industry. A veteran of total rewards administration, Prince excels at crafting and owning the employee experience, from hiring to exit. Formerly at Amazon, Quay, and Borrego Solar, a large scale renewable energy firm. Prince now serves as People Operations Manager at Zum.
In your role at Zum, how do you think about innovation?
In People Operations, we exist to enrich the employee experience. So innovation is all in service of that.
In our group, one of the primary ways we’re doing that is streamlining things so that employees have to do as little manual, repetitive, administrative work as possible. The goal is to give employees as much time back as possible so they can focus on their actual jobs.
To do that, one thing we’re doing is streamlining our systems so that employees only ever have to deal with a single platform through the entirety of their lifecycle. Imagine a scenario where an employee uses a single platform from candidacy through exit, and everything in between, including things like onboarding, benefits selection, and more. Our team is focused on building solutions like that, which will ultimately improve and enrich the employee experience at Zum.
That’s what we’re working toward. True innovation can sometimes be building something new—and it can also sometimes be making things work more efficiently. That’s how we’re innovating in People Operations.
From your perspective, at a company-wide level, how is Zum driving American innovation forward?
If you think about it, Zum as a company is also innovating in the same way we’re doing in People Operations.
Before, bus drivers had one system of tracking their routes. Parents and students had no real idea of when their buses were coming, and school administrators didn’t know how to keep track of their buses.
Well, not anymore. Now, because of Zum’s single integrated platform, students tap on and off a bus with their RFID card. Bus drivers have GPS and school administrators know exactly what’s going on with each one of them, and parents always know where their children are.
That is innovation—the streamlining of student transportation onto a single platform that everyone can instantly and easily access.
When you think of the future, what role do children/the next generation play, and how can we set them up for success?
I would love it if the children riding our Zum buses could get a peek behind the curtain of what we do.
As I said, right now, Zum’s platform is extremely streamlined. For students, all they see is the RFID scanner; all they know is that their bus gets them to and from school on time. I’d love to share with them the moving pieces that go into making that seamless experience a reality—because if they’re able to peek behind the curtain, it might jog something creative or innovative within them.
Zum, and how complex our platform is, could be a real point of inspiration for our children—and I think inspiring the next generation is the surest way to set them up to be innovators in the future.