Job Description

Description

Being part of Air Canada is to become part of an iconic Canadian symbol, recently ranked the best Airline in North America. Let your career take flight by joining our diverse and vibrant team at the leading edge of passenger aviation.

Reporting to the Vice President, Brand, this role will be responsible for creating and executing a communications vision which ensures that Air Canada's products and services are well understood by all stakeholders and that fliers are well supported throughout their travel journey. The long-term goal of this role is to enhance the perception of the Air Canada brand and generate an overarching positive narrative for all Commercial activities across our key commercial stakeholders: consumers, the travel trade, business partners, and relevant trade media.

At their core, the person in this role should be able to demonstrate five key characteristics: * A wealth of communication experience, able to immediately build trust among key stakeholders, and able to work across all relevant storytelling channels.

• A consummate and polished professional, given the extensive senior management and executive relationships they are expected to foster.
• Extremely collaborative, adept at developing relationships in a highly networked, matrixed organization.
• A proven track record leading a high-performing team.
• Highly curious, with a large appetite to learn within an ever-changing, dynamic industry.

Responsibilities

• Develop an overarching communications vision and proactive PR marketing plan for Commercial activities, with both long-range and annual plans with relevant strategies and specific tactical plans therein.
• Create Commercial-level and individual branch messaging frameworks that align to Air Canada's business strategy, and that can be disseminated across appropriate channels; build alignment to these frameworks with senior Commercial leaders; revise as marketing conditions dictate
• Work with corporate communications to find public opportunities for Senior leaders to evangelize our Commercial vision; prepare messaging for them and coach accordingly.
• Work extensively with Commercial leaders on their annual plans, identifying opportunities within our far-reaching Commercial activities to drive positive B2B, B2C, and B2B2C coverage and tactics.
• Liaise and support Corporate Communications practitioners by providing Commercial vision narrative and messaging, along with relevant content, for audiences they cover, such as employees, investors, regulators, and government, etc.
• Working with Trade Marketing, collaborate on a proactive trade media strategy to build a positive reputation among travel agents based on Commercial activities, including Distribution strategy, Aeroplan, network evolution.
• Working with Content Marketing develop appropriate content that can be used efficiently and extensively not only in social channels, but more broadly across Commercial audiences and channels.
• Working with Promotional Marketing, recommend and deploy proactive PR plans that amplify the revenue-generating and behaviour-creating campaigns that support the Commercial business.
• Foster and maintain meaningful relationships with key industry writers and bloggers; become the go-to team for queries about the Company's Commercial activities.
• Contribute as needed to Corporate Communications team on any crisis- or Operations-related communications.
• Develop and oversee a long-term awards/accolades strategy, determining which awards to pursue (with input from senior Commercial stakeholders), and organize entries
• Oversee the Manager, Customer Communications, on strategies for transforming non-promotional customer notifications into clearer, more helpful, and more reputation-enhancing communications.
• Develop and implement a plan for overall reputation tracking, collaborating with the Director, Content on this research; reporting to stakeholders on results and providing recommendations on tactics to address.
• Function as the senior liaise with a roster of external agencies, providing them with insight into overall Commercial activities, and ensuring they are able to work efficiently.
• Build and lead a team of communications professionals.

Qualifications

At least fifteen years' experience working within communications, strongly weighted towards public and media relations, with a strong background in proactive communications supporting business and marketing activities.

Proven ability to earn status as a trusted advisor to senior executives.

Highly adept at working using all modern communications tools and channels.

A superlative writer, and a proven ability to coach a team towards communication excellence.

Experience within a large, matrixed company with a varied stakeholder network is a requirement

Experience managing agencies is a requirement, with direct experience within an agency an additional advantage.

Experience working with both B2C-related audiences and B2B-related audiences is a requirement.

Bilingualism (English/French) is a strong asset.

Demonstrable strong strategic thinking, planning, leadership, analysis, and innovation skills

Given the fast-paced, dynamic nature of the aviation industry and Air Canada's expansive business, the proven ability to work nimbly and make superior, fact-based decision quickly is important for this role.

The ability to develop and inspire a vision, and to lead a team and colleagues towards it, is a requirement.

Proven ability to build a team up, and manage and grow them, is a requirement. * A proven relationship-builder, both interpersonally and by absorbing and acting business imperatives from colleagues.

Location: Toronto / Montreal

Conditions of Employment:

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country of interest, at the time any offer of employment is made and seeking any required work permits/visas or other authorizations which may be required is the sole responsibility of the candidates applying for this position.

Linguistic Requirements

Based on equal qualifications, preference will be given to bilingual candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion

Air Canada is strongly committed to Diversity and Inclusion and aims to create a healthy, accessible and rewarding work environment which highlights employees' unique contributions to our company's success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applications from all to help us build a diverse workforce which reflects the diversity of our customers, and communities, in which we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest; however only those selected to continue in the process will be contacted