[Hiring] Manager or Director, Talent Management @Encoura

Role Description

Encoura is seeking a Manager or Director, Talent Management & Development to own how our people experience working here and how they are developed over time. This role ensures the alignment of talent programs with organizational objectives to retain and grow top talent.

You will partner cross-functionally across the organization to cultivate a high-performance, inclusive culture that supports long-term business growth. You will also lead two experienced Talent Development professionals. Year one is focused by design: performance management, engagement and culture, and the roadmap for what comes next.

We are open to hiring this role at either the Manager or Director level based on the selected candidate's experience, leadership scope, and organizational impact. Both levels share the same core responsibilities, with placement reflecting the candidate's demonstrated ability to lead initiatives and drive organizational outcomes. This is a full-time, salaried position reporting to the Chief People Officer.

A Day in the Life

This year, FY27, you will:

• Develop and execute an integrated talent management and development strategy aligned with organizational goals and values.
• Own the performance management cycle end to end in Lattice — goal setting, check-ins, review cycles, and calibration — and make it a process managers use rather than a process they complete.
• Own engagement and culture. Design and run how we listen, turn the results into action plans that sit with the leaders who can act on them, and follow through until something changes.
• Keep the existing learning stack running — Litmos, Articulate/Rise — and administer training where it is needed today, while assessing what we should consolidate.
• Partner with the Chief People Officer on talent gap and capacity planning, bringing data that shows where the organization is thin before it becomes a vacancy.
• Collaborate with leaders to assess organizational capability needs and implement programs that build critical skills and leadership pipelines.
• Own our manager guides from your first day. The step-by-step guides managers use to coach, document, and correct performance will be written before you start. Measuring whether managers use them, where they get stuck, and whether they are producing better outcomes is yours — and so is revising them when the evidence says they are not working.
• Lead, coach, and develop two Talent Development professionals.
• Utilize workforce analytics and talent metrics to assess program effectiveness and determine what is working and what is not.

Role Progression

Within 1 month, you'll:

• Know the talent team and will have partnered with the CPO to create the FY27 team objectives. Have met the leaders whose groups are undergoing change and planned how best to support them.

Within 3 months, you'll:

• Have the FY27 performance cycle designed and scheduled, have a measurement approach in place for the manager guides, and have an agreed approach to engagement with the Chief People Officer.

Within 6 months, you'll:

• Have the performance cycle running, have a first engagement read with action plans owned by named leaders, and have an FY28 talent roadmap that leadership can fund.

Qualifications

• Manager level: 5+ years in talent management, organizational development, or learning and development, including hands-on design and delivery of performance or leadership programs, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Director level: 8+ years of progressive experience in talent management, organizational development, or related HR functions, including ownership of enterprise-wide talent programs and experience leading a team.
• Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, or a related field with equivalent experience; Master's degree preferred.
• Demonstrated experience designing and running a performance management cycle that managers across an organization actually completed, and a clear view of why it worked.
• Experience owning employee engagement end to end — not just fielding a survey but turning results into action that leaders carried and that employees could see.
• Experience building succession plans and running talent reviews with senior leaders, including the uncomfortable conversations about readiness.
• Strong consultative skills and the standing to tell a leader that the approach they want is the wrong one, and to be heard.
• Comfort with talent data and the discipline to measure program effect rather than program activity.
• Hands-on experience with Lattice or a comparable performance and engagement platform, and with at least one learning management or content authoring system.
• Experience in a recently merged, acquired, or integrating organization strongly preferred.
• Experience supporting a distributed or high-volume hourly workforce preferred.
• Experience in higher education or education technology preferred.

Requirements

• Successful candidates will be required to complete and pass a CLEAR™ identity verification as part of the pre-employment screening process.

Benefits

• The annual base salary range for this exempt position is $120,000–$140,000.
• Employees in this role are eligible for Encoura’s comprehensive benefits package, which includes health insurance, retirement contributions, paid time off, and other programs that support employee well-being.