Manager or Director, Talent Management

Role Overview

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. Encoura brought three organizations together over the past year. We now have roughly 800+ employees and a population that brings three different companies’ sets of expectations.

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 would rather do three things properly now than six things partially.

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. Encoura uses Lattice and Domo

FY28 you will design:

• A succession planning and talent review approach: critical roles, critical talent, honest bench strength, and a defensible view of who is ready for what
• A leadership development program for a manager population formed from three legacy organizations, many of whom are managing at Encoura for the first time
• A consolidated learning program with the content, vendors, and analytics behind it
• An approach for our Student Success population — a high-volume, largely hourly and seasonal workforce whose supervisors need different tools than our corporate managers

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.

About You

• Level will be determined by experience and demonstrated scope:
  • 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. This is FY28 work here, and we want someone who has done it before they design it
• 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. You will be building shared practice across three cultures that have not finished becoming one
• Experience supporting a distributed or high-volume hourly workforce preferred
• Experience in higher education or education technology preferred
• Successful candidates will be required to complete and pass a CLEAR™ identity verification as part of the pre-employment screening process. CLEAR™ Candidate FAQ
  • CLEAR™ Candidate FAQ

The annual base salary range for this exempt position is $120,000–$140,000 andreflects the midpoint through maximum of the established range for this role. Encoura establishes compensation using national market data, internal equity considerations, and organizational budget factors to ensure fairness and consistency across the organization. Certain roles may also be eligible for variable compensation in addition to base salary.

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.

About  Us

Encoura’s mission is to empower students and institutions to create meaningful connections so everyone can make the most informed decisions to achieve their goals. Since 1972, the Company has evolved its products and services to better represent the link between students and higher education institutions and to create the highest probability of student success. 

Encoura’s expertise now spans enrollment, research, marketing, student success, and advancement and provides an unmatched combination of higher education experience and innovative solutions for colleges and universities. The Company also offers Encourage® — the nation’s largest free college and career planning program used by millions of high school students and educators nationwide. 

It is the policy of the Company to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran or disabled status, or genetic information. All applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S. 

Encoura endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process or are limited in the ability and need an alternative method for applying, please contact the Talent Team. 

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Originally posted on Himalayas