The Senior Vice President, People Strategy & Operations serves as a senior enterprise HR leader responsible for translating business strategy into scalable people solutions that drive growth, performance, leadership effectiveness, and operational excellence.
Reporting to the Chief People Officer, this role acts as a strategic partner to executive leadership while overseeing the operational infrastructure of the People function. The SVP will lead the integration of people strategy, workforce planning, talent operations, employee experience, communications, compliance, and HR service delivery to ensure the organization operates as one enterprise.
This leader will balance long-term workforce strategy with disciplined execution, building scalable processes, modern operating models, and high-performing teams that enable business growth and strengthen organizational capability.
The role serves as a key advisor to the CPO and may act as the functional leader in the absence of the CPO.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise People Strategy
- Partner with executive leadership to align workforce strategy with business priorities, growth objectives, and organizational transformation initiatives.
- Help shape and operationalize the enterprise people agenda across talent, leadership, culture, engagement, workforce capability, and organizational effectiveness.
- Drive enterprise-wide consistency while enabling flexibility across business units where appropriate.
- Lead strategic workforce planning efforts tied to capability needs, market demands, and business growth.
- Support organizational design initiatives that improve scalability, accountability, and decision-making effectiveness.
HR Operations & Service Delivery
- Oversee the operational infrastructure of the People function, ensuring efficient, scalable, and compliant delivery of HR services globally.
- Establish operational standards, governance practices, metrics, and service-level expectations across the HR organization.
- Drive simplification, automation, modernization of HR processes and technologies, and adoption of self-service capabilities.
- Ensure operational readiness to support acquisitions, integrations, reorganizations, and rapid growth.
Leadership & Talent Enablement
- Partner with business leaders to strengthen leadership capability, succession readiness, and enterprise thinking across the organization.
- Support the development of high-performing teams and performance-driven cultures.
- Drive integration across talent acquisition, learning and development, performance management, and career growth initiatives.
- Champion initiatives that improve employee engagement, retention, internal mobility, and workforce capability.
Employee Experience & Communications
- Oversee enterprise employee communications and engagement strategies that reinforce culture, transparency, and alignment.
- Ensure employees have a clear understanding of organizational priorities, expectations, career opportunities, and rewards.
- Partner with leadership to strengthen trust, organizational connection, and change adoption during periods of transformation.
Governance, Risk & Compliance
- Ensure compliance with employment laws, regulatory requirements, and internal governance standards across all jurisdictions.
- Partner with legal and finance leaders to mitigate workforce-related risk while enabling business agility.
- Maintain strong controls related to compensation administration, payroll, employee relations, policy management, and workforce data governance.
Metrics, Analytics & Business Insights
- Establish meaningful workforce metrics and reporting that provide executives with actionable insights and support data-driven decision-making.
- Monitor trends related to retention, productivity, engagement, hiring, workforce costs, organizational health, and leadership effectiveness.
- Use analytics to identify risks, opportunities, and operational improvements.
Qualifications
- 10+ years of progressive HR leadership experience, including senior enterprise HR operational leadership
- Experience supporting complex, multi-business-unit, global, or high-growth organizations.
- Strong business acumen with the ability to connect workforce strategy to financial and operational outcomes.
- Demonstrated success leading HR operations, organizational transformation, and large-scale people initiatives.
- Experience advising executive leadership teams on organizational and workforce matters.
- Strong understanding of HR systems, analytics, compliance, payroll, and operational governance.
- Excellent communication, executive presence, and stakeholder management skills.
- Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree preferred.
- SHRM-SCP; HRCI SPHR, GPHR
Preferred Experience
- Professional services, accounting advisory, consulting, staffing, investment banking & advisory firms, financial services, technology services or law firms.
- Private equity-backed or transformation-oriented environments.
- Multi-state and international workforce management.
- M&A integration, workforce scaling, and organizational redesign experience.
Travel: 20%