Senior Director, Talent Experience

The Senior Director, Talent Experience is the primary architect of our talent development. This role is also responsible for holding our culture narrative closely, ensuring it shows up through the moments that matter from attraction to off-boarding. This team ensures every single employee has the opportunity to write a compelling career story here at Smartsheet. We are building a culture where every leader deeply knows their talent, and every employee is aligned on our purpose and how work gets done—daily and globally.

This role requires a dynamic leader who is strong operationally: setting up foundations while charting a longer-term strategy. Your first year of the role will be focused on  being a hands-on builder: resetting core talent foundations and erecting strong, dependable scaffolding for our managers and leaders. Concurrently, you will architect these foundations to be future-ready, ensuring our systems can seamlessly transition into AI-driven, flow-of-work talent models as we scale.

This leader will lead our Employment Brand teams, Talent Management, Employee Development, and Employee Onboarding capabilities. This role will also have a critical role in bringing our culture to life across the organization.

This role is based in our Bellevue, WA, HQ and will report to the SVP of People & Culture. 

Core Responsibilities:

• Core Talent Architecture: Streamline and strengthen our core talent practices, including performance reviews, goal setting, and succession planning.
• Manager Scaffolding: Build simple, high-impact frameworks, toolkits, and learning events that equip managers to lead, coach, and support their teams effectively every day. Partner closely across the organization, including with functional Enablement teams to drive aligned strategies.
• Embedded Development: Deploy high-impact leadership development initiatives that feel integrated into daily operations and aligned to our annual value creation goal achievement.
• Employee Career Development: Deploy high-impact, embedded employee development strategies inclusive of programs, initiatives, and employee mobility strategies that build employee engagement and ensure that we have the right skills and capabilities to reach out business goals.
• Culture Quarterback: Standardize how our culture and values are communicated and recognized globally, ensuring consistency across all teams.

• Flow-of-Work Integration: Gradually shift learning and development out of traditional modules and directly into the daily software tools such as Smartsheet, Claude, and Slack– the tools our employees use daily.
• AI-Assisted Operations: Prepare our talent data infrastructure to leverage AI learning models and intelligent nudges, reducing administrative bias and friction.
• Predictive Talent Signals: Evolve talent and succession reviews from lagging annual cycles into continuous, data-driven insights.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of progressive people strategy, organizational development, or talent product experience in scaling and transformative technology environments.
• Deep track record in talent management and thriving in a nimble, iterative environment. You prefer practical and user-friendly frameworks over complex theories.
• Demonstrated ability to execute day-to-day needs and priorities, while making progress on a strategic roadmap of priorities.
• Proven track record of making data-driven decisions and a strong point of view for how to apply talent and learning strategies into the flow of work. 
• You treat internal initiatives like live products, launching MVPs quickly, gathering feedback, and adjusting in real time.
• You are a trusted partner across various People & Culture teams and the business, with an ability to build trusted relationships at all levels.
• You collaborate effectively in matrixed environments.
• Ability to influence across teams; bringing other teams together to build, create, and execute connected strategies and experiences regardless of reporting lines.
• While you are focused on immediate foundational needs, you possess baseline experience with—or a strong vision for—AI learning models, LLMs, and digital coaching tools.