Assistant Director, Talent Selection Design

About the Job:

The Assistant Director, Talent Selection Design is responsible for the end-to-end design, governance, and continuous improvement of how the enterprise identifies and selects talent that drives business growth, ensuring practices are consistent, skills-based, and deliver strong candidate-centric hiring experiences.

This role modernizes how the organization identifies and selects talent, strengthening internal and external selection practices. The focus is on improving quality of hire and enabling faster, more equitable decisions through data, technology, and AI-enabled tools. The role ensures the talent selection process is effective, scalable, and aligned with business priorities, talent strategy, skills, and organizational culture and behaviors.

The Assistant Director partners with Talent Acquisition, HR Business Partners, HR Service Delivery, and hiring managers to bring new perspectives and consultation to selection challenges, ensuring data-informed hiring decisions that strengthen organizational capability and directly support the achievement of operational and strategic business objectives.

What You'll Do:

Enterprise Talent Process Ownership

• Own the end-to-end design of the enterprise selection philosophy, processes, and governance anchored in skills to improve quality of hire, candidate experience, and business outcomes.
• Ensure talent selection practices are pragmatic, hiring manager and candidate-friendly, and aligned with enterprise talent philosophy, business needs, and culture.
• Accountable for supporting delivery of the talent selection processes through developing clear guidance, materials, draft communications, and readiness support for recruiters, HR Business Partners, hiring managers, and employees.
• Providing day-to-day support and management of processes, including escalated technical inquiries, issue coordination, and follow-through with HR stakeholders.
• Utilize talent analytics and relevant success metrics to assess the effectiveness of initiatives, monitor adoption, gather insights for continuous improvement, and track progress and outcomes.
• Partners with the HR Advisory team to brainstorm and enable Career Center consultations related to talent selection, including resume support, and interview preparation.

Continuous Improvement

• Lead retrospectives and synthesize quantitative and qualitative feedback to identify opportunities to simplify and strengthen talent selection practices.
• Translate insights into clear recommendations and design enhancements that improve clarity, consistency, impact, and the candidate, hiring manager, and recruiter experience.

Stakeholder Partnership & Enablement

• Serve as a primary point of contact for the talent acquisition team on enterprise talent selection processes. Strengthens knowledge management for recruiters, hiring managers, HR Services, HR business partners.
• Provide consultation, guidance, and problem-solving support related to process execution, interpretation, and application.
• Partner with Enterprise Risk and Legal to support audits, compliance reporting, and risk-based inquiries related to enterprise talent selection processes.
• Develop, deliver, and scale enablement materials (e.g., toolkits, job aids, FAQs, talk tracks, training, etc.) to support consistent enterprise adoption.
• Creates automated and scalable self-service support through AI tools to quickly surface accurate guidance for hiring managers, recruiters and HR, reducing the day-to-day support requests (i.e. strengthen interviewing and selection practices for hiring teams).
• Partners with HR Technology, Talent analytics, and Talent Acquisition to modernize and scale selection through fit-for-purpose tools, digital workflows, and data-informed capabilities. Support evaluation and adoption of AI-enabled solutions in ways that strengthen consistency, efficiency, and candidate and hiring-team experience.

What Experience You'll Bring:

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, or a related field  
• Graduate degree strongly preferred

Experience

• 6–8 years of experience in talent management, Talent Acquisition, or related HR disciplines with a focus on high-impact, enterprise talent processes
• Demonstrated experience leading enterprise-wide talent acquisition and selection processes (e.g., requisition-to-offer workflows, structured interviewing and assessment, selection governance, and skills-based hiring)
• Experience partnering with Talent Acquisition and HR Business Partners
• Experience leveraging Workday as a process owner to drive mature, scalable talent selection processes and insights.

Skills & Capabilities

• User-Centered Design Process: Designs products, services, and experiences that are tailored to the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the end-user.
• Customer Centricity: Applies a customer first mindset to design and continuously improve solutions, systems, processes, and services that support enterprise strategy, impact critical business outcomes, and drive organizational success.
• Stakeholder Relationship: Organizes, influences, monitors, and improves relationships with key stakeholders; systematically identifies stakeholders and analyzes their needs and expectations to support in planning and decision making while implementing various tasks to engage with them.
• Cross Functional Partnering & Planning: Facilitates collaboration, communication, coordination, and planning with individuals and teams from different functions within the organization, and who have different areas of expertise, to achieve common goals.
• Consulting: Connects with stakeholders to understand and gain specific information to help resolve customer problems in a given domain. Communicates effectively intent to customers, solicits customer requirements, utilizes domain knowledge and collaborates with the right stakeholders.
• Executive Presence: Builds and maintains an authentic personal brand, inspiring and motivating people to pursue a desired outcome by sharing a clear vision and demonstrating confidence, professionalism, self-awareness and trust with business stakeholders.
• Business Influence: Collaborates, communicates and influences direct reports, stakeholders, and other business functions based on understanding of the marketplace, organizational needs, and the client as a people manager.
• Change Management: Acts as an advocate for change as well as identifying gaps/issues that should be addressed to deliver optimal client/field experiences. Leads change management, when driving technology or process improvements, applying relevant change acceleration, risk mitigation, and stakeholder management methodologies and best practices. Analyzes business trends and current state to develop a case for change that aligns with business strategy. Implements plans and strategies to manage organizational and behavioral changes by aligning leaders and engaging impacted stakeholders.
• Adaptive Communication: Formulates strategies to be used to convey complex information about services, products, systems, or processes to targeted audiences; communicates and liaises between technical and non-technical audiences.
• Learning Agility & Critical Thinking: Pursues learning and obtains knowledge continuously in relevant fields, methods, or technologies in current and future practices; continuously utilizes critical thinking to identify opportunities, execute solutions, and measure impact to constantly improve existing practices and processes based on feedback, lessons learned, and market trends.
• Strategic Thinking: Uses critical thinking and knowledge of business demand to plan, design, prioritize and execute high impact initiatives and programs.
• Analytical Thinking: Organizes and compares various aspects of a situation to comprehend and identify key or underlying complex issues through the use of quantitative data and analysis; leverages strong business acumen, problem solving, and interpersonal skills to think critically about situations from multiple perspectives and consistently seeks ways to improve processes.

#LI-Hybrid, #LI-remote

Compensation Range:

Pay Range - Start:

$108,160.00

Pay Range - End:

$162,240.00

Geographic Specific Pay Structure:

Structure 110:

$118,960.00 USD - $178,440.00 USD

Structure 115:

$124,400.00 USD - $186,600.00 USD

We believe in fairness and transparency. It’s why we share the salary range for most of our roles. However, final salaries are based on a number of factors, including the skills and experience of the candidate; the current market; location of the candidate; and other factors uncovered in the hiring process. The standard pay structure is listed but if you’re living in California, New York City or other eligible location, geographic specific pay structures, compensation and benefits could be applicable, click here to learn more.

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Northwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer who welcomes and encourages diversity in the workforce. We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.