Isaacson, Miller Seeking Chief People Officer

September 3, 2024 – Boston-based Isaacson, Miller is currently looking to hire a chief people officer. The firm is seeking a visionary chief people officer who can guide its people strategy and operations. This is a unique opportunity for an experienced leader to influence organizational change, enhance employee experiences, and help shape a thriving, inclusive environment.

Reporting to the president and CEO and serving as a member of Isaacson, Miller’s management committee, the CPO leads and enhances all aspects of the firm’s people operations function. This role is pivotal in driving talent strategy, fostering an inclusive and high-performance culture, and ensuring alignment with the firm’s mission, vision, and business objectives.

The CPO will steward talent lifecycle strategies and plans that continue to evolve our culture, policies, and practices to meet the workforce and workplace challenges of a matrixed, high-growth, employee-owned professional service enterprise. “In collaboration with the firm’s leadership, P+C team, and other colleagues, the CPO will develop compelling people solutions; enhance performance assessment to ensure that we are measuring what matters; help to ensure workforce well-being; integrate equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging principles into our talent culture and practices; and cultivate talent growth and development,” the search firm said. “Our people are our greatest asset. The CPO will partner strategically with leaders throughout the firm to achieve the firm’s goals regarding all aspects of people operations, including talent acquisition, engagement, performance management, learning and development, rewards, recognition, and retention.”

Isaacson, Miller’s next CPO will be an accomplished and resourceful human capital leader and team manager with prior experience in a successful professional services organization or analogous environment. The firm notes that the position calls for a collaborative professional with experience aligning talent programs to firm strategy within a matrixed, multi-generational, geographically distributed, professional services firm environment.

The successful candidate will establish departmental and interpersonal trust through the application of broad human resources expertise, intellectual curiosity, rigor, humor, resilience, vision, and strong communication and consensus-building talents, according to Isaacson, Miller. The firm notes that the CPO must be comfortable working at all levels of the organization and supporting an entrepreneurial environment in which independent professionals build and sustain varied practices in support of the firm’s mission. The successful candidate will bring experience with – or demonstrated and deeply felt interest in – the mission work of our client organizations whose work advances the public good.

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While no one candidate will possess all of them, the successful candidate will bring many of the following experiences, skills, and attributes:

• Demonstrated skill in coaching, guiding, and influencing senior business leaders; leading people operations and organizational change; and implementing and sustaining high-quality services.
• A track record of successfully leading in a consultative and inclusive decision-making structure.
• Excellent time, project, team, and budget management skills.
• Demonstrated commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusivity.
• Functional expertise in two or more of the following areas: employee relations, compensation, benefits, recruiting, and learning and development.
• Strong listening, verbal, and written communication skills; the ability to gracefully navigate and coalesce divergent points of view.
• Superb relationship management skills; the capacity to build trust and rapport with people from diverse experiences, backgrounds, styles, and aspirations.
• Maturity, objectivity, discretion, and sound judgment in engaging with multiple constituencies.
• A track record of data-driven decision-making; the ability to collect, analyze, and communicate relevant data and leverage meaningful insights.
• High standards for consistently reliable delivery of people services, with rigorous attention to clarity, timeliness, accuracy, and detail.
• Technological facility; comfort with current HR technology and information systems.
• Integrity, honesty, resilience, and a healthy sense of humor.

Nationally Recognized Search Firm

A nationally recognized search firm focused on recruiting transformational leaders for mission-driven organizations, Isaacson, Miller has conducted thousands of placements over more than three decades. More than half of the firm’s work has been in academia, involving university presidents, college chancellors and deans. The firm has filled top leadership posts at Wellesley College, Washington State University, Miami University, Howard University, Bowdoin College, Dartmouth, NYU, Virginia State University, and the University of North Carolina, among others.

John Isaacson, the firm’s chair, founded Isaacson, Miller in 1982. He has led searches in many areas of the firm’s practice. Mr. Isaacson has helped the firm develop its cumulative knowledge of the craft of search and has attended, with increasing interest, to the missionary purposes of institutions, the political and economic disciplines of specialized markets, and the emotional and intellectual learnings that leaders acquire in a committed working life.

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Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor  – Hunt Scanlon Media