Director, Talent Management (Remote)

About the role

GiveDirectly is building its People function to support a planned increase in scale; this is its first senior talent management role. The position is remote, based in Nairobi, and covers performance management linked to pay, manager and leadership development, learning, onboarding, talent planning and succession, employee listening and engagement, and culture and values. The first year focuses on fixing the performance system and onboarding, then shifting to the long-term vision and roadmap of the function.

Key responsibilities

• Build the talent management function: within 90 days assess what exists, recommend the first-year sequencing and agree it with the Head of People, and propose the team and what to build in-house versus outsource.
• Set the multi-year vision and roadmap, connect talent management to workforce planning, compensation and recruitment, and build a talent and succession approach for critical roles.
• Own the performance system redesign: make it reliable and calibrated for merit increases, useful for managers, fair across countries and currencies, and include a clear global standard for low performance.
• Revamp onboarding for the next wave of hiring, build a foundational manager program (feedback, coaching, difficult conversations), and extend into leadership development and learning.
• Plan the values retreat and build an employee listening and engagement strategy.

Required profile

• 7+ years in talent management, performance or organizational design, including leading a function or major part of one.
• Has designed a performance system that connected ratings to pay and kept it fair across different currencies and labour markets.
• Hands-on builder who has created talent programs from scratch in a start-up or scale-up, and thinks in systems and with change management in mind.
• Deep experience in at least two of onboarding, manager development and employee engagement or listening, and experience working across countries including sub-Saharan Africa.
• Track record of taking over a major project in motion, working through disagreement with a senior partner, and influencing without formal authority in a matrixed organization.

Preferred: experience in a mission-driven or international organization, with high-growth commercial or tech experience, and exposure to compensation design.