SG&A Talent, Planning & Strategy Lead

About The Role

Every part of the business needs someone who knows its hiring picture cold and can turn that into a plan. That is this role. You are the embedded planning partner for an assigned scope, running its demand and capacity picture and producing the read that goes up into the enterprise view. The work sits between the analytics and the business. You own the numbers for your scope: the demand, the capacity against it, and where the plan is going to miss. You also own what happens next. That means the conversation with the stakeholders behind the numbers, the process or operational change that follows, and the systems-level fix so the same problem is not back next month. The output is a decision, not a report.

You are the operating partner to SG&A (Sales, General, Admin) recruiting leadership; equal parts chief of staff, business operator, and strategic planner. You assess upcoming demand across this entire organization, turn messy data into clear plans, and make the business decisions that set this team up to win before the requisitions even open. You sit in leadership meetings, represent TA (talent acquisition) to cross-functional partners and division leaders, and own the roadmap for how we plan, allocate, and scale our recruiting capacity.

The output of your work is not a dashboard. It is a decision: where we should be pointed, what we should prioritize, and what we should deprioritize, delivered with the conviction and executive presence to make it stick.

Who You Are

You are a planner with recruiting instincts and an operator's mindset. You have enough TA exposure to know when a plan will not survive contact with the market, and enough business acumen to frame the tradeoff in terms a CFO would respect.

You have executive presence. You are comfortable being the most junior person in a room full of VPs and presenting the recommendation, not the options. You build trust by being the person who always has the answer — or knows exactly how to get it.

Most of all, you are resourceful. You get handed a messy, half-documented problem and you find the path forward. When the obvious answer does not work you do not stop, and you do not wait to be told where to look. You can tell what matters from what is noise, and you turn incomplete information into a recommendation that moves the business.

What You'll Do

Talent Planning, Capacity Strategy & Systems (~70%)

• Own the Headcount Plan. Run the SG&A headcount planning and capacity model: track approvals, update scenarios, manage change control, and keep leadership on a current, reliable view.
• Model Capacity Against Demand. Maintain a live picture of recruiting capacity against incoming demand. Produce the rolling roadmap — demand, capacity, gap, decision needed, date — that feeds the enterprise view.
• Run Demand Intake and Drive Prioritization. Frame the tradeoffs and see the sequence demand against constrained capacity with data-backed rationale. Operate the framework for how business lines submit, justify, and prioritize hiring needs. Turn disparate requests into one source of truth.
• Build the Infrastructure & Own the Data Layer. Replace tribal knowledge and manual processes with automation, structure, and repeatable systems. Be the counterpart on recruiting analytics — funnel velocity, capacity modeling, scorecards, BI platform — and drive adoption so stakeholders can self-serve.
• Partner With Finance. Connect hiring plans to SG&A financials: budget alignment, cost modeling, and downstream implications of capacity decisions.
• Own TA Market Mapping for Expansion. For new sites, facilities, or countries — own the talent read: density, competitor presence, hiring ramp, wage implications, and the recruiting capacity to staff it. Put the talent picture in the room before the decision, not after.
• Report International Movement. International expansion lands in your plan on the same methodology as domestic demand — country tier changes, new in-country needs, and the capacity that follows.

Business Operations & Executive Partnership (~30%)

• Be the Operating Partner to TA Leadership. Your TA leader should never walk into a business review without a capacity story you built — one that connects hiring progress to business outcomes and carries the recommendation on the page.
• Program manage SG&A’s section end to end — capacity against demand, productivity, funnel health, SLA burndown. You own the meeting, the materials, and the follow-ups.
• Represent TA Across the Business. You are in the room with division leaders, finance partners, and cross-functional stakeholders — representing what TA sees, what the data says, and what it means for their plans.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in talent acquisition, people operations, business operations, strategy, consulting, or a related planning-intensive function.
• Strong analytical skills: proficient in Excel or Google Sheets, capable of building and maintaining headcount and capacity models, and comfortable working in messy data environments.
• Experience building structure in ambiguous situations where the process did not exist and the data was incomplete.
• Able to translate analysis into a short, decision-ready narrative for leadership. Strong slide craft, your decks carry the recommendation on the page and hold up when read without you in the room.
• Understanding of the recruiting lifecycle and capacity math (hires per recruiter per month, ramp, conversion) well enough to catch an infeasible plan.
• Experience influencing stakeholders who do not report to you.
• Comfort operating with high autonomy and making prioritization calls with limited guidance.
• Must be a U.S. Person due to required access to U.S. export controlled information or facilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in BizOps, management consulting, FP&A, Chief of Staff, or Strategy & Ops in addition to People or TA workstreams.
• Experience with Palantir Foundry or similar data platforms.
• Familiarity with HRIS (Workday, ChartHop, Oracle, Rippling), ATS (Greenhouse), and BI or analytics platforms.
• Exposure to the embedded partner model (DivOps, BizOps, or similar).
• Defense, aerospace, or other program-driven hiring environment.