Director, Talent Strategy
CDW Corporation · Chicago · Adams, Illinois, United States
Director, Talent Strategy & Planning
Reports to: SVP, Head of Talent | Function: Talent | Scope: Global
Position Summary
The Director, Talent Strategy & Planning is responsible for strengthening CDW's ability to make proactive, business-aligned talent decisions that support growth, transformation, and long-term organizational readiness. This leader ensures CDW has the leadership depth, workforce plans, skills visibility, and performance discipline needed to execute the business strategy today and build the capabilities required for the future.
Reporting to the SVP, Head of Talent, this role leads a team focused on building simple, scalable, data-informed talent practices that help leaders understand where the organization is strong, where risk exists, and what actions are needed to close gaps. The Director connects leadership assessment and succession, strategic workforce planning, skills, and performance management into an integrated approach that improves decision-making, strengthens accountability, and prepares CDW for an outcome-obsessed future.
The successful candidate will bring an enterprise talent mindset, strong business acumen, and the ability to translate strategy into simple, practical tools and resources that help HR Business Partners and leaders act. They will use AI fluently in their own work and embed it into how talent work gets done across the function.
Key Responsibilities
Leadership Assessment & Succession- Own the enterprise approach to leadership assessment and succession, ensuring CDW has a clear, differentiated view of leadership strength, readiness, and risk from front-line leader through executive levels.
- Elevate the quality and depth of talent review discussions by equipping HR Business Partners and leaders with simple, practical guides, templates, and prompts so discussions meaningfully differentiate talent, surface successors and successor gaps, and result in committed actions rather than ratings alone.
- Drive follow-through on succession outcomes in partnership with HR Business Partners, who own the leader relationships and day-to-day execution, working with the Director, Learning Strategy & Design on targeted development for successors and high-potential leaders and with the Sr Director, Talent Acquisition where succession gaps require external pipeline building.
- Track and report progress on leadership readiness, bench strength, and completion of agreed talent actions, giving HR Business Partners and leaders easy-to-use views of their own talent picture so accountability for movement is visible over time.
Strategic Workforce Planning- Build strategic workforce planning as a new enterprise capability at CDW, starting simple and maturing the approach over time so it becomes a practical input to business and functional planning rather than an HR exercise.
- Translate business priorities and growth plans into a forward view of the roles, skills, and capabilities CDW will need, and the gaps between that future state and today's workforce.
- Help leaders understand workforce implications, risks, and tradeoffs earlier through practical planning tools and clear, digestible outputs that support informed decisions on capacity, capability, build-versus-buy, and readiness.
- Partner with Talent Acquisition, Learning, Finance, and HR Business Partners so workforce plans connect to hiring plans, development investment, and budget cycles.
Shift CDW to a Skills-Based Talent Organization- Lead the shift toward a skills-based talent organization, giving CDW a real-time view of workforce capability and a common language for skills across talent processes.
- Advance the skills framework and taxonomy, organizing priority skills into clear groupings that leaders and coworkers can actually use, including integration with the CDW Way values and commitments.
- Progress the multi-year skills infrastructure roadmap and the effective use of supporting technology (for example Workday Skills Cloud) to build skills visibility at scale, while keeping what leaders and coworkers interact with simple and intuitive.
- Embed skills into succession, workforce planning, development, and internal mobility so skills data drives decisions rather than sitting in a system.
Performance Management- Own the enterprise performance management approach, shifting the culture from activity to outcomes and reinforcing accountability for results.
- Ensure performance is evaluated on both the what and the how, anchored in CDW's leadership expectations and values.
- Build the foundation for continuous coaching, regular feedback, and ongoing performance conversations rather than a once-a-year event.
- Equip HR Business Partners and leaders with simple, practical resources that make regular feedback and coaching conversations easy to have well.
- Simplify and standardize performance practices so they are applied consistently across teams and geographies, supported by clear expectations, timing, outputs, and lightweight resources such as conversation guides, feedback prompts, and manager toolkits.
Improve Talent Decision Quality- Build simple, scalable talent practices and put practical tools, templates, and enablement in the hands of HR Business Partners and leaders so adoption happens without heavy lift or hand-holding.
- Strengthen the quality of talent data and insight, and use it to tell a clear talent story to senior leaders.
- Drive accountability for talent outcomes, including leadership readiness, capability gaps, and progress against actions.
- Use AI personally to work faster and smarter — analyzing talent data, synthesizing insight, drafting materials, and testing ideas — and model that way of working for the team.
- Embed AI into how talent work gets done across the function, applying it to succession, workforce planning, skills, and performance so processes are simpler, insight is faster, and the tools HR Business Partners and leaders use are genuinely easier.
Minimum Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business, Organizational Development, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, or a related field.
- 10+ years of progressive experience in talent management, talent strategy, succession planning, leadership assessment, strategic workforce planning, performance management, skills strategy, organizational effectiveness, or HR business partnership in a multinational organization.
- Experience leading teams, setting strategy, building capability, and driving execution.
- Strong business acumen with the ability to connect talent practices to enterprise strategy, growth, transformation, and performance outcomes.
- Strong executive communication, facilitation, consulting, and stakeholder management skills, with a track record of making complex talent topics simple and usable for HR Business Partners and business leaders.
- Experience using talent data, workforce insights, HR technology, or analytics to inform decisions and shape strategy.
- Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, influence without direct authority, and drive change across a matrixed organization.
- Demonstrated personal use of AI tools as a core part of how they work — to accelerate analysis, synthesis, communication, content creation, and decision-making — with a point of view on where AI adds real value and where it does not.
- Strong curiosity and commitment to continuous learning in skills-based talent practices, workforce planning, talent transformation, and the future of work.
Success Profile
The ideal candidate is an enterprise talent strategist who can connect business strategy, leadership readiness, workforce planning, skills, and performance into one integrated talent agenda, and who works in an AI-enabled way themselves.
They are comfortable advising executives, leading a team, using data to tell a clear talent story, and ensuring solutions are simple, practical, and supported by tools and resources leaders and HR Business Partners will actuall