Chief Human Resources Officer

Company Description

By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds skills and expertise. We are dedicated to creating a diverse and welcoming environment where everyone can thrive.

Why join the Harvard Graduate School of Education?

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is a diverse community of learners, teachers, and employees who are passionate about changing the world through education and striving for maximum impact in the field of education.

Many choose to work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education because they believe in our mission and are excited by our vision for the future. We have a reputation as a great place to work, for our excellent leadership, and we are a strong community that values diversity. For more information about HGSE, its programs, research, and faculty, please visit: www.gse.harvard.edu.

Job Description

Reporting to the Chief Administrative Officer, the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) is Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE)’s senior HR leader and the institutional architect for how the School recruits, compensates, develops, and supports its workforce. The CHRO works closely with the Dean’s Office, the Chief Administrative Officer, the Chief People Officer (CPO), and the senior leadership team to ensure HR operations, compliance, and workforce strategy are executed with rigor, equity, and excellence.

As HGSE’s lead expert on employment law, university policy, and HR risk, the CHRO ensures that HR practices are legally sound, equitable, and aligned with university standards, and that the School rests on a scalable, compliant, and data-driven HR foundation. The CHRO also leads the responsible adoption of AI across HR operations so that emerging technologies enhance efficiency, insight, and decision-making while maintaining ethical and compliant practices.

The CHRO serves as a strategic leader for a workforce of more than 400 faculty and staff and several hundred student employees across academic, research, and administrative functions. This includes more than 100 faculty members, a substantial population of union-represented employees, and a diverse range of academic and administrative professionals. Partnering with leaders across more than 30 departments, centers, and administrative units, the CHRO advances workforce strategy in a complex, mission-driven environment that requires navigating faculty governance, university-wide policies, collective bargaining agreements, and the evolving needs of a leading research university.

Leading a dedicated HR team, the CHRO oversees talent acquisition, employee and labor relations, compensation, organizational effectiveness, workforce planning, learning and development, and performance management. The role supports significant annual hiring activity and maintains relationships with multiple bargaining units, including HUCTW and HGSU. As a member of the School’s senior leadership team, the CHRO collaborates with Harvard’s Vice President for Human Resources and peer CHROs across the University, and supports a predominantly hybrid workforce operating across multiple locations, balancing strategic leadership with operational excellence in a highly collaborative environment.

Key Responsibilities:

Institutional HR Strategy & Executive Partnership

• Serve as a senior strategic advisor to the CAO, Dean's Office, and leadership team, ensuring that HR strategy is fully integrated into HGSE's institutional priorities, workforce investments, and long-term planning. Translate institutional goals into clear workforce implications, including staffing models, capability requirements, and operating constraints.
• Partner with the Dean’s Office, the CAO, and the CPO to lead school-wide workforce strategy, advising on organizational structures, headcount planning, and capability development required to advance HGSE's mission, with a particular focus on ensuring that workforce design aligns with both financial realities and long-term strategic ambitions.
• Represent HGSE in university-wide HR forums on policy, compliance, compensation, and workforce governance, serving as a credible and influential voice for HGSE's needs within broader Harvard frameworks.
• Monitor and interpret external trends-including employment law, higher education workforce dynamics, and the impact of emerging technologies such as AI on workforce composition-translating these into actionable recommendations for institutional leadership.
• Participate actively in governance, strategic planning, and budgeting processes to ensure that HR capacity, risk exposure, and workforce investment decisions are explicitly considered in institutional decision-making.

HR Operations, Service Excellence & AI Enablement

• Lead and continuously improve all aspects of HR operations, including payroll, HRIS (PeopleSoft), employee lifecycle transactions, leaves of absence, and compliance for contingent and student workers, ensuring a consistently high standard of accuracy, responsiveness, and service quality.
• Establish and maintain a formal HR Service Catalog with clearly defined service level agreements (SLAs), ensuring transparency, accountability, and a shared understanding of service expectations across research centers and administrative units.
• Design, own, and continuously refine HR workflows and service delivery processes, systematically identifying inefficiencies, reducing cycle times, and addressing root causes of service breakdowns.
• Drive the thoughtful adoption of automation and AI-enabled tools, recognizing varying levels of maturity across solutions, to streamline transactional work where appropriate, reduce manual effort, and improve consistency and scalability of HR services over time.
• Explore and selectively implement AI-enabled service delivery models-such as virtual assistants, intelligent intake, and case routing systems-where tools are sufficiently mature and reliable, to enhance responsiveness, improve user experience, and allow HR staff to focus on higher-value advisory work.
• Build and sustain a data-informed HR operations function, establishing regular reporting cadences for workforce metrics, SLA performance, service demand patterns, and operational outcomes.

Compliance, Policy & Risk Management

• Serve as HGSE's primary expert on employment law, university HR policy, and regulatory compliance, ensuring that all people-related practices meet federal and Massachusetts law, Harvard University standards, and HGSE-specific policies.
• Lead Title IX and Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying (NDAB) coordination responsibilities, partnering closely with university compliance offices to ensure appropriate reporting, investigation, and resolution processes.
• Design, interpret, and enforce HR policies, ensuring they are clearly communicated, consistently applied, and regularly updated to reflect evolving legal requirements and institutional priorities.
• Leverage, where appropriate, AI-supported tools to enhance policy interpretation, documentation quality, and the early identification of potential risk patterns in employee relations, grievances, and compliance issues, while acknowledging current limitations in accuracy and context.
• Lead complex employee relations matters-including investigations, performance escalations, separations, and union-related issues-with a high degree of discretion, fairness, and legal rigor.
• Establish and oversee governance frameworks for the responsible, ethical, and compliant use of AI in HR processes, including guidelines for bias mitigation, transparency, and appropriate use in decision-making.
• Anticipate and proactively mitigate HR-related risks, advising the CAO on issues with potential legal, reputational, or institutional impact.

Compensation Philosophy & Total Rewards

• In partnership with the CPO, lead and steward HGSE's compensation philosophy and total rewards framework, ensuring alignment with institutional values, market competitiveness, and internal equity.
• Lead the annual salary planning cycle, compensation equity reviews, reclassification processes, and market benchmarking efforts, translating complex data into clear and actionable recommendations for leadership.
• Utilize advanced analytics and, where feasible, AI-enabled modeling tools to simulate compensation scenarios, identify potential inequities, and assess the financial and organizational implications of compensation decisions, recognizing that some tools may require validation before broad adoption.
• Initiate and lead analyses of external compensation competitiveness, using data-driven insights to inform HGSE's position within university-wide compensation structures and to advocate effectively for HGSE staff.
• Partner with the CPO on the cultural and experiential dimensions of total rewards, ensuring alignment between compensation structures and how employees perceive and experience value.
• Ensure benefits programs are clearly communicated, accessible, and equitably administered across diverse employee populations.

Talent Acquisition & Workforce Development

• Oversee HGSE's talent acquisition strategy, including full-cycle recruiting, inclusive hiring practices, sourcing strategies, and hiring manager support, ensuring alignment with institutional goals and culture and community commitments.
• Integrate AI-enabled tools into recruiting processes-such as candidate sourcing, screening support, and job description optimization-where appropriate and validated, to improve efficiency, consistency, and equity in hiring.
• Lead the systems, compliance, and operational components of onboarding, ensuring that new hires are effectively and efficiently integrated from an administrative and compliance perspective.
• In partnership with the CPO, support a comprehensive succession planning framework, identifying critical roles, assessing bench strength, and mitigating institutional risk related to key positions.
• Leverage predictive analytics to identify hiring needs, talent pipeline gaps, attrition risks, and advancement disparities, translating insights into targeted HR strategies.
• Partner with the CPO to ensure alignment between talent infrastructure (owned by HR) and talent experience, development, and engagement (owned by the CPO).

HR Consulting, Employee Relations & Client Service

• Lead the HR consulting function, ensuring that academic departments, research centers, and administrative units receive consistent, high-quality, and responsive HR support through a clearly defined consulting model.
• Provide senior-level guidance to managers and leaders on performance management, employee relations, accommodations, policy interpretation, and complex personnel issues.
• Equip HR consulting staff with AI-assisted tools, where appropriate, to enhance case analysis, documentation quality, and consistency of guidance, while maintaining strong human judgment and contextual understanding and recognizing current tool limitations.
• Establish and maintain clear escalation pathways for resolving HR service issues, ensuring that concerns are addressed efficiently and transparently.
• Ensure that HR consulting practices align with the cultural and behavioral expectations established by the CPO, reinforcing a consistent institutional approach to leadership and management.

Organizational Design & Workforce Planning

• Lead workforce planning efforts, translating institutional strategy into staffing models, role definitions, and budget implications.
• Utilize AI-enabled modeling and scenario planning tools, where sufficiently mature, to evaluate organizational design options, forecast workforce needs, and assess the impact of structural changes.
• Assess and plan for the workforce implications of emerging technologies, including AI, such as role evolution, reskilling requirements, and changes to staffing models.
• Partner with the CPO on the cultural and change management aspects of organizational transformation, ensuring alignment between structural decisions and employee experience.
• Oversee the design and management of contingent, student, and temporary workforce structures, ensuring compliance and equitable treatment.

People Analytics & HR Technology

• Establish a disciplined, data-driven approach to HR strategy, using analytics to generate insights on workforce trends, compensation equity, attrition risk, talent pipeline health, and operational performance.
• Own the HR technology strategy, including HRIS architecture, system integrations, vendor partnerships, and the evaluation and implementation of AI-enabled platforms.
• Develop and advance predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities, incorporating AI where appropriate, to enable HR and institutional leaders to move from retrospective reporting to increasingly forward-looking, action-oriented decision-making over time.
• Partner with IT and the CPO to ensure alignment between operational HR systems and employee experience platforms, creating a cohesive and effective technology ecosystem.
• Define data governance, quality standards, and ethical guidelines for the use of workforce data and AI tools.
• Communicate HR insights through clear, accessible reporting and storytelling, enabling the Dean, CAO, and senior leadership to make informed decisions about workforce investment, policy, and risk.

Qualifications

Required

• 15+ years of progressive HR leadership experience in complex organizations.
• Deep expertise in employment law, compliance, and HR operations.
• Experience leading HR technology and data-driven transformation initiatives, including AI adoption.
• Proven ability to operate as a strategic advisor to senior leadership.
• Strong leadership and team development capabilities.

Preferred

• Experience in higher education or similarly complex institutions.
• Familiarity with PeopleSoft and university HR systems.
• Experience implementing AI-enabled HR tools or advanced analytics capabilities.
• Track record of improving HR service delivery and operational performance.

Additional Information

• Standard Hours/Schedule: 35 hours per week
• Visa Sponsorship Information: Harvard University is unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position
• Pre-Employment Screening: Identity, Education, Criminal, Credit