About Shepherd Center

With five decades of experience, Shepherd Center provides world-class clinical care, research, and family support for people experiencing the most complex conditions, including spinal cord and brain injuries, multi-trauma, traumatic amputations, stroke, multiple sclerosis, and pain. An elite center ranked by U.S. News as one of the nation’s top hospitals for rehabilitation, Shepherd Center is also recognized as both Spinal Cord Injury and Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems. Shepherd is the only rehabilitation facility in the nation with an intensive care unit on-site, allowing us to care for the most complex patients and begin the rehabilitation process sooner. Shepherd Center treats thousands of patients annually with unmatched expertise and unwavering compassion to help them begin again.

Shepherd Center's culture is one of hope, humor, and hard work. You will enjoy career growth, strong relationships with co-workers, strong support from leadership, and fun activities that have kept over 12% of staff members working at Shepherd for more than 20 years.

The Director of Talent Acquisition serves as a strategic and operational leader responsible for driving the full lifecycle recruitment function while directly contributing to critical role fulfillment. This player-coach role balances hands-on recruiting execution with leadership of a high-performing team, ensuring the organization attracts, engages, and hires top-tier talent in a highly competitive healthcare market. The role also optimizes and scales talent acquisition processes, leverages Workday as a strategic HRIS, and implements innovative sourcing and engagement strategies while acting as a consultative advisor to leaders.

Shepherd Center is known for its highly desirable, people-first culture, where employees are deeply connected to the mission and to one another. The Talent Acquisition function plays a critical role as culture-keepers, ensuring every hire not only meets capability needs but also strengthens and preserves the organization’s values, engagement, and workplace experience.

The ideal candidate brings a strong track record of setting and delivering on ambitious goals, with the ability to modernize, optimize, and scale the talent acquisition function. This leader thrives in a highly relationship-driven environment, navigating change with influence, credibility, and care. Equally important, they embody Shepherd Center’s values of heart, humor, and hard work, bringing authenticity, resilience, and a people-first mindset to how they lead, partner, and achieve results.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Serve as a player-coach carrying a requisition load for critical roles
• Lead and execute a modern, scalable talent acquisition strategy with a positive mindset and results orientation
• Partner with leaders on workforce planning and talent pipelines
• Drive diversified sourcing streams and leverage data to determine most impactful opportunities in talent acquisition processes and practices.
• Drive consultative recruiting practices and hiring excellence
• Lead, coach, and develop recruiting team members
• Personally manage complex recruiting searches end-to-end
  
  

Required Qualifications:

• Proven success in a player-coach recruiting role
• Strong negotiation skills and experience with total rewards
• Experience leading high-performing teams
• Education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• 6+ years in full lifecycle recruiting or talent acquisition leadership
  
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in clinical or healthcare recruitment environments strongly preferred
• Experience optimizing or transforming talent acquisition functions
• Demonstrated strengths in leveraging ATS and recruitment technologies (e.g., Workday) to drive scalable, data-informed talent acquisition strategies preferred
  
  

Core Competencies:

• Strategic and operational leadership
• Consultative influence
• Advanced sourcing capability
• Negotiation and closing expertise
• Data-driven decision making
• Process optimization
• Relationship building
• Adaptability and accountability
• Lead offer development and negotiation aligned with total rewards
• Optimize recruiting processes using Workday and data insights
• Implement innovative sourcing strategies and work in collaboration with our marketing team to strengthen employer branding