Senior Director of Human Resources

Company: Confidential - retained search conducted by Zak Human Solutions

Industry: Multi-site Healthcare

Location: Nashville, TN - Hybrid (3 days onsite)

Travel: Periodic travel to operating locations.

The Opportunity

We're hiring a Senior Director, Human Resources to lead the people function across our multi-site clinics and our headquarters. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who is equally comfortable designing a compensation philosophy and walking a clinic floor to take the pulse of a care team.

You'll inherit a small team and support a company that is growing quickly. You'll build the systems, processes, and standards that let us scale without losing the culture that got us here. This role is for a builder who leads with partnership, not policing. You'll be the person our field/care teams and HQ leaders trust to bring problems to light early.

What You'll Own in Your First Year

• Performance management. Design and launch a performance review process that works for both clinical and corporate teams.
• Compensation philosophy. Build a defensible comp framework and banding structure across clinical roles and corporate functions, with market benchmarking to support it.
• Employee relations and compliance. Own ER end-to-end and keep us clean across a multi-state footprint: employment law, wage and hour, licensure and credentialing coordination, HIPAA, and OSHA.
• HR infrastructure. Tighten and scale our systems and processes across our HRIS and ATS: onboarding, documentation, workflows, reporting, and the policies that hold it all together.
• Culture at scale. Keep a close pulse on teams in the field and at HQ as we open new sites, and protect what makes this a place people want to stay.
• Learning and development. Stand up an L&D function: manager capability, clinical team development, and career pathing.

Core Responsibilities

Employee Relations & Compliance

• Serve as the senior escalation point for employee relations matters across all locations; conduct and document investigations with sound judgment and discretion.
• Maintain multi-state employment law compliance across our operating footprint, including state-specific leave, pay transparency, wage and hour, and sick time requirements.
• Partner with clinical leadership on credentialing, licensure tracking, HIPAA, and OSHA obligations.
• Coach managers through performance issues, corrective action, and difficult conversations.
• Own HR policy, the employee handbook, and the annual policy refresh cycle.

Performance & Total Rewards

• Design, launch, and iterate the company-wide performance review cycle.
• Develop and steward the compensation philosophy, salary bands, and market benchmarking approach.
• Partner with Finance on merit cycles, incentive design, and headcount planning.
• Oversee benefits administration and the annual open enrollment process.

Talent Management & Acquisition

• Lead and develop the Recruiter / HR Generalist, setting priorities across both halves of the role.
• Build succession planning and internal mobility pathways for clinical and corporate teams.
• Own the full employee lifecycle: onboarding, development, retention, offboarding.

Culture & Employee Experience

• Spend real time in the field. Build relationships with clinic teams so you understand the work, not just the org chart.
• Design and run engagement surveys, skip-levels, and stay interviews, and translate findings into action leadership will actually fund.
• Champion our values and hold the bar as we grow.
• Advise the leadership team on organizational design, team health, and change management.

HR Operations & Systems

• Own the HRIS as the system of record; drive data integrity, reporting, and process automation.
• Optimize ATS workflows and hiring manager experience.
• Build the people metrics that matter and report them to leadership on a regular cadence: turnover, time-to-fill, engagement, and comp equity.
• Continuously improve HR processes; replace one-off workarounds with repeatable systems.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 7+ years of progressive HR experience.
• Multi-site healthcare experience is required. DSO, clinic network, ambulatory, retail health, or similar distributed care model. You've supported both licensed clinical staff and corporate teams.
• Deep employee relations and employment law expertise across multiple states.
• Hands-on experience designing performance management and compensation structures.
• Tech-savvy. You're fluent in HR systems (HRIS and ATS), and you look for ways technology can remove manual work.
• Polished, well-rounded communicator. You can hold the room with the executive team and be equally effective one-on-one with a dental assistant.
• Comfort in an entrepreneurial, high-growth environment where the playbook is still being written.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

How You Work

• You partner, you don't police. People bring you problems early because they trust how you'll handle them. You're approachable, low-ego, and solutions-oriented.
• You build culture and keep us compliant. You don't see those as competing goals, and you've done both at the same time.
• You're steady and discreet. You de-escalate rather than escalate, and people trust you with sensitive information.
• You're a builder. You'd rather create the process than inherit it, and you're willing to do the work yourself while the team is small.

Preferred

• PHR or SPHR certification.

Location & Travel

This role is based in Nashville, TN, on a hybrid schedule of three days per week onsite and two days remote. Expect up to 25% travel to clinic sites across our footprint.

How to Apply

This is a confidential search being conducted on behalf of our client by Zak Human Solutions. Qualified candidates are encouraged to apply directly through this posting. All inquiries will be handled with discretion, and the client's identity will be disclosed to candidates at the appropriate stage of the process.

Equal Opportunity

Our client is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a team that reflects the communities it serves. The company does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance