Talent Management is a priority for Amazon, and each business within our Entertainment portfolio are all driving towards the same outcome of enabling an environment where our people can find personal growth and satisfaction from doing their best, most meaningful work to delight our customers – and the way we do that within our businesses may be a little different from other parts of Amazon.
About the Role:
We are seeking a Core Talent Leader who brings expertise in talent management to deliver and continuously improve our talent approach, using creativity to design, build, and manage process execution. It also helps if you find the world of movies, live sports, music, games, podcasts (and more) all exciting!
While we align with existing Amazon timelines on high level core talent activities (e.g., evaluation and assessment, promotions, annual talent reviews), that is just the start of what is required for this role. This leader will get to help evolve our talent processes to fit Entertainment talent needs through new ideas on how best to create the annual talent management roadmap, and also own program managing the workback timelines needed to flawlessly execute on those activities. This leader will also represent Entertainment, while contributing to cross-Amazon talent initiatives.
The right person for this role needs to thrive in dealing with a high level of ambiguity and feeling comfortable operating in a space with little direction for solving complex talent and organizational business problems. The leader in this role must have strong ownership, grit, and drive for results. The leader will understand how to make high judgment decisions while balancing data driven analysis with creativity, while still emphasizing the voice of the customer across a worldwide employee base. This role will suit a strong and structured written and verbal communicator, who must have the ability gather business requirements and partner with the various stakeholders, inclusive of our executive senior business leaders, to plan, implement, and continuously improve solutions. This person will also have comfort with presenting regularly with executive and C-suite leaders, with the confidence to facilitate debate with leaders at this level.
About the Business:
The role is part of the Amazon People eXperience and Technology (PXT) organization – we build a workplace for Amazonians to invent and deliver on behalf of customers. PXT for Amazon Entertainment supports a portfolio of entertainment businesses that span film, TV, live sports, music, podcasts, games, audiobooks, livestreaming, and other media content. The Entertainment PXT team focuses on the inputs that attract, grow, and retain creative, technical, and business talent at scale. We customize for unique Entertainment business and industry needs where necessary and scale where possible and applicable. Our Entertainment employees deliver world-class products and services for playing, listening, watching, and streaming in an ever-immersive entertainment environment.
About the Team:
This Core Talent Leader will be part of the Entertainment PXT Talent Experience Team. Our purpose is to create and deliver talent programs that help us be Earth’s Best Employer by focusing on the employee experience – from joining Amazon Entertainment, to building connection with each other and our customers, through growing personally and professionally, to being empowered to balance fun, wellness, and learning to sustain a long, fulfilling career with Amazon.
A Little More About Location:
Most of the executive clients and partners of this role are located in Seattle and Culver City, so this role will require regular travel (about once in 6-8 weeks) to Culver City.
Key job responsibilities
This Core Talent Leader’s responsibilities include building and continuously evolving Entertainment’s talent reviews and cyclical processes, for example succession planning and promotion processes, all in close partnership with HR Business Partners, business leaders, analytics teams, and central Amazon talent leads. You will be a talent advisor to both business and HR leaders, and ensure we are constantly improving and scaling the services we provide.
This is a great opportunity for a strong systems thinker and builder to directly impact mechanisms we use to assess, grow, retain, and place Amazon Entertainment talent. This position provides exposure to broad HR strategic efforts where you have an influence on the approach for all Amazon. As a senior member of talent management, and member of the leadership team, this role provides opportunities to design and innovate solutions for, and regularly communicate with, HR and business senior leaders.
The ideal candidate must be self-driven, possess a high degree of ownership, have strong business acumen, excellent business writing and influencing skills, planning/project management skills, and thrive working in a fast-paced environment. This role requires dealing with a high level of ambiguity and feeling comfortable operating in a space with little direction for solving hard, complex talent and organizational business problems. There is no opportunity in this role to outsource work to external consultants so candidates must have strong ownership, grit, and drive for results.
A successful candidate will have a demonstrated track record of:
• Talent management execution. Design the overall talent review strategy focused on business-critical talent issues, which includes succession planning, talent development, long term talent planning, organizational reviews (and integrate with diversity and inclusion). Enhance and revisit executive level talent activities (Talent reviews, Career development, organizational capacity planning).
• Embracing ambiguity, and building structure where processes don’t yet exist. Understand all the connections and integration points through the entire talent management lifecycle, and using your program management expertise to lead the organization through these activities.
• Communicating with multiple stakeholders with concise, clear written and verbal methods. We are a document-heavy culture, which means we write, a lot, to share our ideas, our proposals, and everything else.
• Curiosity about your business. Learning your clients’ business, understanding their priorities, and recommending the best talent activities to help them meet their business customer needs.
• Building relationships and earning trust as a talent expert. Partnering with central team talent leaders, HR business partners, and business leaders and executives.
• Innovating with both simple yet creative solutions to address talent challenges.
• Operating with high judgment. There will be a constant flow of work, both tactical and strategic. Determine what gets done first and why, while managing a plan for what to do with everything else.
• Using research and data to inform your recommendations. We seek to be the most scientific HR organization in the world. We form hypotheses about the best talent management techniques and then set out to prove or disprove them with experiments and careful data collection. We pilot new ideas, measure and seek feedback, iterate and continuously improve.
• Resourcefulness. If you don’t know it, that’s ok. But you should know where to go for the answer or how to find out.
A day in the life
This leader will quickly earn trust with Entertainment PXT peers, leaders, and business line leaders, and get deep in understanding specific areas of the Entertainment business. You will build cross-Amazon partnerships with Talent Management peers and within central Amazon PXT and Talent teams. Medium term projects include: leading our organization through talent processes (Q1 is our busiest talent season), evolving approaches to talent management for Entertainment talent, developing relevant internal communications mechanisms, and rethinking and redesigning talent management for professional creatives.
About the team
Diverse Experiences
Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.
Inclusive Team Culture
Here at Amazon, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.
Mentorship & Career Growth
We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.
