Chief People Officer, Nationally Scaling Professional Services Platform

Position Chief People Officer Reports To Founder & Chief Executive Officer; Member of the Executive Leadership Team, and partner to the C‑Suite Location United States, fully remote Travel Ability to travel as needed to Phoenix, to regional markets, and to the firm’s owned offshore operations center. Compensation Base salary, an annual performance bonus, and a long‑term incentive. Chamberlain Advisors is conducting an executive search seeking an experienced Chief People Officer for our direct client, TopDog Law, a nationally scaling, technology‑enabled personal injury law firm. Most companies hire a Chief People Officer to run a function. This one is hiring a Chief People Officer because talent is the binding constraint on its growth. The firm has gone from roughly one hundred people to roughly five hundred in a year and is building toward several thousand primarily market by market and hire by hire. The question is whether the company can hire fast enough, get people good at the work fast enough, keep them, and hold thousands of professionals to standards that survive the pace. You will take the recruiting engine that feeds it to a world‑class standard, and own the workforce plan, the job architecture and competency framework that define what good looks like in every role, the performance and career systems that make those standards real, and the total rewards and talent infrastructure that hold it together across credentialed legal professionals, a large distributed frontline, and an owned offshore operations center. You will also decide what not to build yet. Sequence separates a people organization that carries this growth from one that buckles under it. Much of this architecture is still to be designed. You will have a seat at the executive table, direct access to the founder, and the runway to build a People and HR organization engineered for several thousand rather than retrofitted to it. Core Profile: alignment with the following is required to get you in the conversation Sequencing Judgment at Hyperscale: You have taken an organization through this journey, from a few hundred people into the low thousands, and you know from experience what to build at 500, what to build at 1,500, and what is a waste of effort until 3,000. That judgment is the single most valuable thing you bring, and it is the trait every leader here named without being asked. The failure mode is not incompetence. It is a leader who imports the full architecture of a mature company and spends year one building machinery the business will not need for four more. Growth here is organic, market by market, so scale reached by hiring counts for more than scale reached by acquiring. You will arrive with a point of view rather than a listening tour, prioritize ruthlessly, and be able to explain to a founder‑led leadership team why something they asked for should wait and what should happen instead. A People Professional Who Runs Like an Operator: You are a career people executive with real functional depth, and you are also the most commercially fluent person in most rooms. Somewhere in your background you carried accountability that reached past the people function, for revenue, margin, a P&L, an operating unit, or a business you helped build, and it shaped how you work. You read financial statements without translation, you can name what drives revenue here, and you defend a people investment in bottom‑line terms rather than in program terms. Leadership teams include you because you make the discussion better on questions that have nothing to do with headcount. You will be asked to show where a performance system, a hiring change or a retention program moved a business number, and to explain the why behind it.A World‑Class Recruiting Engine for the Growth Ahead: Talent acquisition is the first thing this business needs from you, and the standard is world‑class rather than adequate. A recruiting function is in place and is being staffed up. The work is lifting it to a level that carries a step‑change in scale, and doing that while the hiring never stops. You have done this before against a hard growth curve: segmented models for high‑volume frontline hiring and for scarce credentialed professionals, sourcing channels including campus and professional community presence, structured selection tied to a competency framework, and a quality‑of‑hire measure you managed to rather than reported on. You know what great looks like here because you have worked with enough recruiting leaders to name it. You build employer‑of‑choice reputation at the same time, because at this pace the brand and the funnel are the same problem. What matters is whether you have raised a function’s standard, not whether you started one from nothing. Workforce Planning and Capability Architecture: You own the structural layer the business cannot buy from anyone else. That means a driver‑based workforce plan built with Finance and Operations rather than an annual headcount budget, in an organization that opens new state markets rather than acquiring them, so a market entry lands as claims staff, case managers, paralegals, attorneys and settlement crews at once. You own the design side (manager‑to‑staff ratios, spans and layers, where the organization is one departure from a problem) while the modeling and analytics sit with the analytics function, and you are comfortable with that boundary. You design meaningfully different talent models for credentialed legal professionals, a large distributed frontline, and an owned offshore operations center without fracturing the enterprise into three companies. Manager Capability and Learning Installed From Zero: You have installed performance standards in populations that had never been formally measured, and you know the hard part is not the framework but the credibility to make it stick with credentialed professionals. Learning reports to this seat and matters as much as recruiting does. The operating model changes fast enough that a fixed curriculum dates quickly, so what you build is the capacity to learn through constant change. Here that also means job architecture and career paths where none exist, calibration that produces defensible ratings across dissimilar roles and states, and above all the manufacture of several hundred new people leaders, most promoted from the frontline with no prior management experience. You will navigate an attorney line and an operator line inside professional conduct rules that reserve practice‑of‑law decisions to lawyers, and you will treat designing that interface as part of the job. Low Ego, Real Candor, and a Company‑Wide Voice: You have zero tolerance for ego or sharp elbows, and you will protect a high‑trust, no‑jerks culture. You also understand that in a fast, founder‑led, low‑hierarchy company the real danger is the opposite one: everybody being friendly and nobody delivering hard feedback. You will be a forceful voice at the table rather than an executor of decisions already made, willing to say an initiative cannot ship on the date requested and to hold that position with the top decision makers, and then to commit fully once the debate closes. You bring the executive communication this company says it is missing, the ability to crystallize a room's debate back to it, and the discretion to hold what leaders tell you. This is a distributed company that intends to stay one, so you have led a workforce you cannot walk past, and you have carried a difficult change through it. You are not a programmer of events; you own the mechanisms by which culture survives growth. Core Responsibilities & Scope of Work The role carries the full integrated talent agenda. Most of it sits with this seat rather than with a partner or a vendor: talent strategy and business alignment, workforce planning, capability and competency management, performance and succession, the recruiting engine that feeds all of it, and the infrastructure, governance, and analytics beneath them. A narrower set, chiefly total rewards technical depth, is augmented through specialist advisors. The accountabilities below are weighted and sequenced accordingly. Talent Strategy & Business Alignment Talent Strategy & Solution Design: Translate the firm’s 2030 growth plan into an enterprise talent strategy and a sequenced set of talent solutions, deliberately ordered so foundational architecture precedes the programs that depend on it, so the organization is not carrying the overhead of systems it will not need for years. Executive Contribution Beyond the Function: Serve as a full contributor to leadership discussions that are not about people: capital allocation, market entry, operating model, and margin. Bring the people implications of every business decision into the room early, and bring commercial judgment to decisions outside your remit. Change Management Strategy: Treat every new standard as a change program rather than a launch, with executive sponsorship secured in advance, manager enablement built in, and a candid read on organizational appetite. In an organization moving at this pace, adoption rather than design is the real constraint. Measurement Strategy: Define up front what success looks like for each initiative and how it will be evidenced, so that the people agenda is judged on business outcomes rather than activity, and so investment in it can be defended on the merits. Workforce Planning, Capability & Competency Management Talent Forecasting & Scenario Planning: Build and own, with Operations and Finance leadership, a driver‑based workforce forecast that converts case volume and marketing investment into required headcount by role by month, back‑solves requisition timing from realistic time‑to‑fill, and models faster growth, slower growth, and new market entry. Own the cost‑of‑vacancy model that translates an unfilled seat into forgone fee production. Enterprise Skills Gap & Critical Talent Assessment: Run a recurring assessment of the firm’s capability gaps against the 2030 plan and identify where the organization is one departure away from a material operating problem, then direct disproportionate investment there rather than spreading it evenly. Talent Segmentation & Critical Role Identification: Segment the workforce by the value and scarcity of the work rather than by seniority or title, and identify the roles that disproportionately gate case throughput, quality, and growth. Job Profiles, Competencies & Job Architecture: Design and deploy the job family taxonomy, job catalog, and leveling framework across legal production, business enablement, and offshore operations, with competencies and observable behaviors defined at each level, including the firm’s values expressed behaviorally. This is prerequisite work rather than parallel work: compensation banding, career pathing, pay transparency compliance, and acquisition harmonization all fail without it. Performance Management, Succession & Career Development Performance Management Installation: Install an enterprise performance management architecture, including for attorneys and paralegals, with goals cascaded from firm objectives and standards published before they are measured. Partner with operating and practice leadership on instrumenting production standards in the case management system, because a standard that cannot be measured is an opinion. Practice leadership owns what good looks like; you own the architecture, the calibration, the manager capability, and the defensibility. Calibration & Manager Capability: Own the calibration cadence that produces consistent, defensible ratings across practice groups, markets, and sites, and build the manager capability (training, scripts, certification) that lets a performance conversation land with a credentialed professional population unaccustomed to being measured. Expect to run the cycle once without consequence before it becomes consequential. Succession Management & Talent Reviews: Install talent profiles, calibrated assessment, high‑potential identification, and a talent review cadence that manages real talent pools against the firm’s critical roles, reported to the leadership team with named successors and honest readiness ratings rather than optimistic ones. Career Management & Talent Mobility: Publish career paths with distinct professional and management tracks, promotion criteria, and readiness evidence for every job family, supported by skills assessment and transferability. Set internal fill‑rate targets and mobility service levels for frontline leadership and specialist roles and hold managers to them; in high‑volume work, visible career progression is the retention product. Retention, Culture & Leadership Development Through the Scale Curve Manager Capability at Scale: Build the leadership development architecture required to create several hundred new people leaders over the growth horizon, most promoted from the frontline with no prior management experience, including a certification requirement before a leader receives direct reports and a promotion‑readiness bar that is actually enforced. Retention as an Engineered Outcome: Report and manage retention in a form that survives hypergrowth: cohort survival curves, regrettable versus non‑regrettable attrition, and attrition by tenure band and by top performers, rather than a blended percentage flattered by a growing denominator. Own onboarding as a time‑to‑proficiency program with certification gates and a graduated ramp, and be accountable for protecting average workforce proficiency while headcount multiplies, because tenure dilution surfaces in quality and cycle time long before it surfaces in a survey. Culture Mechanisms: Own the mechanisms by which culture survives the growth: values translated into observable behaviors and embedded in interview scorecards, onboarding, promotion criteria, and performance ratings; a deliberate architecture defining what is common across divisions and the offshore site and what is intentionally different; and precedent leadership actually honors when a high performer is out of step with the values. Candor Without Hierarchy: Protect the no‑ego culture from its own failure mode. In fast, founder‑led, low‑hierarchy organizations, everyone being friendly and low‑ego can quietly become nobody delivering hard feedback and underperformance persisting. Make candor structural through calibration, published standards, upward feedback, and manager certification, and be the executive willing to raise the uncomfortable thing in the room. Talent Acquisition, Employer Brand, Total Rewards & Learning Talent Acquisition and Employer Brand: Recruiting is the first thing this business needs from this seat, and the standard is world‑class rather than adequate. Own the function and lift it against the hiring plan the growth curve requires: segmented sourcing models for high‑volume, credentialed‑professional, and executive hiring; assessment and structured selection tied to the competency framework; interviewer certification; offer governance; and a defined quality‑of‑hire measure evaluated at ninety days and twelve months. Build the employer‑of‑choice reputation alongside it, because at this pace the brand and the funnel are the same problem, and stay close enough to the work to know whether the machine is actually running. Employer Brand & Value Proposition: Own a differentiated employment value proposition by segment. The trial attorney proposition, the frontline operator proposition, and the offshore professional proposition are three different arguments, and in the offshore market the firm’s advantage over the surrounding outsourcing sector is career mobility into a US‑facing firm, which is a designed outcome rather than an accident.