Chief People Officer

About St. Anthony’s

Founded in 1950, St. Anthony's is the most comprehensive safety net service center in San Francisco, directly providing food, clothing, medical care, addiction recovery services, access to technology, job training, and other critical resources to the community. Every day we support and are supported by thousands of San Franciscans. Everyone who comes through our doors joins the St. Anthony's team and helps us create a future where all people flourish. St. Anthony’s work is rooted in Franciscan values, which include honoring the dignity and distinctiveness of each person, compassionately accompanying others on their journey, and acting in solidarity with those in need.

Principal Responsibility

The Chief People Officer (CPO) builds and stewards the systems, culture, and leadership capability that allow St. Anthony Foundation to do its work. The role is accountable for how SAF attracts, develops, compensates, retains, roughly 250 people who serve some of the most vulnerable residents of San Francisco. This includes shepherding workforce development of the approximately 30% of staff who are former guests.

Specifically, the CPO leads the People team in the areas of workforce planning, talent acquisition and development, succession planning, employee engagement and retention, employee relations, compensation and benefits, performance management, compliance, HR operations, safety, and workers' compensation. The CPO provides strategic leadership and oversight of these functions through the team, maintaining accountability for their effectiveness, performance, and outcomes. In addition, the CPO is intimately involved in operations, finance, and IT functions.

This is a builder role. The CPO will inherit important capabilities that are still developing and will be expected to establish the systems, team capacity, management practices, and accountability required for a mature People function. Over the next three years the Chief People Officer is expected to design and build: documented systems and processes, workforce analytics that inform decisions, a leadership development and succession architecture, and a culture practice that makes the Foundation’s Franciscan commitments legible in how it treats its own staff.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities 

Strategic leadership and executive partnership

• Develop and lead a multi-year people, talent, and workforce strategy that translates the Foundation’s strategic plan into the workforce, leadership, organizational capabilities, and culture required to achieve it.
• Advise the Chief Executive Officer, the Executive Management Team, and the Board on workforce strategy, organizational design, succession, executive recruitment, leadership capability, and workforce risk.
• Personally serve as a candid thought partner to the Chief Executive Officer on difficult people and organizational decisions.
• Bring the Executive Management Team a forward view of workforce needs rather than a backward report, on a defined cadence.
• Represent the Foundation in workforce, educational, employment, and professional partnerships that strengthen talent pipelines and organizational reputation.

Culture and leadership development

• Translate the Foundation’s Franciscan mission and Statement of Values into practiced organizational behavior: how people are hired, developed, evaluated, corrected, and let go.
• Steward the Foundation’s leadership language and formation work, so that what St. Anthony’s believes about human dignity is legible in how it treats its own staff and its mission.
• Own leadership development strategy for the Foundation, delivered through the Learning and Development function rather than personally.
• Personally coach executives and directors on leadership effectiveness, accountability, and difficult conversations, as a standing practice rather than only in response to crises. Build manager-level coaching capability through the team.
• Establish and sustain talent review, succession planning, and leadership pipeline practices that identify high potential talent, strengthen bench strength, and support executive continuity.
• Own employee engagement measurement, and act on what it shows. Provide strategies and plans to address the needs of the Foundation.
• Serve as an honest reader of organizational climate for the Chief Executive Officer.

Talent strategy and workforce planning

• Own the design and effectiveness of the full employee lifecycle, from sourcing through exit, with execution carried by the talent and operations teams.
• Lead workforce planning and talent forecasting to identify future staffing needs, capability gaps, and succession risk.
• Ensure a sourcing capability equal to the Foundation’s hardest roles, including employer branding, nontraditional channels, social platforms, and community, educational, and training partnerships.
• Ensure onboarding forms new staff into the mission and equips them for the specific demands of this work.
• Ensure performance management is timely, consistent, equitable, and actually used by managers.
• Strengthen internal mobility, cross-training, mentoring, and advancement pathways, with particular attention to promotion from frontline roles.
• Translate exit and retention insights into actionable strategies that strengthen employee experience and organizational effectiveness.

Total rewards, compliance, and risk

• Establish and maintain the Foundation’s compensation philosophy, job architecture, salary structures, market positioning, and pay practices, with attention to internal equity and to the affordability of working at St. Anthony’s in San Francisco.
• Oversee employee benefits, wellness, employee assistance, and retirement programs, evaluated on employee value, compliance, financial sustainability, and market competitiveness. Program administration is carried by the benefits and operations team.
• Oversee the Foundation’s employee wellness program and its wellness committee.
• Ensure compliance with federal, California, and local employment law and regulatory requirements, including wage and hour, leave administration, accommodations, equal employment opportunity, privacy, hiring practices, and required training.
• Hold executive accountability for workplace safety, workers’ compensation, injury prevention, return to work, and OSHA and Cal-OSHA compliance. Program administration, claims handling, routine investigations, log maintenance, drills, and safety meetings are carried by designated staff within the function. Where that capacity does not yet exist, building and staffing it is part of this role.
• Lead employee relations strategy, corrective action practice, and investigation standards. Personally lead executive, organizational, and high-risk matters; routine matters are handled by the team.
• Partner with legal counsel on claims, litigation, agency complaints, restructuring, workforce reductions, separation agreements, and other complex employment matters, and keep executive leadership informed of significant concerns.
• Partner with Finance and Facilities on the building, equipment, and physical plant dimensions of workplace safety and emergency preparedness.

Systems and operations

• Build the documented processes, annual calendars, and service standards that allow the People function to run without depending on any individual’s memory.
• Lead implementation of an effective human resources information system and the Foundation’s move to paperless records. Hold accountability for data integrity rather than for record maintenance.
• Build workforce analytics that are used in decisions: retention and turnover by program, time to fill, vacancy cost, talent gaps, internal mobility, and early indicators of retention risk.
• Provide compensation and wage analytics of sufficient depth to defend the Foundation’s pay decisions internally and externally.
• Evaluate and deploy technology, including artificial intelligence applications in training and talent operations, where it demonstrably improves capacity or quality.
• Ensure sound human resources operations, including employee records, reporting, payroll-related processes, privacy protections, and service delivery, carried out by the operations team.
• Develop and steward the function’s budget, vendor relationships, and contracts.

Team leadership

• Lead and develop the People team, including Learning and Development, human resources operations, benefits, and talent acquisition, through clear expectations, coaching, and accountability.
• Build capability within the team so that responsibility sits at the right level and the Chief People Officer is not the function’s single point of delivery.
• Transition the People function from a Chief-dependent model to a team-led operating model, with clear decision rights, delegated ownership, service standards, and accountable leaders for core HR functions.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, Organizational Development, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of progressively responsible executive-level education and experience.
• At least ten (10) years of progressively responsible human resources, talent, or organizational leadership experience, including five (5) years in a senior leadership or executive role with responsibility for multiple talent functions, including employee relations, talent acquisition, learning and development, compensation and benefits, compliance, and organizational development.
• Demonstrated experience building human resources systems, processes, and infrastructure where they were absent or underdeveloped, with specific examples of what was built and what changed as a result.
• Fluency with workforce data: able to build the analysis, not only interpret it, and to use it to inform an executive team.
• Demonstrated success advising a CEO, Executive Team, Board, and senior leaders on complex workforce, organizational, talent, culture, and employee relations matters.
• Demonstrated success developing workforce and talent strategies and leading organizational effectiveness initiatives, organizational change, workforce planning, talent acquisition, leadership development, succession planning, employee engagement, retention, performance management, and compensation programs.
• Experience leading organizational effectiveness, culture, or enterprise change initiatives that improved workforce capability, leadership effectiveness, employee engagement, retention, or organizational performance.
• Strong knowledge of federal, California, and local employment laws and demonstrated experience partnering with legal counsel on investigations, claims, agency matters, restructuring efforts, workforce reductions, terminations, and other significant employment risks.
• Proven ability to build trust, coach and develop leaders, lead and develop HR and talent professionals, influence across organizational levels, and drive results through collaboration, consultation, coaching, and candid communication.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and manage diverse HR and talent functions through subordinate leaders while maintaining strategic focus on organizational priorities and workforce outcomes.
• Exceptional judgment, discretion, communication, facilitation, negotiation, conflict resolution, relationship-building, and executive presentation skills.
• Strong business, financial, operational, and analytical acumen, including the ability to interpret workforce data, evaluate organizational trends, manage budgets, develop business cases, and balance employee advocacy, organizational performance, compliance, and risk.
• Demonstrated commitment to fostering a respectful, inclusive, accountable, and mission-centered workplace that reflects the Foundation's values and supports individuals experiencing poverty, homelessness, recovery, and other barriers to stability.

Preferred

• Experience in a mission-driven, nonprofit, healthcare, human services, faith-based, or community-serving organization.
• Master’s degree and SHRM-SCP, SPHR, or comparable advanced credential.
• Experience with a frontline and shift-based workforce.
• Experience supporting an organization through executive transition or succession.
• Experience in an organization whose staff includes people with lived experience of poverty, homelessness, or recovery, including graduates of its own programs.
• Formal coaching training or credential.

People of color, differently-abled people, LGBT, and folks with lived experience are strongly encouraged to apply.

St. Anthony's is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We value diversity of culture, thought, and lived experiences. We seek talented, qualified individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, marital status, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, conviction history, uniform service membership/veteran status, physical or mental disability, protected medical conditions, genetic characteristics, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression regardless of physical gender, or any other consideration made unlawful by federal, state, or local laws.

St. Anthony's uses E-Verify to validate our new employees' eligibility to work legally in the United States.