The Senior Director Human Resources - Wholesale North America is a newly created senior leadership role accountable for end-to-end HR business partnership with Sonova’s Regional Wholesale leadership team. The role enables scale, consistency, and functional excellence by shaping a future-ready, data-driven commercial organization—capable of accelerating growth through a clear operating model, fit-for-purpose organization design, and the capabilities, skills, and culture required for the function to enable Sonova growth and innovation.
This role serves as a trusted advisor to the Wholesale Managing Director and channel leadership, ensuring HR solutions drive productivity, engagement, capability development, and sustainable performance.
The Sr Director HR supports leaders in workforce and organizational decisions, drives adoption of enterprise HR products, and identifies risks early while ensuring compliance with local labor law and enterprise governance.
The role is Aurora, Chicago-based, with a hybrid structure, including 20-30% travel requirements to visit sites regionally.
More about the role:
Organizational Development and Transformation
- Enable the teams and operating model by driving organizational effectiveness and functional readiness across the wholesale organisation – both local and regional organisations.
- Lead org design and organization effectiveness and efficiency: shape scalable structures, roles, and governance/ways of working that improve simplificy and speed of decision-making
- Use insight and evidence (people analytics, engagement signals, performance data, feedback loops) to identify bottlenecks and design targeted interventions that improve agility, collaboration, and accountability.
- Coach and challenge the regional business leaders on operating model evolution, Sonova behaviors, talent decisions, and change leadership—balancing short-term need to deliver functional outcomes with long-term capability.
- Embed a performance-oriented environment that is fair, transparent, and standards-driven, with clear expectations and disciplined follow-through
- Lead integration of acquired businesses, aligning structures, ways of working, and culture, while standardizing core HR practices, balancing global frameworks with local needs.
Culture & Change Management
- Build a unified culture across Wholesale —connecting diverse brands, “silo” team structures, and leadership approaches into “one Wholesale” with shared purpose and ways of working.
- Shift from siloed to collaborative delivery by strengthening cross-functional teaming, role clarity, and shared outcomes (customer impact, growth, and brand/channels strength).
- Embed modern ways of working (e.g., agile collaboration, experimentation and learning, continuous improvement) to increase speed-to-market and customer-centric execution.
- Design and execute a change approach covering narrative, communications, stakeholder engagement, change impact, and resistance management.
- Build change capacity within people leaders and teams by implementing practical interventions, enabling toolkits that make the new Wholesale operating model stick.
Talent, Skills & Leadership Development
- Own talent and workforce strategy for the assigned segment in partnership with the HR CoEs: strategic workforce planning, critical roles, succession pipelines, and build/buy/borrow decisions.
- Define and build future commercial capabilities (e.g., data-driven decision-making, customer insights, martech and digital fluency, content and brand excellence, commercialization, experimentation).
- Strengthen leadership capability at all levels—combining future sales/commercial expertise with high-quality people leadership and team effectiveness.
- Create career paths and capability journeys for key commercial disciplines, enabling internal mobility, progression, and transparent development pathways.
Scale upskilling/reskilling through digital and blended learning solutions and targeted developmental experiences/development programs to enable a skills-based organization.
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More about you:
- 10+ years in HR with significant time as a senior HRBP in a complex, multi–state and consumer/technology/industrial/healthcare industries, combined with experience within Commercial, Wholesale or Sales environment.
- Experience in leading organisation, function, state or team transformation with measurable adoption and business impact.
- Strong background in organizational development: org design, role clarity, governance, spans/layers, decision rights, and org health interventions.
- Demonstrated experience in workforce planning and capability frameworks/career arhictechture, ie critical roles, succession, and workforce shaping.
- Effective partnering closely with Centers of Expertise (Talent, Rewards, L&D) and translating “CoE solutions” into functional org and people outcomes.
- Strong commercial mindset and understanding of business growth levers (customer, brand, portfolio, pricing/value, channel performance), and how B2B commercial teams enable objectives.
- Trusted advisor who has proven experience in coaching and challenging senior leaders
- Proven capability in change leadership and adoption.Strong stakeholder management across diverse geographies and team; able to align leaders who may have competing priorities.
- Demonstrates “modern, commercial HR”: performance focus, clarity, pragmatism, and fairness, with high integrity.
- Systems thinker: sees interdependencies across operating model, talent, culture, governance, and incentives. Strong data orientation: uses people analytics and insights to diagnose issues, prioritize interventions, and track effectiveness (not “data for data’s sake”).
- Outcome-led and practical: can simplify complexity, make good trade-offs, and drive decisions to closure.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and pace; thrives in perform and transform mode (new function, new ways of working while enabling the organisation to deliver short term outcome).
A minimum of 200Mb/sec download and 10Mb/sec upload speed internet connectivity is required to support any remote/hybrid employee functionality at Sonova
Don't meet all the criteria? If you’re willing to go all in and learn we'd love to hear from you!
We are looking forward to receiving your application via our online job application platform. For this position only direct applications will be considered. Sonova does not recruit via app, telegram, carrier pigeon or any other format that does not include speaking with an actual human. If you are offered a job without speaking with someone please contact Sonova Human Resources
What we offer:
- Medical, dental and vision coverage*
- Health Savings, Health Reimbursement, Flexible Spending/Dependent Care Accounts
- TeleHealth options
- 401k plan with company match*
- Company paid life/ad&d insurance
- Additional supplemental life/ad&d coverage available
- Company paid Short/Long-Term Disability coverage (STD/LTD)
- STD LTD Buy-ups available
- Accident/Hospital Indemnity coverage
- Legal/ID Theft Assistance
- PTO (or sick and vacation time), floating Diversity Day, & paid holidays*
- Paid parental bonding leave
- Employee Assistance Program (24/7 mental health support hotline, 5 company paid counseling sessions and more)
- Robust Internal Career Growth opportunities
- Tuition reimbursement
- Hearing aid discount for employees and family
- Internal social recognition platform
- Plan rules/offerings dependent upon group Company/location.
This role's pay range is between $233,000 - $310,000. This role is also bonus-eligible.
How we work:
At Sonova, we prioritize the well-being of our employees and foster an inclusive environment that promotes engagement and collaboration. Our team-customized hybrid work model empowers teams to balance individual needs with business goals, offering flexibility and individualized time management. We recognize the importance of life outside of work and strive to create a supportive and motivating workplace where innovation thrives.
More about what we offer
As one of the world’s leading hearing care providers headquartered in Switzerland, we’re committed to building an inclusive culture. We want to create an environment where you can balance a successful career with your commitments and interests outside of work, through our flexible hybrid working model. We offer a wide range of training opportunities for both your professional and personal development, and there are exceptional growth opportunities with individual development plans.
