Director, Talent Development & Strategy

Job Position(s): Director, Talent Development & Strategy

WME is hiring a Director, Talent Development & Strategy based in New York at their 11 Madison office. This role sits at the center of WME’s internal talent pipeline, responsible for building and running the programs that turn assistants into agents across Music, film, television, and all core agency verticals. It suits a senior-level professional who has spent real time inside an agency or talent organization and understands how development infrastructure actually shapes a roster.

About the Role

The Director, Talent Development & Strategy works across HR, Business Operations, Recruitment, and Inclusion to design and run the full early-career development journey, from assistant onboarding through promotion-ready agent. Day to day, this person is building performance management frameworks, running cross-functional sprint workstreams, and making sure programs like Farmhouse and the Trainee pipeline are connected and functioning as a coherent system. The work is operational and strategic in equal measure, with real accountability for how the next generation of WME agents gets built.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and lead a comprehensive agent development strategy covering all business verticals, including Music, ensuring programs scale with agency growth and talent acquisition priorities.
• Build out performance management frameworks in partnership with HR and Business Operations, defining evaluation cycles, success metrics, feedback cadence, and escalation pathways from assistant through early agent levels.
• Administer performance management processes within Workday, including goal setting, review cycles, and documentation, maintaining data integrity across the organization.
• Serve as a lead within the HR, Inclusion, and Operations Sprints initiative, translating cross-functional workstream outputs into practical training curriculum and career progression tools.
• Oversee the agency-wide onboarding and orientation experience for assistants and agents, ensuring consistent delivery across departments and alignment with WME culture and expectations.
• Partner with senior leadership to align the Trainee Program, Farmhouse, and all assistant development initiatives into a clearly defined progression pathway from entry-level through early agent years.

What You Bring

• Several years of experience in talent development, HR strategy, or agency operations within the entertainment industry.
• Hands-on experience with Workday, specifically performance management modules including goal setting and review cycle administration.
• Demonstrated background building or managing early-career development programs inside a talent agency, studio, or entertainment company.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives involving HR, legal, and business operations stakeholders at a senior level.
• Familiarity with talent representation business models and the assistant-to-agent career track across film, television, and music verticals.

Why This Role

WME is one of the largest talent agencies in the entertainment industry, representing clients across film, television, music, and sports, which means the development infrastructure built in this role operates at genuine scale. The Director, Talent Development & Strategy has a direct line to senior leadership and real ownership over how the agency grows its own, which is a rare level of influence for a role of this kind. For someone who wants to shape talent pipeline strategy inside a major entertainment company, this is a substantive position with organization-wide impact.

Apply now for the Director, Talent Development & Strategy role at WME and bring your development expertise to one of the industry’s leading agencies.