Karen Balcom Email & Phone Number

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Work directly with business executive team to provide strategy and thought leadership on HR topics related to culture, diversity, hiring, talent & learning development, succession, and workforce planning. Ensure people solutions are global-ready for EMEA, Americas, Nordica, and APAC implementation, while ensuring local level effectiveness. Identify and implement retention initiatives across global business teams. Continuously drive employee engagement improvement through transparent communications, training and executive coaching. Strategize with senior leaders and HR peers through bi-annual reviews of workforce capability gaps. Leverage ROI metrics to ensure people solutions ultimately address talent gaps. i.e. flight risk analysis, succession adherence, talent retention effectiveness. Provide organization re-design, employee relations and team effectiveness strategies in order to transform business functions into high performing and profitable organization.

Burlington, Ma

Senior Director/Head of Talent Acquistion for North America recruiting teams, cultivating curious minds that will support EMD Serono, MilliporeSigma and EMD Performance Materials, businesses of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. Provided strategic solutions directly with business leaders and HRBP peer leaders to employ custom external sourcing and internal talent mobilities across five business Sectors in the Americas. Ensured business continuity through best practice recruiting.

Waltham, Ma

Establish standards of recruiting best practices, prioritize external recruiting partnerships and ensure a fully integrated and harmonized talent acquisition strategy across five business units. Drove process improvements and established talent infrastructure for college and diversity recruiting and employee engagement. Partner with workforce planning to evaluate employee data and drive solutions that address hire and retention ROI of key talent communities.

Partner with over 30 international HR project team members to assess global onboarding initiatives, collect voice of the customer, development of print and online web solutions, design solutions to align with branding, pilot beta materials, and deliver a sustainable program that can be used by all global sites.

Enhanced global recruiting processes, internal recruitment branding, and interview and selection training strategies. Position expanded to build company’s university relations, intern program, diversity outreach, on-site temp vendor management and global onboarding.

Temp to perm role estabilished to assess and re-align Company's college recruiting activities and entry level hiring programs. Responsibilities focued on acquisition methods, process & reporting to training and development retention strategies.

Hired to build and manage the Globe’s first staffing function of two recruiters to ultimately change the Globe’s talent profile and establish best practices with hiring management.

Analyzed front-end recruiting operations including applicant tracking implementation, internal and external staffing processes, recruiter training, college recruiting management, report design and deployment, and procedure documentation.