About the role
Reports To: Director, Employee Experience
Location: Head Office (Hybrid, 3 days per week)
Role Overview
As the Manager, Talent Programs, you will be responsible for the seamless execution, continuous improvement, and operational excellence of key talent programs at Gay Lea Foods. Reporting to the Director, Employee Experience, you will ensure that established programs are delivered with consistency, rigor, and impact. You will also provide agile support for new talent programs as they emerge, adapting to evolving business needs.
Key Responsibilities
- Program Management: Own the end-to-end delivery of core talent programs (e.g. performance cycles, values awards, engagement), ensuring timelines, quality standards, key metrics, and stakeholder expectations are met.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate with HR business partners, learning & development (L&D), communications, and business leaders across corporate and operations, to ensure talent programs are seamlessly integrated with organizational performance goals. Work proactively with L&D to align program timelines, communications, and objectives, ensuring that all training and materials developed by L&D support and reinforce the delivery of talent management initiatives.
- Continuous Improvement: Monitor program effectiveness, gather feedback, and implement enhancements to maximize impact and alignment with organizational goals.
- Data & Insights: Analyze employee and program data to uncover people insights, using storytelling to communicate findings that inform both the enhancement of existing programs and the creation of new talent initiatives.
- Process Leadership & Documentation: Lead the execution and coordination of core program processes, ensuring they run smoothly, on time, and with consistency across the organization. Maintain up-to-date documentation and toolkits to support knowledge transfer and long-term program sustainability.
- Agility: Support the Director in piloting and embedding new talent programs as business priorities evolve, ensuring operational readiness and scalability. Take on additional talent program responsibilities as assigned, with the understanding that the portfolio may shift based on organizational needs.
- Communications: Develop clear, engaging, and timely communications that support program delivery, drive employee awareness, and reinforce key messages across multiple channels and audiences.
- Culture Champion: Model and reinforce company values, contributing to a positive, inclusive, and high-performance culture reflecting the “Gay Lea way”.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of progressive HR or program management experience, preferably in employee experience, talent management, or a related field.
- Demonstrated success in managing multiple programs or projects simultaneously.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and communication skills.
- Proven ability to adapt to change, operate in ambiguity, and deliver results in a dynamic environment.
- Collaborative, proactive, and solutions-oriented mindset.
- Proficiency with HRIS (Dayforce), survey tools (MS Glint/Pulse), and program management software (MS Planner), as well as the MS Office Suite (PowerPoint, Excel, Power BI).
Gay Lea Foods is a leading Canadian dairy co-operative renowned for producing high-quality, nutritious dairy products that Canadian families love and trust. From farm to table, our 1,200 farmer members in Ontario and Manitoba, and more than 1,200 employees across four provinces, work together to nourish communities through award-winning brands including Gay Lea, Nordica, Salerno, Bothwell Cheese, and more. As part of its deeply rooted, balanced commitment to people, profit, and planet, Gay Lea Foods proudly invests one percent of pre-tax earnings back into Canadian communities through a national food security partnership with Second Harvest, and the community-building efforts of the Gay Lea Foundation. To learn more, visit gayleafoods.com.
Gay Lea Foods is an equal-opportunity employer and values diversity in our workplace.
Reasonable accommodation is available upon request throughout our recruitment and selection process.
Thank you for your interest in Gay Lea Foods.
Wishing you all the best with your career search!
About Gay Lea Foods
With our roots on the farm, Gay Lea Foods has grown to become a leader in the Canadian dairy industry and the largest dairy co-operative in Ontario, with members on 1,300 dairy farms in Ontario and Manitoba, and more than 4,200 producer and investor stakeholders. Our dedication to innovation and the development of high quality products has allowed us to respond to consumers’ evolving tastes and grow the market for Canadian cow and, more recently, goat milk. We are a Canadian success story – and that story is far from over. Moving forward, Gay Lea Foods is poised to seize and create even more opportunities for sustainable, long-term growth in the Canadian dairy industry as we expand beyond our provincial borders, grow our foods and ingredients business, and continue to invest in innovative and industry-leading products.
As much as we evolve, however, we remain a dairy co-operative, owned by dairy farmers. From our farms and production facilities, to our distribution networks and employee ideologies, we embrace and act with co-operative-inspired values, understanding there is no shortcut to quality or success. It takes commitment, passion and collaboration.
Those are the things we’re made of and we’re proud to share our story.
Just like the milk that comes from our farms, so too are Gay Lea Foods’ products and values born on the farm.
About the role
Reports To: Director, Employee Experience
Location: Head Office (Hybrid, 3 days per week)
Role Overview
As the Manager, Talent Programs, you will be responsible for the seamless execution, continuous improvement, and operational excellence of key talent programs at Gay Lea Foods. Reporting to the Director, Employee Experience, you will ensure that established programs are delivered with consistency, rigor, and impact. You will also provide agile support for new talent programs as they emerge, adapting to evolving business needs.
Key Responsibilities
- Program Management: Own the end-to-end delivery of core talent programs (e.g. performance cycles, values awards, engagement), ensuring timelines, quality standards, key metrics, and stakeholder expectations are met.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate with HR business partners, learning & development (L&D), communications, and business leaders across corporate and operations, to ensure talent programs are seamlessly integrated with organizational performance goals. Work proactively with L&D to align program timelines, communications, and objectives, ensuring that all training and materials developed by L&D support and reinforce the delivery of talent management initiatives.
- Continuous Improvement: Monitor program effectiveness, gather feedback, and implement enhancements to maximize impact and alignment with organizational goals.
- Data & Insights: Analyze employee and program data to uncover people insights, using storytelling to communicate findings that inform both the enhancement of existing programs and the creation of new talent initiatives.
- Process Leadership & Documentation: Lead the execution and coordination of core program processes, ensuring they run smoothly, on time, and with consistency across the organization. Maintain up-to-date documentation and toolkits to support knowledge transfer and long-term program sustainability.
- Agility: Support the Director in piloting and embedding new talent programs as business priorities evolve, ensuring operational readiness and scalability. Take on additional talent program responsibilities as assigned, with the understanding that the portfolio may shift based on organizational needs.
- Communications: Develop clear, engaging, and timely communications that support program delivery, drive employee awareness, and reinforce key messages across multiple channels and audiences.
- Culture Champion: Model and reinforce company values, contributing to a positive, inclusive, and high-performance culture reflecting the “Gay Lea way”.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of progressive HR or program management experience, preferably in employee experience, talent management, or a related field.
- Demonstrated success in managing multiple programs or projects simultaneously.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and communication skills.
- Proven ability to adapt to change, operate in ambiguity, and deliver results in a dynamic environment.
- Collaborative, proactive, and solutions-oriented mindset.
- Proficiency with HRIS (Dayforce), survey tools (MS Glint/Pulse), and program management software (MS Planner), as well as the MS Office Suite (PowerPoint, Excel, Power BI).
Gay Lea Foods is a leading Canadian dairy co-operative renowned for producing high-quality, nutritious dairy products that Canadian families love and trust. From farm to table, our 1,200 farmer members in Ontario and Manitoba, and more than 1,200 employees across four provinces, work together to nourish communities through award-winning brands including Gay Lea, Nordica, Salerno, Bothwell Cheese, and more. As part of its deeply rooted, balanced commitment to people, profit, and planet, Gay Lea Foods proudly invests one percent of pre-tax earnings back into Canadian communities through a national food security partnership with Second Harvest, and the community-building efforts of the Gay Lea Foundation. To learn more, visit gayleafoods.com.
Gay Lea Foods is an equal-opportunity employer and values diversity in our workplace.
Reasonable accommodation is available upon request throughout our recruitment and selection process.
Thank you for your interest in Gay Lea Foods.
Wishing you all the best with your career search!
About Gay Lea Foods
With our roots on the farm, Gay Lea Foods has grown to become a leader in the Canadian dairy industry and the largest dairy co-operative in Ontario, with members on 1,300 dairy farms in Ontario and Manitoba, and more than 4,200 producer and investor stakeholders. Our dedication to innovation and the development of high quality products has allowed us to respond to consumers’ evolving tastes and grow the market for Canadian cow and, more recently, goat milk. We are a Canadian success story – and that story is far from over. Moving forward, Gay Lea Foods is poised to seize and create even more opportunities for sustainable, long-term growth in the Canadian dairy industry as we expand beyond our provincial borders, grow our foods and ingredients business, and continue to invest in innovative and industry-leading products.
As much as we evolve, however, we remain a dairy co-operative, owned by dairy farmers. From our farms and production facilities, to our distribution networks and employee ideologies, we embrace and act with co-operative-inspired values, understanding there is no shortcut to quality or success. It takes commitment, passion and collaboration.
Those are the things we’re made of and we’re proud to share our story.
Just like the milk that comes from our farms, so too are Gay Lea Foods’ products and values born on the farm.