People & Culture Manager, Talent & Onboarding

Location: Becket

TITLE:

People & Culture Manager, Talent & Onboarding (Fixed-Term)
STATUS:
Full-Time, Fixed-Term Appointment, November 2026 through March 31, 2027 (Exempt)
SCOPE: A generalist seat with a defined focus: recruiting, letters of agreement, onboarding and training.

LOCATION:

Hybrid in the off-season, with regular on-site days on the Becket, Massachusetts campus. On-site during the May onboarding waves and throughout the Festival season (June through early September). Based within about one hour of Jacob's Pillow.

REPORTS TO:

Interim Director of People & Culture (Ygor Lobo)
DEPARTMENT:
People & CultureWORKS WITH:
The People Operations Manager (payroll, benefits, open enrollment, offboarding and the Paycom system); the Office Coordinator (front desk and the info@ inbox); hiring managers and department heads across the organization; IT, Company Management (seasonal arrivals);
Finance; training facilitators and partners; search and staffing partners.

COMPENSATION: [$65,000 to $75,000] annualized, commensurate with experience, prorated for the term (less applicable tax with holdings)
BENEFITS (SUMMER ONLY): three meals a day, free access to classes, performances, talks, and studio usage.

BENEFITS:
Medical, dental and vision insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA, Delta Dental and VSP, with coverage beginning day one of employment, plus an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA), Employee Assistance Program and travel assistance.

POSITION OVERVIEWJacob's Pillow is a National Historic Landmark, a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, and home to the longest-running international dance festival in the country. On a 220-acre campus in the Berkshire Hills of Becket, Massachusetts, the Pillow presents artists from around the world each summer across three stages, trains dancers at The School at Jacob's Pillow, keeps nearly a century of dance history alive in its Archives, and works year-round with communities across the region.

As it approaches its centennial, the Pillow is investing in the people and systems behind the work, and in being a more inclusive and equitable place for everyone who works here.

Jacob's Pillow employs roughly fifty year-round staff and brings on more than a hundred seasonal staff, faculty and interns for each Festival. Most arrive in three waves in May, after a spring in which the organization fills more than fifty positions. The People & Culture Manager, Talent & Onboarding owns that flow of people from posting to signed letter to first day, screens every search before candidates reach a hiring manager, and then makes sure each new colleague gets the training their role requires, when they need it.

This is a generalist seat with a defined focus. The person in it brings the full HR toolkit, employment basics, employee records, policy, structured and equitable hiring, and points it at four things: recruiting, letters of agreement, onboarding and training. They know the difference between a process question and a people matter. Payroll, benefits, open enrollment, offboarding and day-to-day Paycom sit with the People Operations Manager;

employee relations, leave, accommodation and performance sit with the Director. What isn't theirs gets routed the same day, not absorbed.

On training, the Director and the Pillow's partners design the content. This role makes sure it reaches people: a training calendar for the year, required trainings scheduled and tracked to completion for every new hire and every supervisor, role-based sessions built into onboarding, facilitators booked, sessions that run smoothly.

This is a fixed-term appointment through March 31, 2027, created to carry the fall searches and the build of the 2027 seasonal hiring cycle, with the possibility of…