Day Two

•  Leading a university wide HR operating model redesign as part of Cornell’s Resilient Cornell initiative, responding to financial austerity by shifting from a highly decentralized structure to a centralized, portfolio based model that improves consistency, governance, and service delivery across colleges and units.
• Rebuilding HR’s foundation by realigning reporting lines, reallocating budgets into a centralized cost model, and introducing strategic HR business partner ratios supported by pods of generalists and centers of excellence, enabling Cornell to reduce duplication while maintaining strong local support for academic units.
• Driving measurable financial and operational resilience through attrition, retirements, vacancy management, and functional streamlining, contributing to seven figure cost reduction targets across the institution while positioning HR to deliver faster, more scalable, and more strategic support during one of the largest transformation efforts in Cornell’s history.

• Tackling one of higher education’s most persistent operational challenges, complex faculty, adjunct, overload, sabbatical, and student worker pay, by replacing manual calculations, emails, and payroll handoffs with an integrated, rules-based HR and payroll workflow.
• Redesigning HR operations to automate end-to-end processes such as contract generation, compensation calculation, approvals, and payroll entry, significantly reducing error risk, cycle time, and administrative burden while improving transparency and trust for faculty and managers.
• Delivering material financial impact by eliminating redundant HR software and automating high volume transactional work, projecting $240k–$250k in annual software savings and $500k–$600k in total annual cost savings as additional HR and payroll processes are optimized over the next 12–18 months.

• Where does decision overload show up most clearly in HR operating models today?
• How do unclear ownership, manual work, and fragmented processes increase risk even when costs are reduced?
• What decisions should be standardised, automated, or governed centrally versus deliberately left local?
• How do leaders know when simplification has gone too far?

•  Which HR decisions currently consume the most leadership time or create the most rework?
• Where could clearer rules, ownership, or workflows eliminate repeated judgment calls?
• What is one decision you could make irreversible or automated to reduce noise?
• What evidence would tell you that HR decision‑making is becoming simpler, faster, and more defensible?

• Confronting shrinking labor pools and accelerating retirements across skilled trades and public safety roles by moving beyond reactive, lateral and traditional hiring models that no longer deliver sufficient qualified applicant pools or long-term retention in competitive metropolitan labor markets
• Launching a two-pronged workforce development strategy by creating dedicated outreach to local high schools and early career candidates, exposing students to skilled trades and campus law enforcement careers while pairing hands-on experience with eventual access to affordable education pathways through the University
• Delivering measurable hiring and retention impact by combining early pipeline development with a tiered employee referral bonus model that rewards employees for referring qualified candidates who are eventually hired , increasing applicant pools by 10–15% in hard to fill roles and achieving strong early retention, with the majority of referred hires remaining beyond six months and one year, proving the value of long-term, community anchored talent investment

•  Reimagining traditional higher education recruitment through a unified, campus wide talent campaign that elevates real employee stories across video, podcasts, streaming platforms, billboards, and digital media, aligning every message to a clearly defined Illinois Employee Value Proposition and driving 26% year over year applicant growth in its first phase, alongside social click through rates up to 7.5% on Meta and 23.1% on Google Search, far exceeding industry benchmarks.
• Designing a branded, repeatable operating model that integrates HR, marketing, and workforce data to target hard to fill roles, tailor outreach by job family and labor market, and extend talent visibility beyond campus into regional and national pipelines, contributing to a 65% increase in jobs.illinois.edu page views year over year (from 29,388 to 48,441 in September) without relying on job fairs or transactional hiring tactics.
• Delivering measurable impact with sustained double digit growth in applicant volume, stronger engagement signals among current employees, and rising pride and advocacy across the workforce, reflected in a 60% increase in workplace survey participation and a Net Promoter Score increase from 7.98 to 14.23, demonstrating how strategic employer branding can simultaneously improve attraction, retention, and cultural connection at scale.

•  What breaks first when institutions rely too heavily on job boards, agencies, and last‑minute recruitment?
• How do employee advocacy, storytelling, referrals, and early pipeline investment change the shape of demand rather than just increasing volume?
• Where should universities intentionally stop investing in short‑term attraction tactics that never compound?
• How can leaders assess whether a talent strategy is becoming more self‑sustaining over time?

In this quick-fire session, HR leaders will uncover the story behind a “leap” they have made in their business. Each table will be hosted by an HR leader who will share the secrets of their most high-impact leap; you will then have the opportunity to question the host before moving on to your next table.

Table 1: Navigating Centralized vs. Decentralized HR: Bridging Academic and Administrative Functions

Table 2: Workforce Planning Tied to Enrollment Volatility: Turning Forecasts into Hiring Controls

Table 3: Change Cadence Management: Reducing “Change Noise” So Leaders Can Execute