Shari Mickey-Boggs
Senior Associate Chancellor & Chief Human Resources Officer University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Shari Mickey-Boggs serves as the Senior Associate Chancellor and Chief Human Resources Officer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she brings more than 25 years of distinguished leadership in human resources transformation across both public and private higher education institutions. A strategic and values-driven executive, Mickey-Boggs oversees a comprehensive HR portfolio that includes organizational strategy, workplace culture and well-being, employee experience and engagement, talent acquisition and development, compensation, labor and employee relations, policy design, HR systems and analytics, and regulatory compliance.
Her academic foundation includes a bachelor’s degree in political science and an MBA, and she is currently advancing her expertise through doctoral studies in Education Policy & Organizational Leadership. She is a graduate of the National Academy for Human Resources CHRO Academy and the Harvard Institute for Educational Management Higher Education Program. A certified Core Strengths facilitator and an Associate Certified Coach through the International Coaching Federation, Mickey-Boggs integrates coaching and strengths-based development into her leadership approach.
She is a dedicated leader in the national HR community, serving on the ARU-HRI board and currently presiding as President of the Society of Higher Education HR Executives, where she champions innovation, inclusion, and excellence in HR practices across academia.
When she’s not powering through Pilates or hunting down her next Diet Coke, she’s busy checking national parks off her list—36 down, 27 to go—and plotting her next adventure. Next stop: South Korea!
Seminars
- 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?
