Head of Talent Acquisition, CEMEA

About Us
Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world.

Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you.

Job Description

The Senior Director of Talent Acquisition, CEMEA will lead talent acquisition strategy and execution across Visa’s Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa business, enabling growth by building organizational capability through exceptional talent. This leader will drive regional recruitment strategy across professional hiring, partner with executive hiring early careers, employer brand, and talent marketing, while aligning closely with cross-functional HR, Global Talent Acquisition, Global Talent, and central TA operations teams to deliver a consistent, high-quality end-to-end candidate experience.

The right candidate will be a highly seasoned Talent Acquisition and HR leader who can set strategy, drive execution, and align a broad network of global and regional stakeholders around a modern, best-in-class TA function. This leader will bring a transformational mindset, strong business acumen, and the ability to advance capability growth, channel strategy, operating model effectiveness, and adoption of innovative tools and practices that improve productivity, candidate experience, and quality of hire.

The successful candidate will be highly consultative, with a proven track record of building and delivering TA outcomes aligned to the People Team and business strategy. They will create value across Visa’s people priorities, including skills enablement, Inclusion, internal mobility, AI Adoption and capability growth and development, while developing their team and creating win-win outcomes for Visa, the business, candidates, and employees.

If you are the successful candidate, you will have the opportunity to...

• Deliver top talent aligned to Visa’s People Team priorities, including internal mobility and Inclusion, while ensuring a remarkable candidate and hiring manager experience.
• Lead, coach, grow, and develop the TA team, ensuring they are set up for success and enabled to deliver optimal outcomes for their respective businesses.
• Serve as point of contact for all hiring across the region, bringing in subject matter experts where needed and providing data to senior leaders.
• Foster a culture of partnership, support, transparency, and shared ownership, enabling best-practice sharing, problem-solving, and consistent execution across the TA team.
• Drive hiring manager enablement by clarifying accountabilities, strengthening assessment discipline, and equipping managers to represent Visa effectively while making sound, inclusive hiring decisions.
• Lead and own execution of Visa’s employment brand in alignment with market and business unit needs, ensuring Visa’s employer value proposition is clearly, accurately, and powerfully represented.
• Develop talent attraction plans that ensure critical skills are available to support Visa’s objectives across each business.
• Partner with HRBPs to align on internal talent, role requirements, assessment expectations, and mobility opportunities, serving as a strong advocate for internal talent.
• Partner with Global Talent and Global Talent Acquisition teams to continuously evolve Visa’s assessment and evaluation processes.
• Partner with global compensation and benefits teams to ensure the offer process is managed effectively, competitively, and in compliance with applicable requirements.
• Play a global leadership role in Talent initiatives and projects that drive best-in-class TA outcomes.
• Continue the adoption of AI-enabled talent acquisition tools and workflows to improve recruiter productivity, strengthen assessment consistency, enhance data-driven decision-making, and improve overall quality of hire.
• Ensure compliance with audit, regulatory, and legal requirements across the TA function.
• Administer and resolve employee matters effectively, mitigating risk to the company.

• Oversee talent attraction initiatives, aligned with global strategy, to meet the region’s strategic goals.

• Support early careers program hiring and management.

You will have the following characteristics...

• Transformational mindset, with the ability to define, plan, and execute an end-state vision for world-class Talent Acquisition.
• Intellectually curious, with an external view of best practices and emerging Talent Acquisition trends, and the ability to benchmark Visa’s strengths and opportunities against leading talent competitors.
• Data-driven, outcome-oriented, and continuous improvement focused, with the ability to act decisively, measure impact, and translate insights into practical improvements across the TA operating model.
• Operationally strong, with ownership of the end-to-end TA process, including direct management of critical role recruitment when required.
• Strong conduit between Global TA initiatives and regional implementation, with the ability to translate enterprise priorities into practical, scalable execution across CEMEA.
• Digitally fluent and comfortable leading the adoption of AI and automation tools that improve productivity, quality, fairness, and consistency across the talent acquisition lifecycle.
• Relationship builder and influencer who demonstrates effective judgment with senior leaders and partners, combines human capital expertise with deep organizational understanding, and introduces change in ways that are broadly accepted and sustained.
• Values-driven leader who demonstrates alignment with Visa’s values, motivates and develops teams, and shows a strong commitment to growing internal talent.
• Results-oriented, resourceful, and client-focused, with a strong service mindset, positive can-do attitude, and commitment to continuous improvement and excellence.

This is an on-site position. An on-site position must be consistently performed at an assigned Visa office location and require daily commute to the office location.

Qualifications

Qualifications

• 12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 10 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters/MBA /JD/MD), or a minimum of 5 years of work experience with a PhD
• 15+ years of recruiting experience, including experience leading CEMEA regional recruitment teams in similar multinational corporate environments.
• A combination of corporate recruiting and search or agency experience is attractive.
• Relevant industry experience is highly desired, particularly in fintech, digital, technology, and/or financial services.
• Advanced ability to develop recruiting strategies for sourcing, evaluating, and selecting talent underpinned by advanced technologies.
• Strong understanding of strategic HR, including talent management, talent assessment, and organizational development, is highly desired.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Excellent negotiation, presentation, and organizational skills
• Prior experience providing consulting services to a division or divisions relative to workforce planning topics such as salary equity, internal movement, and staffing level planning
• BA/BS degree or equivalent experience.

Visa is an EEO Employer

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.