Human Resources Director

HRLife are delighted to be partnering with a SME business who place people and excellence at the heart of what they do and pride themselves on building great partnerships with their clients who value their expertise and knowledge. Working with highly educated experts, you will join them as HR Director to really help shape and drive the business forward whilst maintaining the successful foundations and culture they have built and are proud of.

Supported by an HR team, you will be instrumental in partnering with the Senior Leaders, coming up with new initiatives for their people to ensure they continue to retain, develop and attract great talent. Reporting to the board and an integral member of the SLT, you’ll be a natural communicator, have a commercial outlook and be able to influence and bring employees and managers with you on the ‘People journey’ as you work closely to define and drive the people agenda to support future business goals and growth.

Also key to the role is being able to lead a high performing HR team who can closely support the business with key decisions and conversations that really nurture the people ensuring a happy, engaged, and productive workforce. As a trusted advisor, you’ll be able to achieve the right balance between designing and embedding new ways of working, introducing light-touch processes to ensure employees and managers feel supported, empowered and have the right tools available to excel day to day.

With the majority of the workforce being in the UK, you’ll have sound employment law knowledge to be able to work strategically but also get stuck in operationally as required. Experience of working with remote workers based regionally across the UK and overseas will be advantageous as there are colleagues based in the US and Australia too who you will be responsible for. Your role as HR Director will allow you to be creative, data driven, solutions centric and really allow you to get close to the business to ultimately enhance capability, drive performance, increase employee engagement and make it a great place to work.

Key responsibilities include:

• Define and embed a global people strategy that aligns with the broader company’s goals and aspirations
• Influence and partner with global and local leaders to help shape people plans to focus on driving high performance and personal development.
• Champion the culture and values fostering positive employee engagement
• Ensure the best HR structure and processes are in place to offer sound operational support to the full employee lifecycle
• Oversee the full talent spectrum from recruiting, onboarding, developing and retaining ensuring a great candidate and onboarding experience

Interacting daily with a niche, intellectual workforce, you’ll have tons of emotional intelligence, be a well-respected HR leader that is astute, collaborative, and able to positively challenge to get the best out of their peers and people. Being able to juggle and balance the ability to know when to roll your sleeves up and get into the detail with being able to think globally will set you up for success and establish your credibility as their go-to confidante.

In addition, your background and skills will include:

• Degree educated, fully CIPD qualified
• Previous experience from a small to medium sized business (sub-1000)
• Experience of working with a highly academic workforce
• Stability and tenure in previous HR roles
• Be able to demonstrate the ability to operate strategically but also deliver operationally
• Strong UK employment law knowledge with experience of supporting small teams outside of the UK and across different UK locations
• Leading and developing a high-performing HR team
• Able to utilise and interpret data to inform decision-making
• Collaborative and nurturing in style, commercial in approach

This will be a hybrid role - 3 days a week onsite – with offices in London and Oxfordshire – ability to go to each location at least once a week.