Global Design Lead- Onboarding Experience & Compliance in City of London

This role leads the design and continuous evolution of Hays’ global onboarding experience “Welcome to Hays” ensuring every new starter, anywhere in the world, has a consistent, engaging and high-impact entry into the business. The role is responsible for creating a compelling first day and first 90 days experience that connects new colleagues to Hays’ purpose, values, culture and expectations, enabling them to become productive, confident and aligned from the outset. Alongside this, the role oversees the design of global compliance learning, ensuring mandatory requirements are seamlessly embedded into the onboarding journey and delivered in a way that is practical, engaging and drives the right behaviours across all markets.

Key Responsibilities:

• Ensure the global onboarding experience remains modern, engaging and aligned with Hays employer brand, creating a strong and consistent first impression for all new starters.
• Design and continuously evolve the global onboarding journey for all new joiners, creating engaging experiences that bring Hays to life; including our purpose, strategy, culture, valued behaviours and leadership.
• Build and embed global onboarding toolkits, digital experiences that support a high quality first 90 days experience, enabling new starters to quickly build confidence, capability and connection.
• Continuously improve the onboarding journey to reduce time to productivity for all new hires.
• Partner with regional learning teams to leverage and elevate existing local onboarding activities, ensuring alignment to a global framework while reflecting regional context (80/20 approach).
• Define the global compliance capability framework and mandatory learning curriculum and keep this up to date, raising any prioritisation issues regarding global roll out timeline.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to ensure global compliance learning coverage of key risk areas such as: Data protection & GDPR, Information security & cyber awareness, Health & safety, Anti‑bribery & corruption, Diversity, equity & inclusion, Code of conduct & ethical behaviour, Modern slavery & human rights.
• Design high‑impact, engaging digital learning experiences through transforming compliance requirements into clear, practical, and engaging digital learning content—leveraging innovative learning solutions (bite sized microlearning, avatar videos, and scenario‑based learning/gamification to deliver assessment of skills and knowledge).
• Ensure content is accessible, inclusive, and easy to understand for all roles and markets.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, and regional learning teams to ensure content is accurate, compliant, and aligned with regulatory & language requirements.
• Collaborate closely with the regional learning teams to listen to feedback, discuss & agree local market customisation requirements and address these in the digital learning content (adhering to principle of 80% & global content and c20% local market customisation).
• Ensure global consistency and alignment to global learning principles for all global compliance learning content.
• Collaborate with Global Risk, Legal, Data Protection & Privacy, Technology and regional learning teams to ensure global alignment to mandatory compliance learning, whilst allowing for regional variation of c20% to meet local regulatory/compliance requirements.
• Work with business leaders to understand risk areas and behavioural expectations.
• Manage external vendors and compliance content providers where needed.
• Define success metrics for compliance learning and report on global adoption and completion rates.
• Use data on completion rates, assessments, and behavioural insights to refine learning content.
• Ensure accurate tracking, reporting, and audit readiness.
• Demonstrate measurable improvements in compliance behaviour.

Skills & Experience:

• Experience in learning design, compliance training, or risk‑related capability development.
• Strong learning experience design expertise.
• Proficiency with digital learning tools and blended learning design.
• Ability to simplify complex legal or regulatory content into practical, engaging learning - creative in approach while rigorous in compliance accuracy.
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing capability.
• Strong collaborator.
• Proven success designing mandatory learning or regulatory training at scale.
• Experience working with Legal, Risk, and senior stakeholders.
• Understanding of behavioural science, risk management, and adult learning principles.
• Curious, innovative and committed to continuous improvement.