Employee Relations Adviser (4-month FTC)

Contract type: Fixed term contract – 4 months (covering secondment)

Full time: 34.5 hours, we are open to a conversation about how you work these hours

Location: Hybrid between home and our London office. The requirement to come into the office is minimum once a week on Wednesdays.

Salary range: £36,000 - £40,000 per annum

About us

At Macmillan you'll find talented people working together to do whatever it takes to support people living with cancer. We're going all out to find even better ways to help even more people who need our support. Our values are at the heart of who we are and everything we do, inspiring our thinking and guiding our actions. Our new organisational strategy sets out how we’ll fight even harder to make every pound raised count for even more. With your help, we’ll transform cancer care for good.

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced and proactive Employee Relations Adviser to join our People Services team on a 4-month fixed term contract. In this role, you’ll provide a seamless, customer‑focused HR service, delivering expert advice and guidance on a wide range of Employee Relations (ER) matters. Working at pace, you’ll support managers and employee representatives to navigate complex casework, empowering them to make informed, fair, and commercially sound decisions. You’ll play a key role in delivering high‑quality outcomes, ensuring consistency, compliance, and a positive employee experience across the organisation. Based on the fixed‑term nature of this contract, we are only able to consider candidates who can join immediately.

Key responsibilities

• Provide expert, practical and commercially focused advice on ER matters, including disciplinary, grievance, sickness absence, performance, and appeals.
• Proactively manage a high‑volume caseload, ensuring cases are progressed and resolved within agreed SLAs.
• Coach and guide managers and employee representatives, enabling confident and effective decision‑making.
• Review case documentation to ensure consistency, accuracy, and compliance with policy and best practice.
• Assess risk on ER cases, escalating complex or high‑risk issues where appropriate.
• Maintain accurate and up‑to‑date records on the case management system.
• Partner with People & Culture Partners and other stakeholders on complex cases, sharing insights and best practice.
• Support change programmes, ensuring smooth delivery of processes and high‑quality employee experience.
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders such as Legal, Safeguarding, Communications, and EDI to ensure a holistic approach to case management.
• Contribute to HR and People Services projects as required.

About you

• Proven experience in Employee Relations, with strong knowledge of UK employment law and HR best practice.
• Confident in advising and coaching managers on complex ER cases.
• Strong risk assessment skills with a pragmatic, solutions‑focused approach.
• Excellent customer service mindset, with the ability to build credibility and trust with stakeholders.
• Highly organised with the ability to manage a busy caseload and competing priorities.
• Strong attention to detail and commitment to accuracy.
• Collaborative approach, with experience working across HR teams and wider business functions.
• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal.

In return, we offer a range of benefits including:

• 25 days holiday plus flexible bank holiday options, increasing by 1 day every year of service up to 30 days.
• Pension matched up to 7.5%.
• 120+ learning and development offers, with access to external professional qualifications.
• Flexible working patterns, such as compressed hours, flexibility to work earlier or later around our core working hours of 10am‑4pm.
• Holiday buying and selling scheme, life insurance, free wills, retail discounts and much more.

We welcome applications from everyone who meet the criteria and strongly encourage individuals to apply who have a disability, impairment or health condition or individuals who identify as Black, Asian or from another minority ethnic background, as these groups are currently under‑represented at Macmillan. Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy and our internal employee representation body, ‘Our Voice’ and 8 Employee Network groups help us promote fairness and belonging, becoming an engaged and inclusive organisation for all our people.