Senior HR Generalist & Strategic People Consultant in Houghton

End to End HR Generalist Management

• Take full accountability for the end‑to‑end employee lifecycle, ensuring seamless alignment across workforce planning, attraction, recruitment, onboarding, performance management, development, engagement, retention, employee relations, and exits.
• Lead and oversee end‑to‑end recruitment and resourcing processes, ensuring recruitment practices are fair, equitable, legislatively compliant, and aligned to organisational workforce plans, operational requirements, and Employment Equity objectives.
• Partner with line management to provide strategic and operational recruitment guidance, including role scoping, competency profiling, selection methodologies, interview practices, and appointment decisions within a unionised environment.
• Ensure recruitment, selection, and onboarding processes are standardised, governed, and consistently applied, while allowing for appropriate contextual flexibility in labour‑intensive and operational settings.
• Drive talent identification and management practices, including the identification of critical skills, scarce capabilities, high‑potential employees, and succession risks within assigned business units.
• Contribute to and support talent management, succession planning, and capability‑building processes, working closely with HR Centres of Excellence to ensure talent pipelines are aligned to current and future business needs.
• Lead the implementation, governance, and continuous improvement of performance management frameworks, ensuring that performance processes are applied consistently, fairly, and meaningfully across all levels of the organisation.
• Enable, coach, and support leaders to set clear performance expectations, conduct effective performance discussions, manage underperformance fairly and decisively, and recognise and reward achievement in line with organisational values.
• Ensure performance management outcomes are properly documented, defensible, and integrated with reward, development, and talent decisions.
• Drive the implementation of diversity, inclusion, and Employment Equity strategies, ensuring people practices promote transformation, fairness, and equitable access to opportunity.
• Translate Employment Equity objectives into practical workforce actions, including recruitment targets, development interventions, succession planning, and career progression initiatives.
• Monitor people‑related risks, trends, and systemic issues (including turnover, absenteeism, performance concerns, and employee relations trends) using data and insight to support proactive intervention.
• Act as the senior escalation point for complex, sensitive, or high‑risk people matters, exercising sound professional judgement that balances operational requirements, employee wellbeing, legal risk, and reputational impact.
• Ensure all HR policies, processes, and interventions are legislatively compliant, policy‑aligned, procedurally fair, and defensible, particularly within a unionised and regulated operating environment.
• Coach and enable line management to take effective ownership of people management responsibilities, strengthening leadership capability and accountability while reducing reliance on transactional HR intervention.

Stakeholder Management, Union and Labour Relations Leadership

• Provide senior level stakeholder management and advisory support to a wide range of internal and external stakeholders, ensuring constructive, credible, and professional engagement across the people ecosystem.
• Act as a trusted people advisor to senior management, line managers, and operational teams, enabling informed, consistent, and defensible people related decision making.
• Build and maintain strong working relationships with internal stakeholders, including business leadership, operational management, HR Centres of Excellence, and support functions, to ensure alignment between people strategies and business objectives.
• Lead and manage constructive relationships with organised labour and union structures, ensuring engagement supports operational continuity while maintaining compliance, consistency, and procedural fairness.
• Serve as the primary HR interface with external stakeholders where required, including legal advisors, bargaining councils, regulators, mediators, and other employment related external bodies.
• Interpret, apply, and advise on labour legislation, collective agreements, and internal policies, ensuring consistent application, sound precedent management, and risk mitigation across all cases, sites, and regions.
• Guide and support management through disciplinary, grievance, misconduct, incapacity, retrenchment, and performance related processes, ensuring outcomes are lawful, procedurally fair, and defensible.
• Represent the organisation, or support formal representation, at disciplinary hearings, conciliations, arbitrations, and external dispute resolution forums as required.
• Manage sensitive and high-risk stakeholder situations with sound professional judgement, balancing operational pressures, employee relations outcomes, legal risk, and reputational impact.
• Act as an escalation point for complex stakeholder and employee relations matters, ensuring issues are resolved consistently, ethically, and in alignment with organisational values.
• Influence stakeholder behaviour by reinforcing accountability, ethical conduct, and fairness in people management practices across the business.

Strategic People Consulting and Business Partnering

• Act as a trusted senior people consultant to executive and senior leadership, translating organisational and operational strategies into practical, sustainable people solutions.
• Diagnose organisational, workforce, and leadership challenges using data, insight, and stakeholder engagement to design targeted interventions across structure, capability, performance, and culture.
• Advise leaders on organisational design, workforce optimisation, leadership effectiveness, and change management, particularly within unionised and operational environments.
• Influence leadership behaviour by embedding performance accountability, ethical decision making, and values-based leadership.
• Move beyond transactional HR delivery by shaping long term people strategies that drive resilience, productivity, and organisational sustainability.

Leadership and Development of HR Professionals

• Provide direct leadership, coaching, and development to HR team, ensuring high professional standards and consistent HR delivery.
• Enhance the HR team's technical, consulting, and stakeholder management capabilities by implementing coaching, mentoring, case reviews, and skills transfer initiatives.
• Quality assure HR advice, case management, documentation, and interventions delivered by the team to ensure legal soundness, consistency, and alignment to organisational standards.
• Support the growth, confidence, and professional maturity of HR practitioners, enabling independent and effective performance in complex operational environments.
• Model senior HR professionalism, ethical conduct, and sound judgement, strengthening the credibility and resilience of the HR consulting function.

HR Centre of Excellence (COE) Integration

• Act as the primary interface between the business and HR Centres of Excellence, ensuring seamless and integrated delivery of specialist HR solutions.
• Partner with CoEs covering talent management, learning and development, reward, organisational development, and employee relations to deliver cohesive, value adding interventions.
• Ensure CoE frameworks, policies, and programmes are contextualised, practical, and implementable within front line, labour intensive, and unionised environments.
• Provide business insight and feedback to CoEs to support continuous improvement of HR frameworks and offerings.
• Drive effective implementation, adoption, and sustainability of CoE initiatives, avoiding fragmented or siloed HR delivery.

Culture, Change and Organisational Effectiveness

• Support organisational culture initiatives that reinforce ethical behaviour, accountability, engagement, and performance.
• Enable leaders to navigate transformation and change while maintaining stability, trust, and compliance within the workforce.
• Balance operational performance demands with employee wellbeing and fair labour practices in high pressure environments.
• Contribute to organisational resilience by supporting leaders through periods of conflict, change, and constraint.
• Ensure people practices promote long term organisational sustainability, rather than short term corrective actions.
• Drive the department’s values while inspiring confidence and generating excitement, enthusiasm and commitment towards the mission.

HR Technology Enablement and People-Centric Advocacy

• Champion the responsible integration of technology and digital tools within the HR advisory and people consulting space, ensuring that systems enhance decision making, consistency, and efficiency without eroding human judgement or empathy.
• Partner with HR Centres of Excellence, technology teams, and business leaders to embed HR systems, analytics, and digital platforms that support end to end people processes, including recruitment, performance management, talent management, employee relations, and workforce planning.
• Ensure that HR technology solutions are fit for purpose, user centric, and contextually appropriate for operational, labour intensive, and unionised environments.
• Leverage data, dashboards, and people analytics to generate meaningful insights on workforce trends, risks, and opportunities, while maintaining professionalism, confidentiality, and ethical use of employee data.
• Act as an advocate for augmentation rather than replacement, ensuring that technology supports HR practitioners and leaders to make better people decisions rather than defaulting to automated or transactional responses.
• Maintain a strong people centric lens in all HR technology initiatives, ensuring that systems, processes, and tools reinforce dignity, fairness, inclusion, and employee experience.
• Challenge over automation or compliance only approaches by reinforcing the importance of human connection, professional judgement, and contextual decision making in people management.
• Support leaders and HR practitioners in adopting digital tools confidently and responsibly through education, guidance, and change enablement.
• Influence organisational thinking to ensure that the evolution of HR technology aligns with organisational values, ethical standards, and long-term people sustainability.
• Contribute to the development of a modern HR advisory capability that balances digital fluency, analytical insight, and human centred leadership.

Requirements

• Degree in Industrial and Organisational Psychology/Human Resources Management or related.
• Minimum of 6 years’ HR experience, of which at least 3 years must be at a management or senior consulting level.
• Proven experience in unionised and labour intensive environments, end to end HR generalist roles, leading and developing HR professionals, managing complex employee relations and dispute resolution processes, and adopting and integrating technology to improve workflows and client experience.
• Exposure to operational, regulated, or high-risk industries is advantageous.

Work Level: Senior Management

Job Type: Permanent

Salary: Market Related

EE Position: Yes

Location: Houghton