Head of People job description

Human resources — Head of People
Sets people strategy, workforce plans and reward company-wide.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Talent Acquisition
- Job Requisition and Role Scoping — You can scope roles that are new to the organisation or sit across several teams, and set the requisition standard other recruiters and managers follow.
- Candidate Sourcing and Screening — You can design the sourcing and screening approach for a whole hiring campaign, and check the pass-through data at each stage for unfair or unexplained drop-off.
- Structured Interview Design — You can set the interview standard for the organisation, including when assessments or work samples are used, and show whether the process predicts who does well once hired.
- Offer Management and Pre-Employment Checks — You can set the offer approval rules and the checks each role needs, and fix the steps that keep delaying start dates.
- New Hire Onboarding Delivery — You can redesign the onboarding programme from new-hire feedback and early-leaver data, and get managers to own their part of it.

Employee Relations
- Employee Relations Case Handling — You can set the employee relations approach for the organisation, deciding how early resolution, mediation and formal routes fit together, and personally judge the highest-risk cases.
- Workplace Investigation Conduct — You can set how investigations are commissioned and run across the organisation, decide when an external investigator is needed, and review the findings of other investigators for fairness.
- Disciplinary and Grievance Procedure Management — You can own the disciplinary and grievance procedures for the organisation, update them when law or practice changes, and decide how the highest-risk cases are handled.
- Employment Law Application — You can keep the organisation compliant in every jurisdiction where it employs people, track changes in the law, and set how legal risk is weighed in people decisions.
- Absence and Leave Management — You can review absence data across the organisation, fix the policy or process gaps it reveals, and train managers to hold return-to-work conversations well.

HR Operations
- HR Records and HRIS Administration — You can lead a change to the HR system, such as a new module or a migration, and keep records complete and correct through it.
- Payroll Input and Benefits Administration — You can run the payroll and benefits calendar across several teams or countries, resolve disputes with the payroll provider, and tighten the controls that keep failing.
- HR Policy Writing and Maintenance — You can decide which policies the organisation needs and which it does not, and set how policies are approved, published and kept lawful everywhere it operates.
- People Data Reporting and Analytics — You can set the people analytics agenda for the organisation, decide which questions matter most, and use the answers to shape people strategy.
- HR Compliance and Audit Readiness — You can own HR compliance for the organisation in every place it employs people, report on it to leadership, and decide how much risk is acceptable.

Performance & Growth
- Performance Review Cycle Administration — You can improve the review process from what went wrong in the last cycle, and train managers to write reviews that rest on evidence rather than opinion.
- Manager Coaching on People Issues — You can set how the organisation equips managers to handle people issues, and hold senior leaders to the same standard when they avoid hard conversations.
- Learning Needs Analysis — You can build the learning plan for the organisation from the needs analysis, set its priorities against the budget, and check afterwards whether it closed the gaps.
- Compensation Benchmarking and Pay Banding — You can set the reward strategy for the organisation, decide where it pays against the market and why, and keep the pay structure fair and affordable.

People Strategy
- Workforce Planning — You can own workforce planning for the organisation, tying headcount and skills to the business strategy and budget over several years.
- Organisational Design and Change — You can set the design principles for the whole organisation, such as spans and layers, and lead large-scale change without losing the people it depends on.
- Employee Engagement Measurement — You can make engagement a leadership priority, hold leaders to account for acting on what employees say, and decide how listening shapes people strategy.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organised and followed up across the organisation, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and the way you estimate becomes what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders send problems with no owner to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole kind of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create clearly improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- SHRM Certified Professional (SHRM-CP) (required from HR Manager)