HR Business Partner job description

Human resources — HR Business Partner
Advises a business area's leaders on people issues and change.

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 fill hard-to-hire roles by choosing the right sourcing channels, and spot when screening criteria are shutting out capable candidates for no job-related reason.
- Structured Interview Design — You can write interview questions and a scoring guide for a role from its criteria, and run a wash-up where the panel decides on evidence rather than gut feel.
- 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 adapt onboarding for roles or locations that do not fit the standard plan, and check in with new hires during their first weeks to catch problems early.

Employee Relations
- Employee Relations Case Handling — You can oversee a caseload across a team, spot patterns that point to a wider problem in one area, and advise leaders on how to address the cause.
- Workplace Investigation Conduct — You can run an investigation into a routine allegation yourself, interviewing each party impartially and writing findings that follow from the evidence.
- Disciplinary and Grievance Procedure Management — You can advise a manager through a disciplinary or grievance case from invitation to outcome, making sure each step follows the procedure and the law that applies.
- Employment Law Application — You can apply employment law to a live case, weigh the risk of each option, and brief a manager in plain language on what they can and cannot do.
- 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 manage access, retention periods and audit trails in the HR system so personal data is seen only by the people who should see it.
- Payroll Input and Benefits Administration — You can reconcile payroll against HR records, trace the cause when someone is paid wrongly, and get it corrected quickly.
- HR Policy Writing and Maintenance — You can write a new policy from scratch in plain language, consult the people it affects, and explain it to managers so they apply it the same way.
- People Data Reporting and Analytics — You can analyse people data to answer a specific question, such as why one team loses more staff than others, and present a finding leaders can act on.
- HR Compliance and Audit Readiness — You can prepare the HR area for an internal or external audit, answer questions from the auditor, and close the actions that come out of it.

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 coach a manager through underperformance or a difficult team problem so they handle it themselves, and check back later on how it went.
- Learning Needs Analysis — You can analyse skills gaps across a business area from performance data and conversations with managers, and recommend the most effective way to close each one.
- Compensation Benchmarking and Pay Banding — You can build or update pay bands for a job family from market data, and advise managers on placing individuals fairly within them.

People Strategy
- Workforce Planning — You can build a workforce plan for a business area, setting out the hires, moves and development needed to meet its goals for the coming year.
- Organisational Design and Change — You can support the restructure of a team, running the consultation steps and keeping affected employees informed and treated fairly.
- Employee Engagement Measurement — You can read survey results honestly, including the bad news, and help managers agree a small number of actions and see them through.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in areas where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, time, and the effort needed to keep them working.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were never involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.