HR Manager job description

Human resources — HR Manager
Runs the HR team and owns policy, employee relations and compliance.

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 train managers to interview in a structured way, review their scoring for bias or drift, and fix question sets that do not predict success in the role.
- 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 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 investigate complex or senior allegations, including ones with several complainants, and write reports that stand up to challenge at appeal or in a legal claim.
- Disciplinary and Grievance Procedure Management — You can handle cases that turn contentious, such as parallel grievances, appeals or likely dismissals, and keep the process sound when people push back.
- Employment Law Application — You can advise leaders on changes with legal risk, such as restructures or contract changes, and decide when to bring in legal counsel and what to ask them.
- 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 review the whole policy set on a schedule, remove overlaps and contradictions, and make sure managers use the policies rather than work around them.
- People Data Reporting and Analytics — You can set up the people metrics a business area tracks, define each one clearly, and make sure the data behind them can be trusted.
- HR Compliance and Audit Readiness — You can map the HR legal and reporting duties of the organisation to owners and deadlines, and catch a likely breach before it happens rather than after.

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 build the confidence of a group of managers so fewer issues reach HR, and spot when a manager needs development rather than case advice.
- 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 run the annual pay review, test pay for unexplained gaps between groups, and recommend fixes with their cost.

People Strategy
- Workforce Planning — You can plan across several business areas, test the plan against scenarios such as slower growth, and agree the trade-offs with leaders.
- Organisational Design and Change — You can design a new structure for a business area, weigh the options against cost and how work flows, and lead the people side of putting it in place.
- Employee Engagement Measurement — You can choose the listening methods for the organisation, such as surveys, focus groups and exit interviews, and check whether the actions taken changed the results.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep several people's work in step across teams, agree priorities and hand-offs with them, and keep one shared task list that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work that spans several teams, name the assumptions behind each figure, and rework the plan when those assumptions break.
- 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 bring in good practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement clearly improves the work you touch.
- 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 hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

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