HR Manager

Innovative Service Group 
c£50,000 plus attractive package

This is an outstanding opportunity to join one of the region’s most innovative business and consumer services groups in a newly created, HR Leadership role with a key focus on Learning & Development.

Founded by the current management team 12 years ago, the business has grown from strength to strength, carving out their own niche within a high growth market place, whilst retaining their entrepreneurial and highly innovative vision; constantly evolving their product offering, customer proposition and target market. 

Based within the North-West Head Office, the appointee will quickly become a key member of the Management Team. They will hold an important strategic position centred on the business’s prime resource, its people, and the development of every team member. 

Replicating the entire business’s human-focus internally as well as externally, they have created an upbeat, friendly, innovative, and fast-paced environment with market-leading opportunity for advancement. But they seek to continue the development of that culture and environment for the personal and professional benefit of all employees.

This is an energised and innovative culture, still very much an entrepreneurial SME, which every employee works diligently to foster and continually improve. They are an opportunistic growth company that seeks to deliver long-term prosperity to all employees. 

Their people-centric approach has won them significant recognition with not only an enviable client list but also as a genuine employer of choice. Entrepreneurial innovation and a transparent team environment sets this inventive business apart from their competitors, and with continued demand for their services, coupled with their quest to continually innovate and keep them ahead of the curve, their future is as impressive as their short history and even more exciting.

The HR team is still relatively small but very committed to driving performance and development, ensuring engagement and wellbeing, and supporting the focus on customer service. With several apprenticeship programmes for staff and a continual recruitment drive underway as part of their growth, this is an exciting time to join this fast-paced, lively business and become a key part of their ambitious growth plans.

The HR Manager will report directly to the Head of HR, and be responsible for helping to lead and shape the growth of the department, and in particular take a lead role in delivering the L&D strategy; to develop and deliver engaging content to inspire and motivate staff around their personal development and to consider learning interventions across a range of employee levels both face to face and remotely. 

They will be tasked with developing strong, influential, collaborative relationships with colleagues across the business, whilst adding strategic input and driving the people development aspect of the business’s already impressive growth strategy and transformation project. 

The appointee will already be an experienced HR professional, preferably with good exposure to Learnign & Development, but most definitely with the appetite to really drive that element of the people strategy; the ideal person will also possess a broad Human Resources knowledge; but regardless of their background, they will be hungry to develop a strategic HR career, and welcome swift career advancement with the role of Head of HR being a natural medium-term objective.

Whilst the successful candidate will have a very forward-looking approach, they will also provide input to ensuring successful day to day HR operations within all partnership functions, and to ensure engagement with people across the business. 

Key Accountabilities

• To take a key and lead role in the overall management, direction and development of the HR department and overall people strategy.
• Commercial understanding of the business’s activities and objectives; combining strategy, commerciality and culture….but with a remit to place people, communication and engagement at the heart of the business.
• Design and deliver the HR strategy as a key driver to business growth strategy through close partnerships with senior management teams but recognising the differences in that strategy required in different parts of the business.
• Foster a great appreciation for a broader HR framework for the growing international operation, designing and developing appropriate process, policies and best practice but always with an eye to the longer-term objectives more than short-term process compliance.
• Be seen as a true business partner, developing mature but closely synergetic, respectful relationships with internal customers, understanding their priorities.
• Be the voice of the “People Strategy”. Responsible for attraction and retention of key leadership talent. Fostering a dynamic succession-planning strategy, but recognising when external resources need to be employed.

• Develop engaging learning content and keep abreast of current L&D trends to continually improve the learning offering.
• Design, plan and deliver a range of programmes as well as sourcing expert external provision where appropriate.
• Support with the compliance training required across the business as well as recording and monitoring such training.
• Source and introduce a new LMS including an engaging launch process with the ability to build onto this as programmes develop.
• Ensure the learning programmes are applicable to each group of people in the context of the particular aims and objectives.
• Maintain a strong focus on customer service training utilising their membership of the Institute of Customer Service to support this.
• Consider L&D requirements in relation to succession plans across each are of the business.
• Support with managing training budgets and apprenticeship Levy funds and management.
• Support the engagement strategy with ideas and content in relation to all elements of L&D.
• Be confident delivering content both face to face and remotely.
• Establish ways to measure and evaluate the success of the L&D offering.
• Support occasionally with recruitment or other ad-hoc HR projects

As with all appointments in this highly people-centric business, candidate profile and chemistry fit is critical, but never more so than for this for this key role. Working within a fast-paced, innovative, entrepreneurial environment, attitude is as important as experience. The person is everything. The HR Manager will be instrumental in adding to the tone, energy and culture for the business. The gravity of success is all about having the right attitude, underpinned with demonstrable experience.

The appointee will possess an ethos of delivery through engagement, an innovative approach, informed collaborative insight, ideation and a ‘do’ not ‘think’ mindset. They will have combined their own development within HR and L&D with driving and reacting to change, whilst at all time seeking to place people at the heart of decision making.

They will be people, results and delivery oriented; hands-on and possess the ability to create a sense of mission and attentiveness to current and future requirements and challenges.

Qualifications, knowledge & experience

Experience

• Proven experience of working within an L&D rich HR environment.
• Able to design and deliver lively and engaging learning programmes across multiple formats.
• Exposure to Learning Management systems and ideally experience of launching a new system.
• Demonstration of effectively measuring and evaluating learning programmes.
• Ideally exposure to a customer service-based environment and delivery of quality customer service.
• Confident managing training budgets and exposure to apprenticeship Levy system.
• Clear evidence of working in a fast paced, busy environment.

Skills

• Good commercial acumen and approach 
• Strong teamwork ethic yet with the individual drive and focus to manage independently when needed
• Evidence of relationship building skills
• Strong facilitation skills both face to face and virtually
• Creative and innovative thinker
• Adept at Microsoft office suite and the use of different systems
• Some project management exposure
• Good communications skills both verbal and written and, ideally evidence of influencing skills
• The ability to manage internal stakeholder relationships effectively
• Awareness of the compliance elements within a regulated environment would be an advantage

Personal Attributes/Behaviours

• Demonstrates personal drive and energy
• A willingness to offer suggestions and solutions in an innovative, simple and constructive manner
• Collaborative style
• Committed and hard working
• Flexible and able to cope with changing business priorities
• Being highly organised and able to manage multiple priorities and a varied workload
• Tenacious with high volumes of resilience 
• Role models the values and behaviours 

As a small business passionate about the development of their people, the HR Manager will be a critical appointment. They will be an influencer and a trustee of the corporate culture, a key driver behind the business’s already impressive people focus, and as a result, their impressive growth track record.

They will be self-motivated & able to work on their own initiative whilst putting team and company needs before own and possess the ability to think flexibly and laterally.

The successful candidate will have creative and innovative ability and desire, and be hugely excited by a very high paced environment, thick with USPs – their People focus will be underpinned by a real “Just Do It” attitude, and a sense of humour.

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