About the job

£30,000-£35,000 dependant on experience. 25 days holiday + bank holiday with holiday accrual with service and purchase scheme. Minimum of 3 days to be based in Redditch Site.

We’ve got a really good opportunity to join our HR team. Our current HR Advisor joined us four and a half years ago and has developed and progressed brilliantly during her time with us. We’d love to find someone with that same sort of ambition. Someone who has built a solid grounding in HR and Employee Relations, but still has plenty they want to learn, take on and grow into.

There is one thing we do need you to bring from day one: good, hands-on ER experience. Ideally, you’ll have at least two years’ experience dealing with Employee Relations and will already have handled some reasonably complex cases including absence, disciplinary, grievance, performance and capability issues. Experience within construction, distribution, manufacturing, wholesale or another operational B2B environment would be brilliant. We’d also be very open to someone coming from a fast-paced multi-site retail environment.

But this role is about much more than knowing policy and employment law. We want someone who understands that good HR is about getting things done through people, not doing HR to people.

You’ll need to be pragmatic, resilient and organised. You’ll be comfortable giving clear advice, but equally comfortable having a conversation, understanding what is really going on and helping a manager find the right way forward.

Building brilliant, trust-based relationships will be a massive part of your success here. We don’t want someone who reaches for a policy simply because there is a policy. We want someone who can take people on the journey, explain the why, challenge when they need to and help managers become better and more confident themselves.

• What you’ll be doingThere is plenty of variety. Your role will include:Managing day-to-day ER queries and cases across the business
• Advising and coaching managers through disciplinaries, grievances, absence, performance, investigations and hearings
• Managing your ER cases properly from start to finish, recognising risk and knowing when something needs escalating
• Helping managers understand and confidently apply our people policies
• Keeping our policies up to date with UK employment law and best practice
• Supporting improvements to our HR systems and ways of working
• Getting involved in learning, development and succession planning
• Supporting engagement activity and internal communications
• Helping us turn people information and ER trends into useful insight
• Supporting and developing our HR Apprentice
• Getting involved in wider HR projects and occasionally supporting recruitment and onboarding when needed

The role itself is deliberately broad because we want someone who is interested in developing beyond ER and getting exposure to the wider HR agenda.

• What we’re really looking forYou’ll probably recognise yourself in most of these:Around 2+ years of solid HR/ER experience
• Comfortable managing ER cases yourself, including some more complex situations
• A good working knowledge of UK employment law
• Pragmatic and commercially minded. You understand that the answer isn’t always “the policy says…”
• Resilient and able to operate in a busy, operational environment
• Positive, encouraging and good at bringing people with you
• Someone who gets things done and keeps on top of the detail
• Confident enough to challenge, but able to do it in a way that builds rather than damages relationships
• Naturally curious and always looking for a better way of doing something
• Ambitious and genuinely wanting to keep learning and developing
• Experience in a multi-site business and sectors such as construction, distribution, manufacturing, wholesale, trade or retail would definitely help.
• CIPD would be great, but for us, your experience, attitude and potential are just as important.

Why this role?Because we’re not recruiting the finished article.We want someone who can already hold their own with ER but who looks at the wider parts of this role and thinks, “I’d love the chance to learn that.”There is plenty of opportunity to broaden your experience, work with managers right across the business, get involved in projects and continue developing your HR career. Plus, we’re a flexible team and are keen to use everyone’s strengths and interests when mapping out the “who” and the “what”, which means that you’d love to delve into a particular area of HR, we can usually do that! If you’re ambitious, positive, pragmatic, good with people and want somewhere you can genuinely keep growing, we’d love to hear from you.