Senior People Partner

at  iwoca

We believe we make a real difference to business owners, their teams, families and communities: they use our finance as a superpower either to seize opportunities for growth or move their business out from under the shadow of cashflow. It’s our mission to finance a million businesses and we won’t accept a world where they have to jump through unnecessary hoops and wait weeks, even months, for a decision. With iwoca businesses get the right finance with a few clicks, when and where they need it.
Since our launch in 2012, we have stayed true to our goals, and are now one of the biggest fintechs in Europe. Along the way, we have revolutionised lending with our cutting-edge tech platform, earned numerous industry awards, and made billions available to more than 100,000 businesses.
The role of the People Operations team is to develop and implement strategies that enable iwoca to attract, develop and retain the best talent, and ensure that iwoca strengthens our people and our culture as we grow. We’re progressive, innovative and looking to set new standards in People Operations.
Note: this role is a 12 month Fixed Term Contract

YOUR SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

These are the skills and experiences you’ll need to be great at this job:

• Strong experience providing specialist/expert HR advice and influencing others both at operational and strategic levels in organisations of a similar size and complexity
• Curious and open-minded to learn about iwoca’s approaches to people management and people strategy, and how to use your HR skills to achieve successful outcomes within this context
• Excellent stakeholder management. You are known as a true influencer, building trusted relationships with stakeholders at all levels in the business.
• Exceptional attention to detail - you care about the quality and accuracy of your work, you can avoid or find mistakes so that others don’t have to.
• Genuinely passionate about people strategy and culture. You continuously develop your skills and update on best practice by networking, reading books, listening to podcasts etc.
• You truly value feedback and evangelise the benefits of thoughtful disagreement in an organisation.
• You’ll have curiosity and interest to learn about employment law in other markets (specifically DE).
• Ideally, you have some knowledge of German employment law and process, but this isn’t essential.
• You don’t need to be able to speak German (we already have a German speaker in the team), however any German language skills are a bonus

As a Senior People Partner at iwoca, you’ll play a key role in helping to build and manage high-performing and happy teams. You’ll partner directly with specific managers / teams in order to do the following:

• You’ll be a trusted advisor to support, influence and challenge managers on topics such as performance management, identifying and supporting our high potential team members, driving engagement.
• You’ll confidently define, source & implement interventions to address areas of concern in the teams your support- and build processes and tools so that you can measure their impact ongoing.
• You’ll bring experience and empathy to help manage complex and/or sensitive employee relations issues and ensure these are responded to and resolved fairly, swiftly and in line with iwoca’s values and policies.
• You’ll engage and consult with your key stakeholders to understand their business pressures and priorities . You enable your teams to solve their challenges rather than enforcing processes or mandating solutions.
• You’ll provide 1-1 coaching directly to managers to help build their leadership capabilities

More broadly, you’ll help to shape iwoca’s overall People strategy by:

• Diagnosing issues we ought to address regarding our iwoca team and culture, and work with the rest of the People team to determine the best plan of action to address
• You have the ability to facilitate discussions around change and transformation and can identify in advance where and when change management will be needed and proactively participate in developing plans.
• Working on evaluating new benefits and policies, to help strengthen our employee value proposition and People practices
• Working with our People Experience, Talent and Ops Strategy teams to gather data and meaningful insights that help identify People issues and trends (attrition, performance, gender pay gaps, industry trends etc).

In this role, you’ll work with teams based in the UK and Germany. You’ll help ensure culture cohesion across different teams while also supporting local nuances. You’ll also get to learn about the employment law landscape and how it varies between UK and Germany.