Director of People Partnering

About OneAdvanced 

At OneAdvanced, we are in the middle of a bold evolution; moving from a traditional SaaS organisation into a platform-first, agentic AI and data-led business. 

This transformation isn’t just about technology, it’s about building a business that is simpler, faster, and smarter. That means optimising the performance of the 2,000+ colleagues we already have, scaling growth and innovation, and creating an environment where everyone is empowered to innovate and deliver exceptional outcomes. 

Why This Role Exists 

We are looking for a Director of People Partnering who will raise the game of our organisation; owning our end-to-end talent strategy execution and transforming the People partnering team into a strategic growth enabler. 

This is not about incremental HR work. This is about: 

• Simplifying organisational complexity so we can move at speed. 

• Unlocking the potential of our existing workforce to increase innovation and efficiencies and execute our growth strategy. 

• Embedding a platform and AI-first culture that considers how roles and processes change in an AI-first culture and drives both productivity and innovation. 

• Turning People partnering into a commercial lever - ensuring data-led and commercially aligned decisions so every talent, engagement, and performance initiative moves the business forward. 

• Driving our talent strategy execution – ensuring seamless end-to-end thinking around talent levers including performance, upskilling, talent acquisition and mobility. 

You will lead a lean, high-impact People Partnering and Advisory team, work shoulder-to-shoulder with the Executive team, CPO, and wider leadership, and use data to build an organisation that surfaces true organisational insight, delivers material performance and experience uplift. 

Why this role is unique:

This is not just about HR. This is a chance to design the company and partnering team of the future, and then help bring it to life. You’ll have a direct line to the CPO and Executive team, significant influence on business strategy, and the opportunity to create a workforce model that is market leading and a competitive advantage for OneAdvanced.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Partnering 

• Act as a trusted advisor to the executive team, using insight, data and challenge to shape organisational priorities and outcomes. 

• Build commercial clarity around people initiatives- every intervention should drive measurable impact on growth, profitability, or customer outcomes. 

• Use analytics to focus effort on the highest-impact initiatives and track ROI on people investments.  

Organisation Design & Simplification 

• Lead efforts to reduce unnecessary complexity, optimise spans of control, and create agile structures that enable faster decision-making. 

• Ensure the organisation has the right structures, operating models, decision-making and information flows to maximise speed, accountability, collaboration and outcomes 

• Review the organisation to understand how roles and operating models need to change in an AI world, and drive the talent strategy and OD work to transition and embedding of new ways of working, structures, roles and skills. 

Performance & Productivity 

• Reimagine performance management and frameworks to focus on outcomes, accountability, and commercial alignment. 

• Embed our transition to a skills-based organisation, ensuring our leadership teams and People function are utilising insights to close skills gaps and build and reward the skills needed for the future. Determine the skills, capabilities, and workforce mix we need for the future. Drive the shift from static skills data to dynamic capability orchestration. 

• Work with our data analytics team to determine drivers of individual and team performance, and implement changes to replicate success, increase overall organisational performance, and reduce ramp up time for new starters in a role. 

• Partner with leaders to remove barriers to productivity, measure output effectively, and unlock discretionary effort across teams. 

• Build a high performing people advisory function that coaches managers and individuals on performance, provides advisory services and content to support employees and managers on key People-related topics and upcoming changes in employment law/learnings from recent cases, manages any necessary restructuring (including TUPE), and handles employee relations matters (from simple up to Tribunal processes). 

Engagement & Culture 

• Strengthen colleague engagement by creating a compelling employee experience, ensuring colleagues are energised, aligned, and excited by the impact they can have on our organisational strategy, customers and society. 

• Build mechanisms to listen, act, and continuously improve, closing the loop between feedback and action. 

Change & Transformation Leadership 

• Be a visible and credible leader of change across the organisation, inspiring confidence across the business. 

• Build leaders’ and Business Partners’ capability to lead organisational change, embedded behavioural, structural and process changes, and bring their teams with them. 

Activating HR Levers Through Collaboration 

A critical part of this role is orchestrating the right HR levers, in partnership with the Operations & Reward, Talent Acquisition, L&D and People Experience Centres of Excellence - to shape behaviour and deliver business outcomes. This includes: 

• People Operations – Partnering with People Ops team to ensure processes and employee experiences are seamless, systems of records are accurate, and insights/commercial needs are surfaced/reviewed to ensure continuous improvement of policies, processes, tools and analytics. 

• Reward & Recognition – Partnering with Reward to design incentive schemes that reinforce the behaviours we need for successful strategy execution (e.g., performance, collaboration, innovation, customer and enterprise value creation). 

• Performance Management – Working with Talent Acquisition and L&D teams to ensure the right upskilling, assessment and sourcing is in place to reduce skills gaps and improve individual, team and organisational performance. 

• Capability Building – Collaborating with Talent Acquisition, Employer Brand and L&D to identify future-critical skills (AI, data literacy, platform thinking) and build them at pace where it matters. 

• Workforce Planning & Succession – Using workforce analytics and partnering with Talent Acquisition and L&D to ensure the right people are in the right roles at the right time, with strong succession pipelines and readiness for critical positions. 

• Engagement & Experience – Working with the People Experience team to leverage engagement insights, target interventions, and craft a compelling narrative that builds belief and energy around the transformation. 

• Leadership Enablement – Equipping leaders, in collaboration with Talent and L&D, to lead change, coach effectively, and drive performance through their teams. 

• Financial Partnering – Build strong partnerships between Finance and People Business Partners to partner with the organisational leaders to ensure the company is well governed and decisions contribute to the commercial success and balance any necessary constraints. Embed the squad model of Finance Business Partner, People Business Partner, Talent Acquisition lead, People Advisor and L&D for each department and collectively. 

• Supporting the CPO – in driving the people strategy across the business, and building an innovative, data-driven, commercially savvy, and world-class People function 

This role is about aligning these levers in a coordinated, data-driven way to shift the organisation from today’s complexity to a high-performing, platform-first future. 

About You

You are a strategic, commercially minded people leader who thrives on complexity, change, and transformation. You’re as comfortable in the boardroom as you are rolling up your sleeves, and you see HR not as a support function, but as a force multiplier for business performance. 

Experience & Skills: 

• Director / Head of People Partnering / CPO or Head of HR background, ideally with experience in scaling or transforming technology and/or private equity backed organisations. 

• Proven track record leading change, pivoting business models, or driving organisational simplification. 

• Deep understanding of organisational design, workforce planning, engagement, and performance levers. 

• Commercial acumen- can clearly connect people decisions to financial and business outcomes. Comfortable with workforce modelling, productivity metrics, and ROI driven decision making 

• Experience leveraging data and AI to drive insight and action. 

• Exceptional stakeholder management and influencing skills. 

Personal Attributes: 

• Bold, strategic, data led, and execution-focused. 

• Systems thinking – able to understand how ecosystems work, what levers to pull to maximise impact, and able to see and solve for interdependencies across functions, teams, and processes. 

• Comfortable challenging the status quo and leading through ambiguity. 

• Curious, innovative, and excited by the future of work and building something truly world-class. 

• Comfortable leading through ambiguity, bringing people on board with the vision, and visibly leading change across teams, including those not in the role’s direct hierarchical control. 

• Grit, resilience, able to handle a fast pace of change, able to navigate/lead through ambiguity, and rolling up sleeves where needed 

• Passionate about helping people and businesses perform at their best. 

What Success Looks Like in 12 Months:

• The organisation is more agile, more innovative, easier to navigate, and set up for success for significant growth and enterprise value creation, with a clearly defined future-state operating model and the right plans and buy-in in place to embed this 

• We understand the key drivers for performance and engagement, and our engagement and performance frameworks are delivering measurable uplift in productivity and discretionary effort. 

• Leaders see the People function as a true business partner in driving customer results and commercial value. 

• Clear understanding of how roles will change in an AI world, with aligned upskilling, acquisition and agentic plans across all functions. 

• AI-enabled tools and data-driven insights are embedded into everyday decision-making. 
• The organisation is able to scale without a direct dependency on headcount growth.
  
  

Wellbeing focused – Our people are our greatest assets, and ensuring everyone feels their best self to come to work is integral

• Annual Leave – 26 days of annual leave, plus public holidays and the ability to buy additional days
• Employee Assistance Programme – Free advice, support, and confidential counselling available 24/7 through Care First

Personal Growth - Regardless of where you are at in your career, we’re committed to enabling your growth personally and professionally

• Development Programmes – From Future Managers to Leadership Training, our development programmes help you get where you need to go
• Performance Bonus – Our Group-wide bonus scheme enables you to reap the rewards of your success

Financial wellbeing - We understand as well as your mental wellbeing, your financial wellbeing is really important

• Pension Scheme – Our plan with Scottish Widows offers 5% matched contribution by the company
• Income protection insurance – Providing you with support and assistance when you need it most

Recognition – Highlighting and rewarding the great work our people do

• Performance & Talent – Our own technology platform that allows you to get real-time feedback, conversations and goals to help you become your best self

Making a Difference – we provide opportunities to help our people make a difference to the causes they care about

• MatchIt! – Fundraise for a cause close to your heart and OneAdvanced will match part of the funding
• Volunteering Time – Our volunteering leave scheme allows you to use your time to help those who need it
• Pennies from Heaven – donate the pennies from your pay check to help make a difference without lifting a finger