Head of People

**Reports To**: CEO
**Location**: Head Office in Köln, Germany with additionally offices in London, Canada and Costa Rica. Remote working is also negotiable.

The role of Head of People and Culture directly supports the business by helping to drive success through designing and implementing best people practices across our teams internationally. We strive to ensure our teams are highly engaged and motivated, supporting leadership and managers to attract and retain great talent.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FROM YOU:
A committed and dedicated ‘people person’ who has experience of working in dynamic culture and is able to flex around change and knows what great looks like across the employee life cycle, from onboarding, employee relations, reward, performance management to exit.

You will have worked in the information industry or a start-up business and comfortable being a coach and advisor to managers, supporting HR issues and shaping out policies and procedures to ensure the business continues to flourish.

Ultimately the right person for this role will be like us - customer focused team players who are innovative, ambitious, trustworthy and always striving for excellence.
- Strong experience within a Senior People/Head of People role within a startup or scaleup
- You're a bonafide People generalist with experience across the full employee lifecycle. You know what great looks like from a People and Culture perspective as well as how to create scalable practises that will support and enable our team and company growth
- Experience having led a People project from start to finish, weighted in a design thinking approach. This isn't just a ‘HR' role - you'll need to design and build ‘better-then-best-practise' initiatives from scratch that are specific to our business and culture
- You're great at figuring out what needs to be done, prioritising and getting stuck in. We have a lot to do so you'll need to have the ability to balance a bias to action on some of the chunkier strategic projects and keeping on top of the day to day work
- You take an empathetic, human-first as well as data driven approach to People and Culture and decision making. You're also not afraid to challenge or push back on practises or ideas that don't consider these areas
- Especially before you've grown your own team, you'll be the only person on the ground within People and Culture, so you'll need to be happy to work independently but also love working cross functionally with other individuals or teams (including the Leadership team
- You have excellent communication skills - written, verbal and to a group. You also understand that internal communications done right is essential for a scaling business and know how to ensure it happens

KEY RESONSIBILITIES:

- Using HR data to identify any areas for improvement and develop interventions for change, such as retention, performance management
- Design and execute regular employee engagement activities to enhance our culture and build a strong purpose within the company, showing clear deliverable improvements and high levels of communication to the wider business
- Manage and guide the HR advisor to ensure fairness and consistency, reflect employment legislation and best practice and the desire to build a strong employee value proposition
- Showcase our employer brand both internally and externally and look at innovative ways to attract and retain great talent benchmarking our reward and benefits offering
- Build key internal and external customer relationships and have a readiness to learn about the sector and build extensive knowledge of current market conditions and trends
- Own the day-to-day management of general HR issues and providing an exceptional service to our people in a timely and efficient manner ensuring that best practice and employment law is followed with any employment relations issues
- Have the gravitas to positively challenge processes and be actively involved in decision-making using sound reasoning and delivering proactive solutions to issues
- Strive to build and develop a high performing team capable of achieving the company's long-term objectives by supporting the delivery of clear career pathways building a strong working environment
- Responsible for forecasting and budgeting in relation to salary management including salary benchmarking and managing the annual pay review process
- Implement a HR information system and employee files to ensure the relevant data and information is stored accurately, producing meaningful HR information on a monthly basis to provide insight into trends, shaping future HR activities and enabling HR processes to become more streamlined and efficient

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE:

- Excellent communication skills (fluency in written and spoken English, German ,French or Spanish also desirable
- Highly proficient in EXCEL
- Able to navigate and implement a HR System
- Able to demonstrate HR process improvements and building strong cult