Senior HR Business Partner

ThoughtWorks is not your average global IT consulting company; so don’t expect to find average people working here. As a Senior Talent Partner, you are going to help us stay this way. As a software service and consulting firm, people really are our business. Your job will be to create innovative talent management solutions and execute those solutions for the business. 

RESPONSIBILITIES

The Senior Talent Partner position is responsible for assessing and anticipating people-related needs and driving strategic and scalable solutions to support Markets, Service Lines &  Functions. The position serves as a consultant to leadership on employee development, engagement opportunities, and challenges. A successful Senior Talent Partner acts as a coach, manager, connector and change agent. In order to be successful in this role, you must be able to create order out of chaos, be flexible and adaptable in your approach, ok with imperfection, and able to balance the need for structure and guidelines with the need to be creative and progressive.

It is preferred that the Senior Talent Partner role is based in San Francisco, CA with the ability to travel up to 25% of the time (when travel is deemed safe in the future). 

Reporting into the North America Talent Development Lead, the 4 primary responsibilities for this position will include:

1. Strategic Partner
• Create a vision for talent strategy in the market. Design/tailor Market-specific initiatives that better support the business.
• Develop the next generation of leaders. 
• Systemically resolve recurring pain points across the organization.
• Influence/shape regional strategic talent initiatives.
• Assess implications to people of strategic options.
• Represent market talent interests within business.
2. Employee Mediator
• Managing competing personalities and conflict between individuals and teams.
• Account leadership team triage.
• Respond to organizational changes.
3. Responsive Support
• First line of Employee Relations issues.
• Just in time manager and individual support.
• Survey action plans & coordination.
• Escalation point and employee advocacy.
4. Operations Manager
• Performance Management Process.
• Pay Review Process.
• Keep Markets Informed on People Initiatives.
• Track, Observe & Report People Trends.
• Execute Regional Change Plan.
• Employee Information “Systems” Management.
• Training Orchestration & Facilitation.
• Continuous process improvement.
• Survey administration.
• Recruiting & Staffing support and  partnership.

A successful candidate demonstrates the following attributes:

• Adaptable & Flexible
• Ability to positively adjust to new and changing conditions
• Ability to multi-task
• Extremely comfortable working in environments that are culturally diverse, fast-paced, always changing, and light on structure/process.
• Collaborative
  • Ability to solve complex, often ambiguous issues. In our experience, this is because you’re intuitively collaborative.  
• Communicative & Influential
  • Stakeholder management experience and confidence to challenge, influence, and persuade after gathering an appropriate level of context and data to support.
  • Ability to coach a diverse population of leaders using various coaching techniques
  • Ability to influence through a suite of knock-your-socks off communication vehicles (written, verbal, presentations, facilitation, etc) You build rapport with all sorts of people.
• Change agent
  • Enable and promote change to happen
• Positive attitude
  • Sense of urgency, thrive in ambiguity, resourceful, resilient
  • Can accept feedback and admit when you’ve made a mistake  
  • Ability to make tough and sometimes unpopular decisions
• Results-oriented
  • Incredibly strong organization, follow-through, time and knowledge management skills. 
  • Driven to create outcomes
• Problem solver
  • Ability to solve complex, often ambiguous issues, in creative ways. In our experience, this is because you’re knowledgeable of key business drivers, an expert in your craft, and intuitively collaborative. 
• Driver/Initiator
  • Takes initiative to get things done, doesn't need to be told what to do
• Strong business acumen
  • Keen and quick to understand and deal with business situations in a manner that will lead to a good outcome, able to balance people and business needs appropriately

BACKGROUND

• Knowledgeable of US employment law and expert in employee relations best practices. Can handle risky situations well.
• A knack for talent management and loads of experience:
• Leading employees through performance management issues
• Coaching Leaders & Executives
• Creating strategic Succession Plans and Leadership Pipelines
• Using data analytics to present trends and patterns in the business
• Design and executing change programs
• Experience working on and supporting distributed teams and individuals.
  • Bachelor’s degree in a people or organization design-related field; or a foreign equivalent with 8-10 years of talent management experience, preferably in a large (10,000+ employees) people-centric, professional services environment

A few important things to know: