Head of People Partnering (6 months FTC)

Working closely with the Exec Team and senior leaders across a number of functions, you’ll be a trusted advisor and proactive coach, guiding change, building leadership capability, growing talent, and ensuring that people considerations are at the heart of every decision.

Your ability to balance strategic thinking with operational delivery will be essential in navigating complexity, anticipating workforce needs, and driving initiatives that enable performance, growth, and transformation.

Strategic Partnership

• Collaborate closely with the Exec Team and senior leaders to gain deep insight into business goals, challenges, and opportunities and integrate people plans across the areas you partner.
• Act as a trusted advisor, providing strategic People insight and guidance, anticipating future business needs and proactively identifying people-related risks and opportunities.
• Translate business priorities into actionable people initiatives that support workforce planning, capability building, and organisational effectiveness.

Partnering and Colleague Relations

• Lead, coach, and develop a high performing People & L&D Partnering team to ensure they deliver high quality support and deliver purposeful outcomes to the relevant functions.
• Develop and implement people strategies that directly support and drive organisational performance, engagement, and long-term growth.
• Create a positive colleague relations environment where concerns are addressed and conflicts are resolved in a timely manner, in line with our policies, procedures and shared values.

• Work with the Talent team to design and implement strategic talent management programmes to attract, retain and develop talent within the business.
• Build strong succession plans in partnership with business leaders, and actively keep them alive to deliver purposeful career development opportunities and a strong ‘ready now’ pipeline that enables future growth and mitigates any talent risks.
• Drive initiatives focused on developing leadership capability and strengthening the leadership pipeline.
• Identify and address skills and capability gaps across the business through targeted learning and development initiatives.
• Champion and drive our Early Careers strategy, ensuring a seamless and engaging experience for emerging talent.
• Oversee the implementation of our Quality and Productivity processes, including objective setting, performance reviews, succession planning and performance management to build a high-performance culture. 

Colleague Engagement and Culture

• Support the development and implementation of meaningful colleague recognition programs that reward and motivate high performance in line with our shared values.
• Work with the People Insights team to support the colleague listening and survey cycle, upskilling leaders to have relevant, meaningful and ‘always on’ engagement action plans for their teams.
• Lead by example by being a visible role model for Dunelm’s shared values and leadership behaviours.

• Partner with the Exec and senior leadership to design and implement effective organisational structures that support business goals and long-term growth.
• Drive workforce planning initiatives, ensuring the right talent and capacity is in place to support current and future business needs.
• Lead people change management, ensuring smooth transitions and mitigated disruption during times of transformation.
• Champion DEI initiatives to create a diverse and inclusive workplace where we drive action to improve diversity across teams, and all colleagues feel ‘at home in our home’.
• Use available data to inform decisions, priorities and focuses in the DEI space.
• Work with the Belonging team to co-create polices and improve workplace practices, including implementing positive change with leaders and colleagues.

• Work with People Centres of Excellence to ensure efficient processes and ways of working are live and embedded across the team so we deliver the best outcomes together.
•  Utilise People data to prepare and present analysis to senior leaders on People activities, KPIs and outcomes.