HR Business Partner

About CIFF

The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is an independent philanthropic organisation with offices in Addis Ababa, Beijing, London, Nairobi, and New Delhi. CIFF works with a wide range of partners seeking to transform and empower the lives of poor and vulnerable children and adolescents in developing countries, with the ultimate goal of solving seemingly intractable challenges to ensure all children and adolescents have the chance to survive and thrive.

CIFF aims to play a catalytic role as a funder and influencer to deliver urgent and systemic change at scale. Areas of work include empowering girls and boys to control their sexual and reproductive health to avoid unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion and HIV/AIDS; improving children and mothers’ health and nutrition; preventing low birthweight babies; eliminating deaths from severe acute malnutrition, nested within a more integrated approach to childhood development; and deworming efforts to break transmission for good. CIFF’s child protection work focuses on ending child labour and sexual exploitation by enabling an environment that reduces vulnerability of communities and increases protection of children. The organisation’s climate portfolio is driven by a vision of a climate-safe future for today’s children and future generations that also bear the benefits of cleaner air, energy security and sustainable jobs.

We are privileged, as a financially independent philanthropy, to be able to work in challenging areas that others can’t, and we often elect to work on what can be controversial issues that others won’t. For example, CIFF is pro-choice with respect to women’s reproductive rights along with the prioritisation of access to reproductive information and to contraceptive choices. It is imperative to the CIFF family, therefore, that prospective candidates are aware of the issues we work on and embrace all our programmatic work with fully open minds to the huge number of ways in which we seek to empower young lives.

Job Title: HR Business Partner

Reporting Into: Executive Director , People with a dotted reporting line into E.D ( Africa)

Main purpose of the role:

As one of the three HR Business Partners in the HR team, the purpose of this role is to deliver a first-class HR service to a small client base of two /three sector teams by taking the lead on and managing all elements of a generalist HR role for their designated areas, at a strategic level, whilst ensuring effective delivery of the day to day operational agenda.

The HR Business Partners act as change agents working closely with the senior leaders and their teams to deliver and embed the People Strategy, upskilling people managers to enable the delivery of CIFF’s strategic goals and contributing more broadly to the philanthropic sector and strategic grantees by leading the way with best in class HR practices. They work at both a strategic and operational level, ensuring a diversity lens across all HR activities with responsibility for building organisational and people capability through their excellent understanding of the foundation and the people challenges CIFF faces.

The HR team:

Working alongside the Senior HR Business Partner with an L&D specialism based in London and another HR Business Partner based in London, plus the Head of HR Operations, there will be strong administrative support from two HR Advisors (each with their own internal specialism in internal communications or recruitment) and a HR Administrator.   These three roles report into the Head of HR Operations. The Global HR Facilities Manager is also a key member of the team, leading on working environment, health and well being and the advanced workplace strategy. Strong specialist support is also provided in the team on systems scoping, recruitment and systems training.

Position Responsibilities

HR Business Partnering

• Form and maintain excellent working relationships with the Africa leadership team and other dedicated sector leads and team members to understand ongoing work, targets and gaps in capability
• Work with the Africa leadership team and other dedicated sector leads to ensure that the people strategy is implemented and adapted based on business requirements
• Proactively work to promote, influence and support high performance through leadership & talent, HR processes and other initiatives
• Champion the development of an inclusive, diversity-driven culture, ensuring values are upheld and support the delivery of the strategic agenda.
• Build management team expertise and execution around people management practice across the business.
• Manage all HR activity on behalf of the relevant business area including pay and performance review, reporting & analysis
• Maintain a good knowledge of employment law supporting in informing policy and/or process updates
• Pro-actively use data, metrics and evidence (including insights from Office Vibe) to inform and drive decision making and change across their business areas
• Coach and provide feedback to key stakeholders to help improve business efficiency.
• Jointly responsible with all team members under the leadership of the ED, People for a strong financial and commercial lens across all HR activities and supplier management.

Employee Relations

• Ensure that people management issues of change and growth are managed and develop workforce plans to ensure the right organizational design
• Deliver practical day to day HR policy and practice and advice that fits the business and is not ‘over engineered’.
• Lead on all employee relations activity in their client groups, supporting and advising investigation and hearing leads on appropriate processes for disciplinary, grievance, or change management processes
• Work with the Head of HR Operations to ensure an effective and efficient HR service across CIFF.

Recruitment & Selection

• Lead on the recruitment and selection process for their client groups ensuring a best practice end to end process, using the enhanced and rigorous recruitment process and psychometric tools (in which all HR BPs will be qualified) and keeping headhunter spend to a minimum.
• Support hiring managers with the design of job descriptions, hiring timelines and advertising outlets.
• Support in panel interviews, leading final selection decisions and making offers to candidates.
• Work with the HR Advisor, Resourcing to ensure:

a)      Design of job descriptions, hiring timelines and advertising outlets

b)      Appropriate advertising, screening and information sharing to make sure candidates are            well informed throughout recruitment processes

c)      All relevant paperwork relating to the recruitment process is maintained in an appropriate filing system.

• Conduct and provide feedback to panel members and candidates on psychometric assessments.

Reward

• Support the annual pay review cycle, contributing to development of the pay review proposals and supporting processes and accountable for the pay review cycle in their sectors
• Support people managers in their client sectors through all reward processes acting as confidential advisors and experts to ensure CIFF’s approach to reward is applied consistently and fairly across the foundation
• Retain a strong awareness of pay across sector teams identifying changes.
• Working with the Head of HR Operations, identify areas of employment law change or requirements to inform reward policy and / or process updates

Learning and Development

• Work with the ED People and the HR BPs in creating a coaching culture through the roll out of coaching skills across the foundation and working with ET and Directors to ensure they are embedded and sustained
• Undertake the annual training needs analysis that informs annual L&D plans at an organisational, team and individual level for sector areas, ensuring follow through on all L&D needs and continuous monitoring and review
• Support the Senior HR BP (L&D) in developing and embedding a first-class L&D strategy and coaching culture through the roll out of coaching skills across the foundation.

Projects

• Take the lead on key new HR initiatives and projects (EDI, metrics, OD, talent management) and act as a support to the ED, People and ED Africa as required.
• Provide cover and support for the absences for other HR Business Partners.

The Talented Individual

Desired Qualifications & Experience

• Significant and demonstrable experience of business partnering acting as a key strategic partner in all areas of HR and implementing organizational business strategies from a people perspective
• Excellent knowledge and competency in the fundamentals of HR – Reward, Recruitment & Selection, L&D, Employee Relations – preferably with a strong grounding in the private sector
• International HR experience working within a global organisation is highly diserable
• Excellent up to date knowledge of employment law and best practice.
• Experience of using HR Information Systems.
• Outstanding communication skills, both oral and written, influencing and negotiation skills
• Strong interpersonal skills with an excellent team work ethic.
• Highest levels of judgment and professional integrity.
• Knowledge and considerable use of psychometric testing activity and feedback.
• Educated to degree level or equivalent.
• CIPD qualified/ Equivalent advance level qualification in HR
• Knowledge of localised HR/Employment Laws across Africa would be beneficial

Please attach a covering letter with your C.V upload attachment. Applications without covering letters will not be considered for this position.