Senior HRBP (Tech, Product + Ops)

Job Title

Job Description

Who are we?

Hello, we are IG Group. We are a FTSE 100 listed fintech that has been in the business of helping people trade the world’s financial markets since 1974. Today we run mobile, web and desktop platforms used by more than a million clients across 18 countries, and we do it with the help of around 2,500 people.
 

We are also in the middle of a serious transformation. Under our CEO we are sharpening our product, building a high performance culture, and creating the operational scale to grow.
 

A word about our People team

Thanks to recent changes to our business units, we’ve gone back to first principles with our partnering function. Our business partners partner: that is their craft and their whole job. The deep specialist work in Reward, Talent, Learning and Development, and Employee Relations sits with our Centre of Excellence, and partners draw on that expertise rather than trying to do all of it themselves.
 

What that gives you is a role with focus. You get to know a part of the business properly, build relationships that mean something, and spend your time on the work that actually shifts performance. It also means you are never on your own, because you have specialists behind you.

This is the senior step on our partnering ladder for Tech, Product and Ops. You will hold the largest and most senior client group in the area, and you will lead a small team of two HR Business Partners, based in Kraków and Bangalore, who partner the layers of the business below you. You will be judged on the quality of your own partnering as much as on the strength and consistency of the team you lead.
 

Who will you partner with?

Functions or business areas: Product, Technology and Operations for IG Consumer

Leadership team you support: The Chief Product Officer, the CTO - IG Consumer and the Operations Director, and their leadership teams

Approximate population: c. 500, across three layers of the team

Locations covered: London (base), with population across the UK, Kraków (Poland) and Bangalore (India)
 

What is the role?

You will be the senior People partner to the leadership team above. This is a role for someone who has done the fundamentals of partnering well and is ready for the harder, more ambiguous work: the restructure that hasn’t started yet, the senior case that needs careful handling, the leadership team that is not yet performing as a team.
 

You will be close to the most senior leaders in your area and you will need to be genuinely useful to them. That means understanding the commercial picture, having a view, and being willing to hold your position when it would be easier not to. It also means being the person who makes things happen, not just the person who advises.
 

What will you do?

Partner senior leaders

• Be the trusted People partner to your leadership team, in the room for the decisions that matter rather than told about them afterwards.
• Coach senior leaders on their own leadership, their team dynamics and the calls they find hardest. Challenge them well.
• Hold a position under pressure. Balance what the business wants with what is right for IG and for our people, and be respected for how you do it.
• Manage competing priorities across several senior stakeholders without losing pace or losing anyone’s trust.
• Lead, coach and develop your two HR Business Partners in Kraków and Bangalore, setting the standard for partnering across all three layers of the team and ensuring consistent quality wherever colleagues sit.
   

Lead organisation design and change

• Lead restructures and reorganisations in your area from first conversation to final implementation, compliantly and with care for the people affected.
• Advise leaders on operating model, structure, spans, layers, levels and job design before decisions are made, so structure follows strategy rather than personalities.
• Build the case for change, including the numbers, and take leaders and colleagues with you through it.
   

Own the hardest employee relations work

• Take the most sensitive and complex cases in your area, including senior level and cross border matters, working closely with our Employee Relations specialists and Legal.
• Be accountable for the quality and consistency of ER practice across your area, and for making sure risk is surfaced early.
• Use what you see across cases to fix causes. Feed the patterns back so policy and manager capability improve.
   

Set the bar on culture and performance

• Own the engagement and culture agenda for a large or complex population, and hold leaders accountable for their own scores rather than carrying it for them.
• Set the standard for what good performance management looks like in your area. Push leaders to differentiate properly, recognise the best and act on the rest.
• Make sure your area’s strongest people are known, developed and kept, and that succession risk in critical roles is understood.
   

Make the wider People function better

• Shape how group and divisional programmes land across more than your own patch, and feed what you see on the ground back into the Centre of Excellence so that what they design works.
• Raise the bar in the team through mentoring, role modelling and improving how we partner. Be someone the more junior partners learn from, without needing a management title to do it.
• Work well across our locations, and help the team understand where local context should change our approach.
   

Bring insight, not just information

• Use people, cost and commercial data to bring your leaders insight they had not asked for.
• Build and defend a business case, in the language the business uses.
• Watch the external market and regulatory picture so you can see what is coming rather than react to it.
   

What does success look like?

• Your leadership team trusts you and involves you early.
• Change in your area is delivered on time, compliantly, and with colleagues understanding why.
• The hardest cases are handled well and quietly, and nothing significant surprises us.
• Engagement and performance in your area improve, and leaders are empowered to own that improvement themselves.
• Managers and more junior partners around you are visibly better because you are there.
   

What will you need?

• Significant HR business partnering experience, including partnering leaders at or close to executive level.
• Experience supporting Product + Tech teams, familiarity with relevant methodologies, ceremonies and what good looks like. 
• A clear track record leading organisational change and design.
• Deep employee relations capability and the judgement to handle senior, sensitive and cross-border cases (with support).
• Strong employment law knowledge for at least one of the markets we operate in, and the appetite to get up to speed on the others.
• Commercial credibility. You can hold your own in a business conversation and connect people decisions to cost, risk and delivery.
• The confidence to challenge senior leaders constructively and to hold a position when it matters.
• Experience coaching or developing others; prior line management experience is an advantage given this role leads two HR Business Partners.
• Experience working across locations and cultures, or a clear ability to do it well.
• You work in line with our performance principles: Lead and Inspire, Think Big, Champion the Client, Deliver at Pace and Raise the Bar.
   

Helpful but not essential: experience in financial services, fintech or another regulated industry, and experience working in a matrix model alongside a Centre of Excellence.
 

Where this role can take you

This role sits at Grade 3B on our People Partnering Progression Framework. The usual next step is People Lead at Grade 3A, where you would keep a client group and also lead a small team of HR Business Partners, and from there Head of People at Grade 2B, owning the people agenda for a division or a group of functions.
 

One more thing

We believe diversity is vital to our success. It fuels creativity, drives innovation and sets us up to win globally. We are committed to building teams with a range of perspectives and skills, so we encourage applications from people with all kinds of backgrounds and experiences. If you need any adjustments to the process, just tell us and we will sort it.

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