Senior People Partner

The role

We're looking for a Senior People Partner to sit alongside business leaders at Fonoa and drive high performance across their teams.

As Senior People Partner at Fonoa, you'll own the business-facing People relationship for a defined set of leaders and their teams. Real partnership. You'll help managers prevent problems before they escalate, move difficult situations forward when they don't, and build the frameworks that make consistency possible as the company scales.

The role spans day-to-day partnering, performance, manager coaching, employee relations, onboarding, career development, culture, and engagement. You'll also provide People coverage for our US employees. The expectation is that you find the 'how' when others default to yes or no.

This is a senior IC role on a small, high-calibre People team, reporting to the Chief People Officer. We're looking for commercial credibility, personal gravitas, and the breadth to operate across the full scope of a People function in a fast-scaling business.

What you'll do

• Partner with business leaders. Be the named People partner for a defined set of leaders. First point of contact for people issues, performance conversations, team dynamics, and management challenges. Own the relationship, not just the transaction.
• Drive performance and accountability. Help managers set clear expectations, have difficult conversations, and act on issues before they become crises. Coach the manager through it. Don't just advise from the side.
• Own employee relations. Manage ER cases end-to-end across markets, from early intervention through to resolution. Keep things moving, keep things fair, and keep the business out of avoidable risk.
• Build the people programmes. Design and run the programmes that move the business forward: onboarding, career frameworks, manager training, culture, engagement. Make them real, not decorative.
• Cover the US & EU. Provide dedicated People partnering for Fonoa's US & EU employees, with working knowledge of US employment law and practices.
• Shape the function. Help build what the People function looks like as Fonoa scales, and operate as the partner business leaders bring their hardest problems to.

What we're looking for

• Commercial credibility and gravitas. You can hold your own with a CRO, CPO, or founder. You speak the language of the business (performance, output, growth, risk), not the language of HR policy. You've pushed back on a senior leader and can describe specifically what happened.
• High-growth experience. You've operated in a scaling company where the People function was being built rather than maintained.
• A 'how, not no' instinct. When the easy answer is yes or no, you look for the third option. You can walk through a specific example where you helped a leader reach a legitimate outcome through a route they hadn't considered.
• Performance and ER in practice. You've owned performance situations and employee relations cases end-to-end, not just advised on them. You can describe how you support the manager, keep momentum, and bring cases to resolution across multiple jurisdictions.
• Programme design from scratch. You've built at least one people programme from a blank page, not inherited and maintained one. You can describe the problem, the design, the buy-in, and what changed.
• Breadth across the People function. Meaningful work across at least two of: performance frameworks, career development, L&D, onboarding, or culture programmes. Range, not depth in one specialism.
• Strong context-switching. You can manage active situations across multiple teams without dropping things, with a clear method for triaging what's urgent, what's important, and what can wait.
• Working knowledge of US and UK/EU employment. Enough to be the first point of contact for employees and managers across markets without escalating every question to legal.

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