Senior People Partner
Hometree Group · United Kingdom · remote
Hometree Group · People Department
Salary: £65,000 + bonus
Role type: Permanent, full-time
Location: Remote, south of England based, with quarterly travel to Cornwall and Kent (see Location & Travel below)
Reporting to: Head of People Partnering
About HometreeFounded in 2015, Hometree has become one of the fastest-growing challengers in the UK home services market. We span home cover that protects the essential systems in the home, renewable installations like solar, batteries and heat pumps, and the financing that makes them affordable. Together, we help homeowners look after their homes and move to greener, lower-carbon living.
Our installer businesses are where a big part of that promise gets delivered. They are established, well-regarded local companies with their own brands, their own reputations and their own way of doing things, now part of a larger, private equity backed Group. That combination, local businesses with real identity, inside a Group with investment behind it, is exactly what makes this role interesting.
We're also going through the biggest step change in our history. By acquiring OVO Energy's Home Services division, including the trusted CORGI HomePlan and HomeHeat brands, we're becoming one of the UK's leading home services groups, with fresh investment to fuel our next phase of growth.
Key Achievements🏆 UK's third-largest home cover provider: our latest acquisition makes us the third-largest provider of home cover in the UK.
🏆 7 Acquisitions: we've expanded our operations by acquiring key companies across financing (Hometree Finance, formerly Bewarm), home cover (OVO Home Services, CORGI HomePlan and Your Repair) and energy services (Geowarmth, The Little Green Energy Company, CORGI HomeHeat, IMS and GreenGen).
🏆 400k Homes Covered: we cover over four hundred thousand homes across the UK.
🏆 550+ Employees: we have over 550 passionate employees transforming the industry across the Group, one home at a time.
The RoleYou'll be the senior People Partner for Installs: around 100 colleagues across three parts of the division, our southern-based installer businesses in Cornwall and Kent, each with its own brand and local reputation; our central Installs team in London; and our remote CORGI HomeHeat boiler installation team, dispersed across the country.
The installer businesses are entrepreneurial companies that have joined our Group, and part of the job is helping them keep what makes them distinctive while getting real value from the scale, investment and support that now sits around them. You'll be the first point of contact for installer management and a trusted advisor to the Director of Operations and Director of Commercial who run the division, working directly with both office and field-based teams. You'll sit on the Senior Management team for Installs alongside the Chief Commercial Officer, the Director of Operations, the Director of Commercial and other senior stakeholders, contributing as a member of that team rather than only as its people adviser.
Much of the job is translation: making the case for where a Group approach genuinely adds value, and making sure our frameworks are shaped by what actually works for an installer and an engineer on a roof. It's an autonomous role, you'll own your populations, build your own plans and make your own calls, with escalation the exception rather than the rhythm of the job and because we're a lean team, we'd like someone with a generalist streak who will get stuck in when the centre is stretched.
Responsibilities• First point of contact for installer management: Be the person MDs, managers and employees call on first, before something becomes a problem, not after. Be a sounding board on the conversations that are hardest to get right.
• Partner the division's leadership: Sit on the Installs Senior Management team and work hand in glove with the Director of Operations and Director of Commercial, keeping people risk and opportunity visible on their agenda and staying aligned on what matters commercially.
• Build local People plans: Own a People plan for each of your populations, built around that population's actual challenges rather than a cascaded Group template, with outcomes the MD recognises as commercially useful.
• Own employee relations end to end: Run the full range of ER across a dispersed, field-based population, conduct, grievance, capability, performance, absence, and incidents that happen in customers' homes, with the judgement to know what needs a conversation and what needs a process.
• Bridge Group and local: Be clear with leaders on where a consistent Group approach is necessary and what it is worth to their business. Equally, represent installer reality back into Group so frameworks are designed with it built in.
• Partner your People peers: Work closely with the Head of People Operations, Head of Reward and Head of Talent Acquisition so that policy, pay bands, hiring process and performance frameworks work for local office based talent and field-based populations, not just a head office one.
• Build manager capability: Many of our managers have come up through the trade into leadership. Invest in their confidence and capability so more is handled well, and handled early.
• Retention and attrition: Own the retention agenda for a workforce where replacing a qualified engineer is expensive and slow. Understand why people leave, act on it early, and work with managers to make the changes stick.
• Talent, succession and key-person risk: Know who the critical people are in each business, where the risk sits, including at leadership level and make sure there is a plan rather than an assumption.
• Workforce planning: Support leaders on resourcing, capacity and skills planning in businesses where demand is volatile and installation capacity is often the constraint on revenue.
• Reward in local labour markets: Partner the Head of Reward on pay, bonus and incentive decisions that hold up in Cornwall and Kent, where competition for a qualified engineer is intensely local, while staying defensible across the Group.
• Health, wellbeing and absence: Own physical, field-based workforce occupational health, long-term and musculoskeletal absence, return to work, welfare after incidents, and mental health, which matters enormously in our industry and is too often left unsaid.
• Change: Support the people side of change as the Group grows and matures, including the integration of acquired businesses and bringing terms and ways of working together, done properly and with care.
• People data: Use attrition, absence, engagement and performance data to spot risk early in populations small enough that a handful of leavers is a trend.
• Get stuck in: Pick up more operational people activity when the central team is stretched, because we're a small team, and because your population still needs it done well.
What we're looking forEssential• Senior partnering experience: Significant experience as a People Partner or HR Business Partner at a senior level, owning a population and its leadership relationships without needing cover.
• Field-based workforce experience: You've supported engineers, installers, technicians or trades, from installations, construction, M&E, facilities, utilities, logistics or commercial manufacturing. You know that partnering a deskless, dispersed workforce is a different job from partnering an office.
• Autonomous and self-directed: You can hold your own with experienced, commercially-minded leaders who will rightly test your thinking, and land a difficult message without needing backup in the room. Escalation is the exception, not the rule.
• At home in both worlds: You know how to work with a close-knit business where culture and brand are personal, and you've also worked in larger, more structured organisations. You can represent both perspectives credibly without becoming the voice of only one.
• Entrepreneurial environments: Yo