Director, HR Business Partners

The Director, HR Business Partners leads the team of HR business partners who provide strategic support to leaders across every function at Flexential. The Director sets the standard for how business partnership is practiced here: close enough to the business to understand what drives results, candid enough to challenge a leader's thinking, and disciplined enough to keep decisions consistent, fair, and defensible. The role carries direct partnership responsibility for a portfolio of senior leaders while coaching a small team to do the same across the rest of the organization.

The HR business partner team is the front door to People & Culture. Leaders and team members should be able to bring any people question to a business partner and get either an answer or a fast, warm handoff to the right expertise in HRIS, data and analytics, learning and development, compensation and benefits, or talent acquisition. The Director owns that experience end to end, making sure the door is easy to find, quick to open, and never a dead end.

As a member of the People & Culture leadership team, the Director works in close collaboration with every P&C function to ensure the programs and initiatives the team drives are the ones that help the Flexential team reach its business and growth goals.

The Director reports to the Chief People Officer and leads a small team of HR business partners supporting leaders across all functions and locations. The role sits on the People & Culture leadership team and partners peer to peer with the leaders of total rewards and HR operations, talent acquisition, learning and development, and people analytics. Client groups may include corporate functions, sales, operations, and engineering, with assignments adjusted as the business grows.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Business Partnership

Partner with senior leaders on the people implications of their business plans: how the team is structured, where capability gaps sit, what the next twelve months of hiring and development need to look like, and which decisions carry organizational risk.

Bring workforce data and outside perspective into planning conversations early, rather than reacting after a decision is made.

Translate business strategy into a practical people agenda for each client group and hold both sides accountable to it.

Team Leadership

Hire, coach, and develop the HR business partner team, setting clear expectations for consultative skill, judgment, and responsiveness.

Balance portfolio assignments so coverage is equitable and no leader is left without support.

Create the routines that make a small team feel bigger: shared case review, consistent documentation, calibrated approaches to recurring situations, and deliberate development plans for each partner.

Model the standard of service the team is expected to deliver.

Performance Management

Own how performance management is practiced in the field.

Coach managers through goal setting, ongoing feedback, review cycles, calibration, and the harder conversations that follow, including performance improvement plans and separations.

Work with learning and development to build manager capability rather than absorbing the work on managers' behalf, so that the quality of performance conversations rises across the organization over time.

Employee Relations

Oversee employee relations across the organization, ensuring investigations are timely, thorough, well documented, and consistent in outcome.

Advise leaders on risk, precedent, and legal exposure, escalating to the Chief People Officer and to counsel when the situation warrants.

Track themes across cases and convert them into systemic fixes such as policy changes, manager training, or structural adjustments, so recurring issues are addressed at the source.

Career and Talent Planning

Lead talent reviews, succession planning, and career pathing for supported client groups.

Make sure every leadership team has a current view of its bench strength, its critical roles, its flight risks, and its high-potential team members, along with a plan for each.

Partner with learning and development on development experiences and with talent acquisition on where to build versus buy, and ensure internal candidates are genuinely considered for open roles.

Retention and Engagement

Use engagement survey results, turnover data, exit and stay interviews, and direct listening to identify where the team member experience is falling short, then work with leaders on specific, time-bound actions.

Partner with total rewards on pay equity and retention risk, and with the broader P&C team on the moments that shape retention most, including onboarding, promotion, manager transitions, and the first year in role.

Front Door to P&C

Ensure leaders and team members can access People & Culture expertise efficiently. The business partner is the single point of entry: resolving what can be resolved directly, routing quickly to HRIS, data and analytics, learning and development, compensation and benefits, or talent acquisition when specialist depth is needed, and staying accountable for the outcome through to resolution.

Establish and monitor service standards for responsiveness and follow-through, and make the path to help obvious to every leader.

P&C Team Leadership and Collaboration

Contribute to the strategy, priorities, and annual plan of the People & Culture function as a member of its leadership team.

Bring the voice of the business into P&C decision making, testing proposed programs against what leaders and team members actually need and what the organization can absorb.

Collaborate with every P&C function on design and rollout, and serve as an advocate for the function's work in the field so initiatives land as intended and drive the business and growth goals they were built to support.

Core Competencies

The following competencies describe how the role is expected to be performed and form the basis for how performance in the role will be assessed:

Business Acumen: Understands how Flexential makes money, what pressures each client group faces, and how people decisions affect those outcomes.

Strategic Influence: Earns a seat in planning conversations and shapes decisions before they are made, without relying on positional authority.

Coaching and Candor: Tells leaders what they need to hear, builds their capability rather than doing the work for them, and stays in the relationship afterward.

Judgment and Risk Management: Weighs fairness, precedent, and legal exposure quickly, and knows when to decide and when to escalate.

Team Leadership: Develops business partners into trusted advisors and creates the consistency that lets a small team cover a large organization.

Data Fluency: Works comfortably with workforce data and turns it into a clear recommendation rather than a report.

Collaboration Across P&C: Partners with every P&C function so programs are designed with the field in mind and land well when they reach leaders.

Measures of Success

Within the first year, success in this role is visible in the following ways:

Leaders describe their business partner as one of the first calls they make when facing a people decision, not a step they take after the fact.

Performance review and calibration cycles are completed on time, with noticeably higher quality of documentation and feedback.

Employee relations matters are resolved within agreed timeframes, with consistent outcomes and clean documentation.

Every leadership team supported has a current talent review and succession plan for its critical roles.

Regrettable attrition and engagement measures move in the intended direction in the client groups supported.

Requests routed into People & Culture reach the right expertise quickly and close out without the requester having to chase them.

Qualificati