Founding Director of People, Culture & HR Innovation

Founding Director of People, Culture & HR Innovation

Help us fix HR today — and design what HR becomes tomorrow.

We are looking for an experienced HR leader who is ready to do something very different.

Someone who understands HR, but also sees where it has become too bureaucratic, too process-driven and too disconnected from the creativity, ambition and humanity of the people it is supposed to support.

This is not a conventional HR management role.

This is a high-stakes founding opportunity to help rebuild our HR function from the ground up — while working with a team to design an entirely new, people-first way of working that could challenge the status quo.

The opportunity

Our immediate mission is practical: clean up, strengthen and professionalise our existing HR department.

That means looking honestly at what currently exists, identifying what works, what does not, what is missing and what has become unnecessarily complicated — then putting the right structures, policies, processes, governance and people practices in place.

But that is only the beginning.

Alongside fixing today's HR function, you will help us design the blueprint for the next generation of HR: an open-source HR platform and new way of working designed around people, creativity, innovation, development, fairness, accountability and better organisational culture.

We believe HR should be more than policies, procedures and risk management.

People are not processes.

Organisations should be places where people can think, create, challenge, develop, contribute and do meaningful work — while still having strong structures, accountability and professional standards.

We want to explore what HR could look like if we designed it around that principle from the beginning.

Two connected missions

1. Fix and strengthen HR today

You will initially help us:

• Review the existing HR function, structures and practices

• Identify gaps, weaknesses, risks and unnecessary bureaucracy

• Establish appropriate HR policies, procedures and governance

• Strengthen recruitment and onboarding

• Improve employee experience and people support

• Develop better approaches to performance, learning and development

• Ensure appropriate employment practices and HR compliance

• Create systems that can scale as the organisation grows

• Help build a strong people and culture foundation

2. Help invent HR for tomorrow

At the same time, you will work with the founding team to explore and develop:

• A blueprint for a new open-source HR platform

• A people-first approach to organisational design

• New approaches to employee voice and participation

• Better models for creativity, innovation and collaboration

• New approaches to leadership and personal development

• Psychological safety and healthy organisational culture

• Fairness, accountability and transparency

• The appropriate use of technology and AI in HR

• New ways of measuring organisational health and employee experience

• A framework that other organisations could potentially adopt, adapt and build upon

The ambition is not simply to improve HR within one organisation.

It is to ask:

What would HR look like if we were brave enough to redesign it properly?

You will be joining at a stage where there is significant work to do, significant problems to solve and significant things yet to be built.

That is precisely what makes the opportunity different.

For the right person, this could become a paid founding leadership position as the organisation develops, funding is secured and the wider structure is operationalised.

We are looking for someone who sees the potential in that journey rather than simply looking for an established job description and a finished organisation to step into.

This is an opportunity to:

build something.
lead something.
invent something.
leave a legacy.

If you have spent years watching organisations operate in ways that you knew could be better — and quietly thinking “someone should really change this” — this may be your opportunity to actually be one of the people who does.

You will not be doing it alone.

You will have the opportunity to build and work alongside a founding team, bring ideas into reality, test new approaches, learn from what does and does not work, and help shape something that can grow beyond its original founders.

The legacy opportunity

We are particularly interested in people who want their work to mean something beyond another position on a CV.

The long-term ambition is to create something that can be shared, developed and potentially adopted by others.

If successful, the HR model you help create could become part of a much larger body of work — something that demonstrates that organisations can be both high-performing and deeply human.

That is the opportunity.

Not to inherit someone else's HR system.

To help invent a better one.

Who we are looking for

You may be an experienced:

• HR Director

• Head of People

• People & Culture Director

• HR Transformation Leader

• Organisational Development Leader

• Senior HR Consultant

• HR strategist or practitioner

You should have substantial practical HR experience and understand the realities of employment, governance, organisational risk and people management.

But experience alone is not enough.

We want someone who:

• Thinks critically about conventional HR

• Is comfortable challenging established thinking

• Can distinguish between necessary structure and unnecessary bureaucracy

• Is genuinely people-centred

• Understands organisational design and culture

• Can move between strategy and practical implementation

• Has an interest in innovation, technology and AI

• Is capable of building systems rather than simply operating them

• Can work collaboratively with founders and other senior leaders

• Is comfortable working in an environment where not everything has already been figured out

• Wants to create, experiment and improve — not simply maintain the status quo

Most importantly, you should want to build something.

What we can offer

This is initially a voluntary founding leadership opportunity during Phase 1, as the organisation develops its foundations, structures, funding and operating model.

However, the intention is that the right founding leaders can have the opportunity to progress into substantive paid leadership positions as the organisation grows and the relevant funding and operational capacity are secured.

This is therefore an opportunity to get involved early, have genuine influence over the direction of the organisation and potentially grow with what you help build.

You will have the opportunity to:

• Shape the HR function from an early stage

• Work directly with the founding leadership team

• Influence organisational culture from the beginning

• Help develop an original HR model

• Build a team around the work as the organisation grows

• Contribute to something with potential beyond the organisation itself

• Establish yourself as a founding leader in an emerging model of people and organisational practice

• Progress into a paid founding leadership positionh