Senior HR Advisor
Department: Central Services
Employment Type: Permanent
Location: Cheltenham
Reporting To: Toni Stevens
Compensation: £40,000 - £50,000 / year
Description
The Senior HR Advisor is a trusted partner to managers across the organisation, delivering proactive, commercially focused HR support and acting as the first point of contact for people-related matters.
As a key member of the People team, you will provide expert guidance on employee relations, coach and empower managers to confidently handle day-to-day people management, and drive best practice across performance, absence management, and engagement initiatives.
This role is pivotal in reducing organisational risk, strengthening leadership capability, and enhancing the overall colleague experience. You will combine sound HR expertise with strong business insight to ensure people solutions are practical, compliant, and aligned with organisational goals.
Key Responsibilities
Manage employee relations cases end-to-end, including investigations, disciplinary, grievance and absence-related processes, ensuring timely, fair and legally compliant outcomes.
Provide day-to-day coaching and guidance to managers on people management matters, building confidence and capability in handling performance, conduct and wellbeing issues.
Proactively manage absence trends, supporting managers with early intervention, occupational health referrals and return-to-work planning to reduce risk and improve attendance outcomes.
Support the performance management cycle, including calibration activity, documentation quality and manager guidance to ensure consistency and fairness.
Deliver engagement and wellbeing initiatives in partnership with the People Team and business leaders, supporting action planning and follow-up activity.
Gather and maintain insight on talent, succession and workforce risks, providing accurate data and themes to inform workforce planning discussions.
Support operational TUPE activity, leading on delivery where appropriate, ensuring compliance and clear communication with affected colleagues.
Identify ER trends, risks and themes, escalating appropriately and recommending preventative interventions.
Contribute to policy development, continuous improvement initiatives and the enhancement of HR processes to strengthen service delivery and reduce organisational risk.
Collaborate closely with the HR Coordinator to ensure smooth case administration, accurate documentation and effective case tracking.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
Essential
Proven experience managing employee relations cases independently within a UK employment law framework.
Experience supporting organisational change initiatives, restructures or consultation processes.
Demonstrable experience supporting and delivering TUPE processes, including employee consultation, due diligence coordination and post-transfer integration activity.
Strong working knowledge of UK employment legislation and best practice.
Experience coaching and influencing managers to improve people management capability.
Demonstrable experience managing absence and supporting performance processes.
Ability to balance operational delivery with proactive relationship building.
Strong analytical skills, with the ability to identify themes and risks from people data.
Confident communicator with the ability to challenge constructively and build trust.
Organised, resilient and able to manage competing priorities effectively
Experience supporting organisational change initiatives, restructures or consultation processes.
Desirable
CIPD Level 5 qualification (or working towards) or equivalent experience.
Benefits
As well as a competitive salary, discretionary annual bonus, and a minimum 24 days of annual leave (with the option to buy more), you will also get an excellent benefits package, including flexible, hybrid working, private health insurance, life assurance, income protection, enhanced pension contributions, and occupational maternity and paternity pay.
You will also have access to company volunteering days, an Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing scheme, an employee assistance programme with retail discounts and savings, a generous employee referral scheme, regular sports and social events, and free Cheltenham bus travel.
Benefits Band 3