The Senior Manager, HR Business Partners – North America leads the HRBP function across the United States and Canada, serving as both a people leader and a senior business partner to executive stakeholders. This is a player-coach role: you will manage and develop a team of HR Business Partners while personally owning partnership with one or more senior client groups.
You will translate business strategy into people strategy — shaping organizational design, talent planning, leadership capability, employee relations practice, and engagement across the region. You will act as the connective tissue between the business and the HR Centers of Excellence (Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, Talent Development, HR Operations), ensuring that regional execution is consistent, compliant, and commercially relevant.
Success in this role is measured by the quality of leadership decisions your team enables, the health of the organizations you support, and the credibility the HRBP function holds with the business.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIESStrategic Business Partnership
- Serve as the senior HR partner to designated executive leaders in the US and Canada, contributing to business planning and acting as a trusted advisor on all people matters.
- Translate business objectives into an actionable regional people agenda covering talent, structure, capability, culture, and cost.
- Use workforce data and business metrics to identify trends, diagnose root causes, and recommend interventions rather than react to symptoms.
- Provide coaching and candid counsel to senior leaders on leadership effectiveness, team dynamics, decision-making, and change.
Team Leadership and Development
- Lead, coach, and develop a team of HR Business Partners supporting client groups across North America; set clear expectations, priorities, and standards of practice.
- Build team capability in consulting skills, data fluency, employee relations judgment, and commercial understanding.
- Allocate HRBP coverage and workload across the region, balancing client demand with development opportunities for the team.
- Manage team performance, conduct regular one-to-ones and performance reviews, and build succession depth within the function.
- Model the standards of partnership, confidentiality, and professionalism expected of the function.
Talent, Organization, and Change
- Lead organizational design and workforce planning activity for client groups, including restructures, role design, spans and layers, and location strategy.
- Drive talent review, succession planning, and calibration cycles across North America; ensure clear action follows assessment.
- Partner with Talent Acquisition on critical hires, internal mobility, and leadership selection.
- Lead HR delivery on change programs — integrations, reorganizations, site openings and closures — including impact assessment, consultation, and communication planning.
Employee Relations and Compliance
- Own the standard of employee relations practice across the region; oversee complex investigations, performance management, accommodation, and separation matters.
- Ensure consistency, fairness, and defensible documentation in all ER outcomes; escalate and partner with Legal where appropriate.
- Maintain compliance with US and Canadian federal, state, and provincial employment law (including FLSA, FMLA, ADA, Title VII, state leave and pay transparency requirements, provincial employment standards, and human rights legislation).
- Review and localize HR policy for North America in partnership with Legal and global HR; drive consistent application across the region.
Performance, Engagement, and Culture
- Drive the annual performance and compensation cycles for client groups in partnership with Total Rewards, including calibration, merit, and promotion decisions.
- Interpret engagement and listening data for the region; work with leaders to convert insight into sustained action.
- Champion inclusion, wellbeing, and a consistent employee experience across US and Canadian locations.
Operational Excellence
- Partner with HR Operations to ensure accurate employee data, clean processes, and an effective service model across the region.
- Define and track HRBP metrics — attrition, time to fill, internal mobility, ER cycle time, engagement — and report on regional people performance to leadership.
- Identify and remove low-value activity from the HRBP team’s workload through process improvement, manager enablement, and self-service.
- Manage regional HR budget items within area of responsibility.
Required
- Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of progressive HR experience, including at least 5 years in an HR Business Partner or generalist role supporting senior leaders.
- Demonstrated experience partnering at the executive level, including influencing decisions you do not control.
- Working knowledge of US employment law and practice; working knowledge of Canadian employment standards and human rights legislation, or demonstrated ability to acquire it quickly.
- Proven track record leading complex employee relations matters and organizational change.
- Strong analytical capability — comfortable building a case with workforce data and presenting it to a commercial audience.
- Experience working in a matrixed, multi-site environment.
Preferred
- 2+ years of direct people management experience leading HR professionals preferred but not required.
- SHRM-SCP, SPHR, or CHRL/CHRP certification.
- Experience supporting both the US and Canada within a single regional remit.
- Experience with HRIS platforms (Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, or similar) and HR analytics tooling.
- Experience supporting organizations through M&A integration.
- Business Acumen — understands how the organization makes money and frames people decisions in those terms.
- Influence and Credibility — earns a seat at the table through judgment and delivery, not title; comfortable delivering unwelcome advice.
- Coaching and Development — raises the capability of both direct reports and the leaders they support.
- Judgment Under Ambiguity — makes sound, defensible decisions in sensitive situations with incomplete information.
- Data Fluency — interrogates workforce data, identifies the real pattern, and communicates it clearly.
- Change Leadership — plans, sequences, and lands organizational change with the human impact managed deliberately.
- Operating Discipline — runs a consistent, well-documented practice across multiple countries and client groups.
- Integrity and Discretion — holds confidence absolutely and applies standards evenly regardless of seniority.
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