SALARY: £69,131 per annum
HOURS: 37.5 per week
LOCATION: Albert Road, and visible across all sites
Purpose of the role:
We are seeking a Head of HR to provide strategic leadership to our People function and to continuously evolve how we support colleagues, leaders, and operational teams. This is a senior role with real operational impact, responsible for ensuring that our people systems, roles, skills, and structures put colleagues at the centre and actively support effective service delivery today, while enabling the organisation to adapt and grow over time.
Working closely with operational and commercial leaders, you will lead the People function to be an effective and trusted business partner, shaping how people capability, leadership, and culture enable productivity, resilience, and performance across a complex, unionised, and customer‑facing organisation.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead the design and continuous improvement of the organisation’s workforce model, ensuring roles, structures, skills, and resourcing arrangements support operational delivery, productivity, and service resilience over time.
- Own the development and maintenance of job profiles, skills frameworks, and capability expectations, ensuring clarity of role purpose, accountability, and progression as the organisation evolves.
- Ensure employment and contractual arrangements (including TUPE readiness) are designed and applied in a way that supports flexibility, service change, and effective delivery, working closely with operational and commercial leaders.
- Oversee the development of people systems and services (including payroll and People Services), ensuring they are reliable, efficient, and deliver a positive end‑to‑end colleague experience.
- Lead the evolution of talent and recruitment systems, ensuring the organisation can attract, assess, and retain the skills and capabilities needed for both current delivery and future growth.
- Build organisational and leadership capability by enabling strong people management practice, clear accountability, and consistent application of people processes across the business.
- Enable a positive, inclusive, and performance‑led culture, using engagement insight, workforce data, and colleague feedback to inform continuous improvement.
- Provide effective, insight‑led HR business partnering and employee relations support, ensuring leaders are equipped to manage their teams confidently and issues are resolved fairly, consistently, and at pace.
- Act as a key contributor to organisational change, service transformation, and contract transition, ensuring people considerations are fully embedded in decision‑making.
Essential Skills, Knowledge & Experience
Skills
- Workforce planning, organisation design, and change leadership
- Designing scalable people systems and services
- Strong employee relations and risk‑aware decision‑making
- Data‑driven insight and commercial thinking
- Strong influencing and partnering with senior operational leaders
Knowledge
- Advanced knowledge of employment law and employment frameworks
- Strong applied knowledge of workforce productivity, resourcing and cost models
- In-depth understanding of talent, capability, & organisational development principles
- Working knowledge of TUPE, mobilisation, and service change contexts
- Strong understanding of engagement, wellbeing, and inclusive leadership practice
Experience
- CIPD Level 7 qualification (or equivalent professional qualification), or demonstrable equivalent senior‑level HR experience in a complex, operational organisation
- Designing or evolving workforce models and role architectures
- Leading people change in live service environments
- Working effectively with trade unions or employee representatives
- Supporting leaders through transformation and growth
Our Benefits:
- Annual leave package of 25 days plus 8 bank holidays.
- Employer contribution of 5% into the company pension scheme.
- Support for Mental Health, including a BUPA Employee Assistance Programme that provides support covering Mental Health, Financial and Family related topics. We also have Mental Health First Aiders across the business.
- Support for your Physical Health with our BUPA Health Cash Plan (we cover the cost of coverage for you), Cycle to Work scheme and an onsite Physiotherapist. All are free for our colleagues.
- Because we value our colleagues, we want to recruit more employees just like them, which is why we have our employee referral scheme.
- Dedicated learning and development team. We take pride in developing our colleagues and some examples of this include our In-House Driver Development Programme and internal promotions. Many of our Senior Leadership Team have developed from Operational roles, such as one of our Contract Managers who started as a Street Cleanser.
- Employee recognition ‘Stand Out Award’ and long service awards. To celebrate our colleagues wherever they are on their journey with us, we recognise and celebrate talent.
- All colleagues receive free access to our Reward Gateway discount scheme, helping you make your money go further with savings at over 900 retailers. It’s one of the ways we support smart spending and everyday wellbeing.
- We recognise that everyone is different and strive to create an environment that supports all colleagues through flexible working. We have introduced a hybrid working model where possible and actively encourage part-time working, job sharing and flexibility on hours. If this interests, you please do get in touch, and we can start a conversation.
About Bristol Waste Company:
What we do is important – we’re here to keep Bristol, and beyond, clean, and safe.
We do this for our city’s residents, workers, visitors, and businesses. Our work helps deliver Bristol’s sustainability targets in partnership with the council.
Bristol Waste’s commercial operation, where we serve businesses and organisations across the region, is also growing.
Our ambition is to provide good quality, value for money services, and we continue to deliver a social value impact worth more than £30 million every year. We want people who share our values and want to work with us to drive our business forward.
Everyone belongs:
At Bristol Waste everyone belongs – we are proud of being a truly inclusive organisation.
We give fair and equal consideration to all applications.
We encourage and welcome applications from people of all ages, genders ethnicities, nationalities, disabilities, religions or beliefs and of neuro divergence.
Important note on applying:
- Please apply as soon as possible and before 23:59 on the closing date, Monday 20th April. Sometimes we close vacancies early if we receive a high number of quality applications.
- Due to the high volume of interest, we won’t be able to receive late applications, and we are currently unable to respond to all who apply.
- If you haven’t heard from us within three weeks of the closing date, it unfortunately means you won’t be invited to interview on this occasion.
Timetable
- The vacancy is internal only and will close at 23:59 on Monday 20th April.
- Shortlisting will take place on Tuesday 21st April.
- Interviews will take place on Thursday 30th April.
Contact us:
Please contact our Recruitment Team if you have any specific questions about the position or if you require support in applying for this position:
- recruitment@bristolwastecompany.co.uk
- 0117 440 6676