People Lead

Location: London (Oval)

Type: Full-time, onsite

Salary: Competitive salary

Hi I'm Ashni, I'm the Global VP of People across the UK, US, Canada and South Africa, and I'm looking for someone to partner with me and lead our UK team.

Today, my People Team is a global function and you’ll be taking on a high impact role in supporting a UK team of 270+ people (and growing!) and a global team of over 600. You’ll work closely with our Co-Founders, Slava and Oren, our Senior Leadership Team and the wider People function to make sure we have the people, leadership, structure and processes needed for the next stage of growth

The simple version of the role is: Help us build an organisation where great people can do great work, managers genuinely manage, and our People practices scale as quickly as the business does.
This isn’t a role for someone who wants to sit on the sidelines advising from a distance. We’re looking for someone who can spot what needs to change, build the solution and make it happen.

What we’re building and why

Schools in the UK and US spend over £12bn a year on agency staff, and £3.6bn of that goes straight into the pockets of recruitment agencies. That’s why we’ve built an alternative.

Zen is an all-in-one digital platform that gives schools full control over how they find, vet, and manage temporary educators. Think “tech startup,” but solving a painfully human, operational, and systemic issue in education staffing. Our platform is built to be scalable and intuitive, designed in close collaboration with schools and educators to fit seamlessly into existing school workflows. School leaders can search, book, and manage staff in real time, while gaining full visibility and control over their spend and compliance. We are incredibly proud that our approach to helping Schools and Educators has led to us becoming a Certified B Corporation™.

We’ve had tremendous success and are currently experiencing a period of exceptional growth. We’re looking for a seasoned operator to come in, roll-up their sleeves, and get their hands dirty working closely with senior leaders across the business.

What we're looking for

You’ll have a demonstrated record of driving exceptional results in People domains or subdomains. This likely will be in either a high-growth startup or other performance obsessed organisation.

Some of the traits that usually correlate with success in this role:

• Relentless drive to deliver tangible outcomes

• Endless curiosity

• Hold a wildly high performance standard for themselves and those around them

• Systems level thinker adept at driving clarity from ambiguity

• Boundless resilience for dealing with the tricky parts of the People tradecraft

What your first 6-12 months might look like

You’ll be a player coach assuming a day 1 line management for a team of 5 individuals across the US and UK. No two days are the same and you could be getting stuck into things like:

• Raising the bar for managers - Great People teams cannot compensate for poor management. You’ll coach leaders and managers on everything from setting clear expectations and giving feedback to navigating underperformance and having difficult conversations
• Performance, talent and progression - As Zen grows, we need to become increasingly deliberate about maintaining our high performing team and really assessing what “great performance” looks like so that we can recognise, develop and retain it. You’ll help us answer questions : Are expectations clear? Are our best people progressing? Do we know where we have capability gaps? Are managers tackling underperformance early enough?
• Hiring great people - The talent market is forever quickly evolving, and AI is changing both how people apply for roles and how companies assess them. We want our hiring approach to keep evolving too.You’ll help build a world-class hiring process that allows Zen to identify great people efficiently and consistently.
• Handle the difficult stuff - Working with people is not always straightforward. You’ll lead on complex employee matters including complaints, grievances, investigations, performance issues and other sensitive situations. We want someone who can bring calm judgement when things are difficult, work effectively with employment lawyers where needed, and help managers understand both what we should do and why.
  A difficult employee case should not simply result in the case being closed. It should make us ask whether there is something we can improve in our policies, systems, processes or manager capability so the same issue is less likely to happen again.
• Building a people function that scales - You'll help turn People data into something genuinely useful. You will build meaningful metrics, identifying trends and using evidence to help us understand what is working, what isn't, and where the organisation may be carrying risk.

What you might like or dislike

Every place makes tradeoffs based on what they value and where they are in their journey. Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them.

How we work.

We’re passionate about the problem we’re trying to solve. We seek colleagues that share our passion for improving education because, frankly, it’s a really hard problem. You have to be equally interested in what we do as a company as you are in the People domain.

Expectations of what a People team does

In a lot of organisations a people team is a support function, there to help when you need it. At Zen, it is the engine room of the organisation and we believe if we get people right, everything else will follow. But getting people right isn’t doing what everyone else does nor is it waiting for direction from the business. We expect People Leaders to drive the direction of the business and roll up their sleeves and get stuck in on issues big and small.

Compensation

Fair but not flashy. We’re still an early stage company so can’t beat out companies with deep pockets (yet). You’re here because you understand it’s about the long term - both in what you can learn and the slope of your pay progression here when you take on more and more. We reward exceptional performance.

What's in it for you?

• Work that you want to talk about

• Competitive salary

• Ownership in the company

• 25+ days of holiday (increases with tenure)

• Life Insurance

• Health Insurance

• Electric Car Scheme

• Cycle to Work Scheme

Diversity and Inclusion

At Zen, we strive to build a culture of equity and inclusion, where everyone is respected, valued and appreciated for their unique traits, experiences and perspectives. We are committed to creating a safe, inclusive and equitable environment where our team can thrive, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, religion or beliefs. We value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all.

We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives, just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool and creating an inclusive culture where people’s voices are heard and all our team can look forward to coming to work.

We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and promoting an equitable and inclusive environment for all. We seek out diverse opinions, beliefs, and experiences because they collectively make us stronger; we’ve had former teachers, pilots, fundraisers, engineers, lawyers, marketers, social media experts and more join our team.