Head of People and Culture UK & Ireland

WHY OATLY?

Our mission? To make it easier for people to eat better and live healthier lives without throwing the planet under the bus in the process. If that makes you want to stand up, fist-pump, and shout, “Yes!” or even just a mild “Cool, I’m into that” , then maybe you’d like to join us. (Fun fact: we were recently voted one of 2024's best places to work for a small organisation.)

WHAT WE NEED YOU TO DO

We have an exciting opportunity for a strategic, values-driven Head of People and Culture for the UK and Ireland arm of the Swedish Oat Milk company - Oatly. This role holds end-to-end accountability for shaping and delivering an exceptional employee experience, from talent planning and culture to operations and reward, ensuring that our people practices support business growth, inclusion, and purpose.

You'll combine strategic thinking with hands-on delivery, partnering closely with our leadership team and people managers to build a healthy, high-performing and human-centred organisation.

Key responsibilities:

People Strategy & Leadership:

Drive and lead the People strategy in line with business goals, acting as a key member of the UK & Ireland Core Leadership Team with a people-first mindset.

Engagement and culture:

Define and run initiatives that build on our strong, inclusive, high-performance culture rooted in our behaviours and guiding principles.

Talent Management & Development:

Own and lead workforce planning and performance management, alongside delivering learning and development programmes that support growth and succession at every level.

Reward & Recognition:

Partner with our central reward specialists to localise the reward strategy—covering salary frameworks, benefits, benchmarking, and incentives—while implementing recognition initiatives that celebrate values and performance.

Business Partnering & Change:

Act as a trusted advisor to leaders and managers on team effectiveness, structure, and leadership development, while supporting change management through clear communication, planning, and stakeholder engagement. Serve as the escalation point for employee relations, partnering with legal as needed, and build manager capability across performance, development, conflict resolution, and engagement.

Wellbeing:

Drive strategic wellbeing initiatives and infrastructure to support employee health and sustainability.

Manage our Culture and Talent Partner:

One direct report who has ownership across the employee lifecycle, including hiring, onboarding and offboarding. He also ensures our HR admin is in top shape and manages our office and facilities.

Global partner:

Work with the global People and Culture partners in our central team and in other markets, to collaborate and align the people function.

We’d love to hear from you if…

• You have a generalist HR background, with demonstrable experience leading a People/ HR function in a fast paced business.
• You can operate at a high level, but are also happy to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the day to day.
• You know how to turn a business strategy into a people strategy into initiatives that actually work (and stick), with an ability to think on short-term and long-term time horizons.
• Company culture is your jam—you’ve got experience building it, shaped it, and kept it thriving, even when things get messy.
• You’re a trusted advisor to leaders, with the kind of calm, practical people-wisdom and expertise they’ll listen to.
• You’re a pro at (and enjoy) wearing multiple hats, so you can go from coaching a colleague to a performance management meeting to running a workshop to leading a social to updating a spreadsheet… and repeat.
• Change doesn’t scare you—you’ve helped teams navigate it with clarity, empathy, and solid planning.
• You have expertise in talent management, employee development, and performance management in dynamic environments.
• You’re a pro in showing and balancing care and candour in your messaging.
• Whilst we don’t mandate office use, we need someone who’s able to commute to Farringdon and be present in the office.

Bonus points for…

• Experience working in/ with Ireland.
• Any people focused qualifications, such as a CIPD.

Finally, we hope that you share our values and have a great interest to carry out our mission in order to make the world a little bit better. 

Another bulleted list felt redundant, so we made this page talking about all the benefits we offer to sweeten the deal working with us before you apply – if you're curious, check out this fancy page right here .

YOUR APPLICATION

Phew! Well done if you’ve got this far. We’re glad we’ve still got your attention because we’ve got one last super important point to make.

As you can probably tell, we’re a norm-breaking company. For us, diversity and differences are an obvious asset. We know that amazing candidates can sometimes be put off applying for a job unless they can tick every box, and that makes us really sad. So please trust your gut and pop in your application if it’s feeling right. If you have the curiosity, passion, and collaborative spirit, let’s do this together! It will be fun!

Last day of application: 28th of July.

We treat all candidates equally: If you are interested, please apply through our application system - any correspondence should come from there. This will ensure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone!

THE OATLY WAY

Oatly is a company built on the idea of change. Our mission is to make it easy for people to eat better and live healthier lives without recklessly taxing the planet’s resources. It's why we come to work every day. With head office in Malmö and production in Sweden, Netherlands, China and the US, our products are available in almost 30 countries across Europe, North America, and Asia.

Love Oatly XOXO

#LI-TA1