Why join us

As a Regional People Partner, you will play a strategically critical role in shaping and delivering the people agenda across your region. You will work closely with senior leaders as a trusted advisor, ensuring our people plans directly support business priorities, regional challenges, and long-term organisational goals. This role is central to driving culture, building capability, and influencing the behaviours and mindsets that enable high performance.

You will be instrumental in connecting operational realities with strategic people ambitions - translating insights from our stores into meaningful interventions that improve colleague experience and business outcomes. Working with the wider People function and Centres of Expertise, you will ensure that people strategies are executed consistently and embedded deeply within the business.

You will spend majority of your time in stores, building relationships, understanding how initiatives are landing and ensuring that people activity is implemented consistently, effectively and with the right level of impact.

What you'll do

In this strategically focused role, you will partner with senior regional leaders to shape the direction of people activity and ensure it directly supports operational and organisational priorities. You will use data, insight and your understanding of the business to diagnose challenges, identify opportunities and design people interventions that strengthen capability and drive performance. You will lead the delivery of all people cycles across your region - performance, reward, talent and succession, ensuring each activity is simple, accessible and aligned to the long-term needs of the business.

You will also provide strategic leadership to a team of Store People Partners, setting clear expectations, enabling their development and ensuring they are equipped to deliver high-quality, consistent people support across the region. You will provide coaching, direction and regular feedback, helping them navigate complex people issues and strengthening their capability so they can support stores with pace and confidence. Through your leadership, you will create a cohesive, high-performing People Partnering community that delivers impactful interventions and provides a consistent colleague and leader experience.

You will play a central role in delivering transformation and change, creating clear, pragmatic plans that help leaders navigate new ways of working and embed cultural and behavioural shifts. You will ensure that change lands effectively by staying close to the operation, engaging leaders at every stage and using colleague feedback to refine and improve delivery. You will influence strategic decision-making by providing insight-led recommendations, advising leaders on organisational capability and helping them translate strategy into practical actions that improve team performance and colleague experience.

You will coach and develop leaders, support talent growth, and strengthen succession pipelines that reflect the future needs of the organisation. You will maintain strong relationships with colleagues, leaders and union representatives, ensuring the colleague voice is heard and reflected in how people activity is shaped and delivered. You will champion continuous improvement, share learning and drive consistency across your region, ensuring people activity is delivered effectively and aligns with Sainsbury’s long-term priorities.

Who you are

You are an experienced and highly strategic People/HR Business Partner with a strong track record of shaping and delivering people agendas in fast paced, complex commercial environments. You bring experience leading and developing People Partners or HR professionals, creating clarity, building capability and enabling high performance across your team. You are confident setting direction, coaching others, and ensuring consistent delivery across multiple sites and stakeholders.

You have the ability to think long-term while acting with pace, connecting people activity to organisational strategy and ensuring interventions have meaningful business impact. You build trust quickly, influence effectively at all levels and bring strong commercial awareness to your recommendations. You use data and insight to shape decisions, diagnose root causes and target interventions, and you are comfortable navigating ambiguity while maintaining a calm and credible presence.

Essential Criteria

• A proven track record as a senior People/HR Business Partner within fast paced, complex, commercial organisations, demonstrating the ability to shape and deliver strategic people agendas that drive long term business performance.

• Significant experience designing and executing people plans that translate organisational strategy into practical, high impact activity across multiple sites and stakeholder groups.

• Strong influencing and leadership capability, with the confidence to partner with senior leaders, challenge constructively, and build trusted, productive relationships that shape decision making and drive cultural and behavioural change.

• Deep expertise in talent management, succession planning and capability development, with the ability to identify future workforce needs and build strong, diverse pipelines that support organisational growth.

• Demonstrated experience leading or enabling complex organisational change and transformation, ensuring that people related changes are well-planned, communicated clearly, and embedded effectively.

• Strong analytical and data led decision-making skills, with the ability to interpret people metrics, diagnose root causes, identify strategic opportunities and measure the impact of interventions.

• Experience in organisational design and effectiveness, using insight and business understanding to shape structures, roles and ways of working that support operational performance and long-term capability.

• High levels of learning agility, curiosity and adaptability, with the resilience to operate in a dynamic environment and maintain focus on long term strategic outcomes while delivering at pace.

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