Mars
HR Associate Experience Lead - Northern Europe
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Job Description
At Royal Canin, our purpose is to make a better world for pets. We're a business built on science, passion and genuine belief that what we do changes lives - for cats, dogs, and the people who love them. It's why our people care beyond their job description, why belonging here feels different, and why Royal Canin attracts people who want to be part of something that is meaningful.
We're ambitious, we're growing, and we're transforming - and North Europe is at the heart of that. We're building the number one Associate Experience across six countries, embedding AI into how we work, and treating the people agenda like a product that gets better every single day. This is not a traditional HR role. It's for someone who thrives on continuous improvement, acts like a business leader, and cares deeply about people.
We're looking for a HR Associate Experience Lead, based in the UK, to partner with our HR Director and own the end-to-end associate experience across North Europe. The cluster is a complex market - fast growing, legislatively demanding, and full of opportunity. You'll be the HR heartbeat while connecting into and shaping the broader cluster agenda.
If you're commercially curious as much as people-curious, hungry to drive continuous improvement, quick to build relationships in diverse and complex environments, and someone who genuinely thrives on getting things done - this might be the role you've been waiting for.
What will be your key responsibilities?
- Own the Associate Experience
- Own the end-to-end associate experience across North Europe - from the moment someone accepts an offer to the moment they leave. As a designer, an improver, and an owner.
- Treat every touchpoint - onboarding, performance, development, engagement, recognition, offboarding - as a product to be continuously improved, not a process to be administered. Use data to find the friction, AI tools to remove it, and your relationships with line managers to make the improvement stick.
- Partner with and coach line managers to lead their teams with confidence, empathy, and consistency, ensuring people policies are applied fairly and effectively.
- Know the business as well as you know the people
- Be deeply connected to what's happening in the business - the category, the competitors, the retail and veterinary ecosystem, the numbers that matter.
- Use organisational health data to make a difference - turning retention trends, engagement signals and capability gaps into targeted plans with real outcomes – measured, tracked and course-corrected.
- Lead change
- Lead the people workstream on transformation programmes, build change plans, and make sure what gets designed at the centre of expertise (CoE) lands in six different markets.
- Bring a working knowledge of employment legislation across the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland - not as a compliance function, but as a commercial advantage.
- Use digital to work differently – and bring others with you
- Pro-actively use digital & AI tools to improve how the P&O function works - finding smarter ways to analyse data, surface insights, personalise the associate experience, and remove the manual work that gets in the way of the work that matters.
- Be curious enough to experiment, brave enough to try things that haven't been done before, and bring line managers and associates with you on the journey.
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Essential:
- Proven progressive HR experience, with real ownership of recurring programmes.
- A product or continuous-improvement mindset: you spot where something's underperforming and improve it.
- Digitally savvy and genuinely comfortable with data - you use it to track organisational health and inform decisions.
- Comfortable building and running simple tracking and planning systems.
- Experience translating centrally-designed programmes into local execution, ideally across multiple countries.
- Sound working knowledge of employment legislation across multiple countries, confidently applied in both casework and change or transformation contexts.
Preferred experience:
- Experience in a program or project management capacity, alongside HR/P&O experience.
- Experience leading or contributing to organisational transformation or change programmes.
- Experience working across multiple countries or a multi-site cluster.
What can you expect from Mars?
- Work with diverse talented Associates, all guided by The Five Principles.
- Join a purpose driven company, where we’re striving to build the world we want tomorrow, today.
- A strong focus on learning and development support from day one, including access to our in-house Mars University.
- An industry competitive salary and benefits package, including company bonus.
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