Regional People Partner - Northern Ireland

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work–life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. We’re the first to say we do HR differently here. For a start, we work as business partners and specialists — whether that’s making sure nearly 150,000 colleagues are paid on time, or shaping a strategy that helps us attract the right people, put them in the right place, and unlock their potential. This is a fast-moving business, and our policies and rewards evolve with it. That’s why we’re as flexible as we can be about where and when you work. We’re also flexible about your future. There’s always room to move up or across, if that’s what you want. We really value different perspectives, so there’s no one opinion, no single path, and yours matters.

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

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.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holid

ay allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).