Senior HR Business Partner

An exciting opportunity for a Senior HR Business Partner!

Who are we?

Howden is a leading global engineering business with focus on providing mission critical air and gas handling products and services to our clients, helping them to increase their environmental and operational efficiencies. We recognise the value of people and truly believe that by working together, aligned to a common purpose, we all have the opportunity to grow, learn and make a difference.

Our products and services have made a valuable difference for our clients for the past 100+ years, and we are now looking for a Senior HR Business Partner (0.8 FTE) to support our 3 entities in Belgium and who will support our company in making a valuable difference in the century to come! The position is located in Zwijndrecht, Belgium, and is part of the HR team Benelux. This is a unique opportunity to work with a highly motivated team to capture the growth opportunities in our markets. Join us in this exciting journey!

What To Expect

The position is an all-round Senior HR Business Partner role, which will support the businesses in Belgium and potentially the Benelux region in all HR domains. In this role, you understand the business priorities and you translate the business strategy into relevant and impactful local HR projects and actions. You are the functional lead or ‘captain’ of the HR team located in Belgium and will be working closely with the Head of HR – Benelux in translating regional, European or Global HR initiatives to local practice. You are the direct sparring partner of the local business leaders when it comes to the core HR domains, and you challenge and support the local business leaders in driving change and support growth.

This role is dynamic, offers a lot of variety and direct contact with people at all levels in our organizations in Belgium and internationally. As the role also includes operational responsibilities, you directly influence the employee’s experience during the employee life cycle within the companies by providing exceptional support and advice to managers, running a variety of operational HR processes, supporting and leading process improvements in HR and by working together with a professional HR team that is having fun while making a difference every day. The HR team works closely with the business and plays a key role in realizing our growth ambition so having a direct impact is guaranteed!

What more you will do?

• You have a clear understanding of the way current and future challenges affect people side of the organization and you use this to provide effective advice to key stakeholders. 
• You lead and support a variety of HR processes like recruitment, talent management, wellbeing, employee engagement, onboarding, reward, and employee relations;
• You provide solicited and unsolicited advice to our people leaders and management on HR topics and initiate local projects that support the business growth ambition.
• You provide 1st line advice to employees and people leaders on a variety of topics like social security, company policies, collective labor agreement and visa processes.
• You lead the daily 10-minute HR team meeting to provide a platform to the HR team to share good news to celebrate success, discuss the top-3 priorities for the day and flag issues where each team member needs help from other team members so we work together as a team;
• You pro-actively share and ask for best practices to learn from your colleagues within the HR team Benelux and/or HR team Europe.
• You work together with HR team members based in the Benelux and globally on HR projects around a variety of HR topics.
• You ensure reliability, validity and completeness of the HR data in the various systems.
• You implement robust processes within the department to reduce waste, increase effectiveness and to provide excellent HR support to our businesses.
  
  
  

What Will You Bring

• A Bachelor degree in Human Resource Management.
• A minimum of 5 years of experience in HR and a minimum of 2 years as a Business Partner role in an international matrix organization.
• Experience in being the functional lead in a HR team or in HR projects.
• Ambition to further develop within the HR Europe team.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Experience in working with ERP systems and MS Office applications.
• Generalist-level knowledge of labor law, immigration law and payroll.
• Experience in the continuous improvement of processes.
• Fluent Dutch and English language skills, both verbal and in writing. French language skills are a plus.
• Your personality is pro-active, solution oriented, and you can have a healthy debate. You are transparent, flexible, you think in terms of processes, and you have a hands-on and no-nonsense mentality. We search for a team player who is constructive critical, assertive, well organized, who has excellent communication skills and someone who questions the status quo but also provides and supports implementation of alternatives.
  
  
  

What Will You Get In Return

We offer an interesting, challenging, dynamic and fun position within a professional, international organization with freedom to act, improve processes and the opportunity to work with a variety of stakeholders. We offer a Hybrid working policy and see wellbeing of our employees as key to our business success. As we consider talent management as key to the success of our organization, we offer opportunities for personal and professional development. Potential future positions could be within other Howden locations or vertical move within the HR team internationally.