Senior HR Advisor

Are you an experienced HR advisor with truly generalist experience looking for an exciting role within a supportive and ambitious organisation? You believe that it is people that make great organisations. You know that finding and recruiting great people is at the heart of a world-class organisation. Diversity and equality are important to you and naturally flows through everything you do.

Our HR & OD delivery team provides accurate, high quality professional guidance and advice to managers across a range of employee relations matters – performance, grievance, disciplinary and redeployment. All of this drives your own personal development, research, networking and ability to persuade and influence others. There are eight of us within our team and we are at the very heart of Audit Scotland.

Audit Scotland is Scotland’s largest public sector auditor and independent of government. We employ more than 320 talented professionals who know that their work helps ensure the efficient delivery of public services. We believe that public money (around £57 billion a year) should be spent wisely. We audit the Scottish Government, NHS Boards, local authorities, Scottish Parliament and many more public bodies across Scotland. People respect our work, our opinions and the work of our HR&OD team in helping drive improvement.

We want to make sure Scotland makes the very best of the opportunities and that change is delivered well – transparent financial reporting and delivering value for money are key to this. Our HR&OD professionals help make this happen through the partnership, support and coaching they provide to our auditors.

There has never been a more interesting or important time to join us. We offer a rewarding place to work, a supportive and open culture and a wide range of professional development opportunities. Benefits include 42 days of annual leave including public holidays, flexible working, home working (we provide all of the digital and associated kit), competitive salary, a superb career-average pension scheme, lots of investment in your personal development and plenty of autonomy. We’re a Sunday Times Best Companies, award winning employer and regional leader across employers in Scotland.

Overall purpose of the role

As a Senior HR Advisor, you will have strong planning skills and the ability to take responsibility for managing short term projects through to delivery. When you make a promise you always keep it – you deliver on time, on budget and to high quality and are not afraid to seek feedback to improve your performance.

An effective team player and self-motivated, you will support the wider HR & OD team and work in partnership with internal stakeholders, external consultants and employee union representatives building productive relationships to aid success.

You must be capable of managing and prioritising your workload, understanding when and where to seek additional support and approval. You will be a true team player and work closely with colleagues across the business to help ensure our core service delivery is maintained to an excellent standard and key improvement programmes are well supported.

How you can help us

You’ll help make Audit Scotland a world-class public sector audit organisation by:

Delivering effective recruitment and selection campaigns in association with external consultants and internal clients. Ensure appropriate candidate management (using our in-house e-recruitment system) through to appointment and adherence to organisational policy and employment good practice. Supporting recruiting managers throughout the process.

Supporting the team with all current HR processes to support all aspects of the employee lifecycle ensuring accurate and appropriate documentation and records. This includes appointments and new employees, employment changes, leavers processing, monthly payroll variables, maternity and paternity.

Provide effective support to line management on a range of issues including employment law, health & safety and employment policies as appropriate.

Managing absence and employee relations cases as appropriate, knowing when to escalate.

Support the production and review of key HR performance indicators and regular reports (including diary entries, sickness absence, evaluating learning & development activities), to support operational management and reporting of management information. Review and benchmark statistical data in conjunction with the HR Assistant Manager.

You understand systems and processes are the foundation of a solid HR infrastructure and you have the skills and experience to produce and interrogate statistical data as required.

Lead or support on specific HR projects which occur on an annual basis, for example, graduate recruitment, gender pay gap reporting, employee health checks, renewal of Disclosure Scotland checks, drafting staff handbook policy updates, employee survey data collections and our holiday review.

Deliver a quality, flawless and efficient in-house HR service delivery function that is recognised as being superb when benchmarked with other professional services organisations and audit agencies from across the world (to ensure we deliver value for money for the UK taxpayer).

Work seamlessly with our colleagues in Communications to ensure that our Audit Scotland employer brand is synonymous with our values and our desire to be one of the very best places to work in the world of financial and performance audit.

Work together with the other great people in our HR & OD team and help us achieve our ambition for exceeding internal clients’ expectations every year – coaching colleagues and providing helpful feedback or just pitching in with help on other projects and work as and when needed.

Specific knowledge and experience

You will have proven experience of working in a generalist HR team coupled with sound experience and knowledge of HR systems and processes. A CIPD qualification would be advantageous but not essential providing you can clearly demonstrate a strong track record of success across the responsibilities listed above.

You will be confident in providing advice and guidance to all levels of the organisation on employment related matters and you must be capable of managing and prioritising your workload, understanding when and where to seek additional support and approval.

You will be proficient with Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word and Excel) and may have used SharePoint and a range of other Microsoft365 apps such as MS Teams. You will demonstrate a good standard of written English, with experience of preparing written reports or documents.

You will also have a good attention to detail and the ability to calculate employee changes to salary or allowances and undertake data analysis with Excel. This may extend to experience of providing feedback and coaching junior colleagues in the team.

You’ll bring improvement ideas and solutions for your internal clients with the ability to persuade and influence others and you may have experience or passion for diversity and inclusion improvements.

You may have experience in delivering small projects such as Graduate recruitment or system improvements from end to end.

Application Information

Interested? Next steps

Click the apply button to complete an application form. If you wish, you can also share your CV. We offer a range of benefits, please visit our careers page for more information.

Our application deadline is Sunday 16 May at midnight. We’ve reserved week commencing 24 and 31 May for interviews to take place.

Diversity and Inclusion

We value the unique perspective a diverse workforce brings to what we do. Therefore, we’re keen to increase representation in our workforce and support progression of those from minority ethnic backgrounds and other underrepresented groups. We are also a proud disability confident employer.

How we work

We employ more than 320 staff in a wide variety of roles, based at our offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, at sites across Scotland and working from home.

This isn’t your typical work from home or work from office type job. We’re flexible about working patterns and we’ve transformed how we deliver high-quality public audit. We support you to work in the ways that achieve the best results for you, your team and the business, including your physical location and how you manage your hours. Put simply, we trust you to do your job, and want you to have the ability to have a rewarding work-life balance and best support your individual circumstances, be that childcare, adult carer responsibilities or managing disabilities.

We welcome applications from across the UK. Some travel to our offices or client sites will be necessary at times, but you don’t need to live in Scotland to work for us and, depending upon your home/base location, your business travel expenses will be covered by Audit Scotland.

Next steps

Complete our on-line application and accompanying short questionnaire. We’ll get back to you shortly after the closing date and, if you’re successful, invite you to take part in our interview and selection process. Our entire workforce has been working from home since March 2020 due to Covid-19 public health measures. We have a superb digital platform that offers great connectivity so our people can work effectively from home. Our recruitment is managed virtually online by means of MS Teams and we will provide you with further details and assistance as required.