People Partner

People Partner - Retail
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits Location: London Store Support Centre - Field Based and Home, London, EC1M 6HA Contract type: Permanent Business area: Group HR Closing date: 11 November 2025 Requisition ID:

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. That's whether we're making sure that nearly 180,000 colleagues are paid on time, or that our strategy is helping us attract the right people, put them in the right place, and unlock their talent. This is a fast-moving business and our policies and rewards keep up too. 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 is important. What's certain is that you'll be joining one of the happiest, most engaged teams in the business.

This is a regionally based role which is typically around 60% travel & 40% remote. Covering the London Regions.

Why join us

You will partner with our Regional Stores Directors as a trusted, visible advisor and business partner, supporting the execution and delivery of people plans aligned with Retail and People divisional goals. You will be a conduit into our Centres of Excellence, ensuring the correct expertise is engaged to solve business problems.

The role will drive our culture, enable performance, coach managers, and deliver a tangible return on investment by building supermarket colleague capability, maximising capacity, and cost efficiency to deliver customer outcomes and shareholder value.

What you'll do

You'll be a true People Partner to our Regional Stores Directors. You'll spend time understanding where the opportunities are and how you can drive priorities and outputs.

You will work collaboratively with the cross-functional teams and Centres of Excellence, developing and delivering strategic regional or divisional people plans that address specific functional people challenges. Your responsibilities will involve mobilising and delivering against these plans, driving a high-performance culture through coaching and influencing leaders, executing and embedding business change initiatives, and fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment.

Additionally, you will analyse people data to inform decision-making, track progress against targets and measures, and actively contribute to driving positive metrics related to engagement, talent, performance, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Your role will be essential in driving business performance and ensuring that the organisation is equipped with the right capabilities to succeed.

You'll likely spend 3-4 days per week in stores around your region, seeing how any changes or initiatives have landed, spending time with your Regional Stores Director, supporting new Store Managers on their development or assisting areas lacking in support.

Who you are

You are a highly experienced and strategic People/HR Business Partner with a proven track record in partnering with senior leaders and stakeholders working within in fast-paced and complex commercial organisations. With your expertise in creating and delivering people plans in collaboration with Centres of Excellence, you have strong influencing and relationship-building skills. Your talent management experience, coupled with your ability to enable and drive business change and transformation, adds value to the organisation. As a data-driven decision-maker, you excel in analysing and drawing insights from data to inform strategic decision-making. With your deep understanding of organisational design and effectiveness, you contribute to shaping effective business partnerships.

You'll be curious, proactive and engaging, while not shying away from difficult situations. You'll understand that the Retail world is fast-paced & what this means to ensure effective delivery.

Strengths you need to demonstrate

Being a Change Agent is not just around change initiatives like restructures or business change, but cultural or behavioural change amongst leaders. Be curious, adaptable and innovative. Using data and business insight to support your decisions on approach and measuring the success of changes implemented.

Commercial Acumen is all about knowing the commercial levers of the business and how its people can deliver them. You'll use savvy commercial decision making to have a direct impact on the businesses outcomes and ensuring decisions you're making add value to the customer. You'll be close to the market and understand how we can stay ahead in an ever-changing market.

Collaboration & Influence is all around you, within all large businesses there are lots of teams focusing on different things and how you stay connected with what's going on and how you can work with them to use their expertise is key. Have a very agile mindset, comfortable with ambiguity and happy to fail fast. Utilising all the different leadership styles to change your approach depending on your audience, enabling you to effectively influence.

Essential Criteria

• Proven track record as a People / HR Business Partner in fast-paced, complex, commercial organisations
• Experience of creating and delivering people plans in partnerships with Centres of Excellence, leading delivery through cross functional teams
• Strong influencing, partnering and relationship building skills, working with senior leaders and stakeholders across the business to build trusted relationships
• Talent management experience
• Experience enabling and delivering business significant business change / transformation
• Strong data skills, able to identify / analyse and draw insight from data to help inform decision making
• Organisational design / effectiveness experience in the context of a business partnering role

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 holiday 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 for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).

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