People and Culture Director - Manufacturing & Engineering

People and Culture Director

Build the strategic people function this business has never had

£80,000 to £90,000, flexed to £95,000 for the right person, plus bonus and benefits

Hampshire | Site based

Commutable within around one hour from Salisbury, Amesbury, Tidworth, Whitchurch, Stockbridge, Winchester, Basingstoke, Newbury, Romsey, Devizes, Marlborough, Southampton and Swindon.

Some HR leaders maintain a strategy. This role is for someone who wants to build one, from the boardroom to the shop floor, in a business that is growing fast enough to need you and stable enough to give you the runway to do it properly.

Our client is a well-established, privately owned, high-growth engineering and manufacturing business in Hampshire, part of a wider investment-backed group. It has grown its workforce by more than a third in the last three years, invested heavily in advanced manufacturing capability, and holds a substantial, guaranteed order book with genuine ambition to scale considerably further over the next twelve months. What it has never had is a strategic people voice at the top table. That is the opportunity in front of you.

You will sit on the senior leadership team from day one, as a genuine peer to the site Managing Director and General Manager, not an adviser on the sidelines. You will own organisational design and workforce planning tied directly to a live growth plan, take full ownership of the reward and pay framework including benchmarking and the annual pay review, build succession planning and leadership development where little currently exists, and be trusted to coach, mentor and build the confidence of senior leaders as the business scales. You will be commercially fluent enough to own a budget, interrogate the people cost base, and advise the leadership team on the workforce implications of commercial decisions as naturally as you advise on policy.

This is a hands-on, visible, every-day-on-site role. You will be as comfortable interrogating engagement, turnover and absence data as you are walking the floor, coaching a first-line manager through a difficult conversation, or leading a boardroom discussion on succession. You will have a genuine point of view on AI adoption, digitalisation and technology-enabled process transformation, and can speak to the commercial benefit this brings to the whole business, not only to HR. You will lead transformation and cultural change deliberately, not accidentally, in a business that is genuinely ready for it and has the appetite at the very top to back you.

The person we want is confident without being abrasive, diplomatic without being passive, and collaborative without losing the ability to hold a difficult line when it matters. You will be commercially astute, analytically minded, and comfortable being the person in the room who brings the evidence rather than the opinion. You will have built genuine influence with senior operational leaders from a standing start, ideally in a private equity or investment-backed business going through growth or change, and you will know what it feels like to be the only strategic HR voice in a room full of engineers, and to earn their respect anyway.

You will talk about your impact in numbers, not generalisations: cost, output, utilisation, retention, and the return on an investment in people, because that is the language this business runs on. You will be ready to defend those numbers under genuine, searching challenge from a hands-on ownership team, and you will be able to speak credibly to your whole career, not just the last twelve months of it, because real strategic ownership is built over years, not manufactured for an interview.

This will suit you if you are currently the most senior HR or people leader in a high-growth SME and are ready for your next challenge, or if you currently lead people strategy for an autonomous division or business unit within a larger corporate group, genuinely close to the operational leadership rather than sitting centrally within a large HR function. If you have built a grounding in a larger corporate environment before moving into a smaller, faster-growing business, that combination of rigour and hands-on delivery is a genuine advantage here, not just a nice-to-have. Either way, you will already be used to being hands-on because the business needs you to be, not because no one else is available.

To be direct about what will not work: this is not the right move for someone whose experience has been built entirely inside a large, layered corporate HR function, who has always had a team of specialists to lean on, who is looking for a remote or largely hybrid role, or whose evidence of success stops at absence levels and training completion rather than commercial outcomes. This role is on site, visible, and hands-on by design, and it will suit someone who finds that exciting rather than restrictive.

You will be CIPD Level 7 qualified, Chartered MCIPD or Chartered Fellow, or able to demonstrate clearly equivalent standing through track record. Experience in electronics, precision engineering, aerospace, defence or a similarly complex, regulated manufacturing environment would be a genuine advantage, though candidates from other high-reliability or technically complex sectors are very welcome. What matters far more than sector pedigree is your ability to build trust fast, operate with real gravitas, and combine strategic thinking with a genuine willingness to be in the business every day.

The package includes a base salary of £80,000 to £90,000, flexed to circa £95,000 for an outstanding candidate, a discretionary profit-share bonus scheme tied to business performance, pension and further benefits to be confirmed. This search is being run on a strictly confidential basis. If this sounds like the challenge you have been waiting for, get in touch for an initial conversation before submitting your CV