Location: London (Oval)

Type: Full-time, onsite

Salary: Competitive salary

👋Hi I'm Ashni, I'm the Global VP of People across the UK, US, Canada and South Africa, and I'm looking for someone to partner with me and lead our UK team. 

Today, my People Team is a global function and you’ll be taking on a high impact role in leading a UK team of 270+ people (and growing!). You’ll work closely with our Co-Founders, Slava and Oren, our Senior Leadership Team and the wider People function to make sure we have the people, leadership, structure and processes needed for the next stage of growth.

The simple version of the role is: Help us build an organisation where great people can do great work, managers genuinely manage, and our People practices scale as quickly as the business does.
This isn’t a role for someone who wants to sit on the sidelines advising from a distance. We’re looking for someone who can spot what needs to change, build the solution and make it happen.

🌍 What we’re building and why 

Here’s the challenge: UK schools spend over £2 billion a year on temporary staff. But £600m of that goes straight into the pockets of recruitment agencies, money that should be going back into classrooms and teachers’ pay. So we’re doing things differently.

Zen Educate is an online platform that gives schools instant access to fully vetted teachers and support staff. Since launching in 2017, we’ve already saved schools over £30 million, that’s gone straight back to where it matters most. We've just closed a $37m Series B (the biggest EdTech round in Europe last year!), and we’re scaling fast in the UK and the US 🚀. We are incredibly proud to be a Certified B Corporation™! It’s an exciting time to join, have a huge impact, and grow alongside us.

🌱 What the role looks like in practice

Raising the bar for managers - Great People teams cannot compensate for poor management, and a big part of this role will be helping our managers become better at leading people themselves.

• Coach leaders and managers on everything from setting clear expectations and giving feedback to navigating underperformance and having difficult conversations. 

• Supporting a manager through a challenging situation, or recognising that the same issue keeps appearing and building something that prevents it happening again.

• Make managers dependent on HR but to make them better managers.

Performance, talent and progression - As Zen grows, we need to become increasingly deliberate about maintaining our high performing team and really assessing what “great performance” looks like so that we can recognise, develop and retain it. 

• Helping us answer questions such as: Are expectations clear? Are our best people progressing? Do we know where we have capability gaps? Are managers tackling underperformance early enough?

• Partner with leadership on workforce planning and making practical decisions about people, structure and capability.

Hiring great people - The talent market is forever quickly evolving, and AI is changing both how people apply for roles and how companies assess them. We want our hiring approach to keep evolving too.

• Help build a top-of-class hiring process that allows Zen to identify great people efficiently and consistently without adding unnecessary processes. We care much more about whether our hiring produces great outcomes than whether every role follows the same traditional recruitment playbook.

Handling the difficult stuff well - Working with people is not always straightforward.

• Lead on complex employee matters including complaints, grievances, investigations, performance issues and other sensitive situations. We want someone who can bring calm judgement when things are difficult, work effectively with employment lawyers where needed, and help managers understand both what we should do and why.

• Support our Educator HR team with more complex issues involving our contractor and PAYE educators.

• A difficult employee case should not simply result in the case being closed. It should make us ask whether there is something we can improve in our policies, systems, processes or manager capability so the same issue is less likely to happen again.

Building a People function that scales - You’ll help turn People data into something genuinely useful.

• Building meaningful metrics, identifying trends and using evidence to help us understand what is working, what isn’t and where the organisation may be carrying risk.

• Own UK employment compliance, making sure we stay ahead of changes in employment law and that our policies, processes, systems and documentation continue to evolve with the business.

• Lead and develop our UK People function, setting a high bar for quality, pace and impact while helping the team scale alongside Zen. 

What's in it for you?

• Work that you want to talk about

• Competitive salary

• Ownership in the company

• 25+ days of holiday (increases with tenure)

• Life Insurance

• Health Insurance

• Electric Car Scheme 

• Cycle to Work Scheme 

Diversity and Inclusion

At Zen, we strive to build a culture of equity and inclusion, where everyone is respected, valued and appreciated for their unique traits, experiences and perspectives. We are committed to creating a safe, inclusive and equitable environment where our team can thrive, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, religion or beliefs. We value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all. 

We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives, just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool and creating an inclusive culture where people’s voices are heard and all our team can look forward to coming to work. 

We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and promoting an equitable and inclusive environment for all. We seek out diverse opinions, beliefs, and experiences because they collectively make us stronger; we’ve had former teachers, pilots, fundraisers, engineers, lawyers, marketers, social media experts and more join our team.