Head Human Resources/HR Director
JD Group
Total years of experience :13 years, 5 Months
JD GROUP Jul 2002-Aug 2013
A division of Steinhoff International, JD Group operates across Africa. During my tenure within the Group and in addition to the position detailed below, I also held the positions of Organizational Effectiveness and Change Lead and HR Executive/HR Business Partner for the Hi Fi Corporation Retail Chain.
Head Human Resources/HR Business Partner
• Effectively lead and manage HR Team
• Developed an integrated HR strategy and operating plan to support the achievement of business goals.
• Designed process and policies to standardize and ensure the business talent pipeline needs for the short medium and long-term needs are met. This included, centralizing recruitment to optimize efficiencies and reduce employment costs, graduate programs and internship’s, succession planning forums/talent pools, career pathing, psychometric analysis and development programs for high potentials.
• Developed and implemented strategies, policies, procedures and processes for learning and development, supported by an integrated performance management system.
• Vast experience in change management in multinational organization, with multiple business units and operating divisions.
• Migrated the HR function from a decentralized model to a centralized services delivery model
• Project Managed HR projects and supported business projects across with HR and change management programs. This included SAP implementation, HR, Merchandise, Financial Services and Supply Chain, de-coupling of the financial services systems.
• Defined and managed HR budgets and improved productivity consistently taking into account legislative requirements.
• Developed and implemented employee engagement and customer strategy across the organization.
• Designed and Implemented organizational design strategy, policy and procedure that was supported by job grading and an integrated Reward and Remuneration strategy.
• Employee relations and wage negotiations.
• Influenced and sensitized line management to HR responsibilities.
Key successes achieved in this position were:
➢ Improvement in all key dials and ROI in HR across the Group: Productivity up 3% year on year for two consecutive years, Labour Turnover reduced from 40% to 18%, Talent pipeline ready now successors 22% of Management category, reduced cost of employment per employee by 12% by centralizing recruitment, Employee engagement from 83% to 93% over a three year period, customer satisfaction index improved over three year period (external and internal), settled wage negotiations with union within agreed timeframes and mandate and in difficult times (settlement lower than industry by 2%), reduced days to fill a vacancy in the organization from 27 to 21 days, retention of new hires improved from 83% to 90%, and maintained manager competence at 83%, implemented leadership programs from supervisory to senior executive levels.
➢ Participated and project managed HR work streams across Project implementation of SAP, Centralization Supply Chain and Financial Services and Implementation of Vision + and Capstone simultaneously; project milestones consistently delivered on time, below budget/cost at agreed quality standard.
This position required specialist skills in Talent Management, Recruitment and Training, and very operational.
- design and implement recruitment and selection processes and ensure first for purpose talent within the manufacturing plant and sales and marketing office
- design and implement training and development programs
- manage relationships and set up processes with the Food and Beverage SETA, including designing unit standards, competencies etc.
- facilitate sales and marketing training
In this position I also took on additional marketing and sales responsibilities to drive business performance for the plants alternate beverage project.
This position was a generalist position and in my position here, I focussed predominantly of labour relations as there was labour unrest at the manufacturing plant.
- recruitment and selection
- industrial relations
- training and development
- payroll
- HR policies and procedures
- organisational design
I achieved a distinction through UNISA (University of South Africa). I was also the top student of the class, and was awarded the team player of the year for our Group. Subjects covered were : Business process value chain Strategy Finance Human Resources Leadership Business Management Marketing Retail
