Senior Associate - People and Culture

About the Role:

The People and Culture function within the organization exists to find passionate people, bring them in well, and help them stay, grow, and contribute over long tenures. This function reporting to the People and Culture Manager will cover talent acquisition, onboarding, engagement, learning and development, organisational culture, and statutory compliance.

The Senior Associate – People and Culture will be the first point of contact for every candidate who writes/ applies to the organization as well as the person who shapes a new joiner's first weeks. The role is hands-on, forward-facing, and operationally dense. It also demands warmth, process discipline across multiple hiring cycles.

Key Responsibilities:

A) Talent Acquisition (Core Focus)

• Run full recruitment cycles across roles and programs — from finalising job descriptions with hiring managers through sourcing, shortlisting, interviewing, offer, and close.
• Build a range of sourcing approaches for open positions, ranging from targeted outreach, referrals, and via the internship pipeline.
• Be in-charge of employer branding on relevant platforms.
• Work closely with hiring managers to understand what each role really needs, and bring a point of view on fit and quality of hire.
• Maintain recruitment data that tells the organisation what is working and what is not on metrics like time to hire, sourcing effectiveness, and conversion.
• Develop the internship program as a genuine pipeline for associate-level hiring.

B) Employee Life Cycle

• Own the end-to-end onboarding experience, from pre-joining paperwork to the first day, first week, and first month for a new hire.
• Coordinate with administration, IT, and finance to ensure systems and access, are ready before a new hire arrives.
• Run orientation sessions that introduce the organization's work, culture, people and its policies.
• Manage separation and clearance processes with the same care as onboarding.

C) Employee Engagement

• Plan and run an annual engagement calendar across the organization's offices.
• Coordinate with internal teams and external partners on events and convenings.
• Run annual engagement surveys and translate findings into specific improvements the organisation can act on.

D) Organizational Culture

• Help maintain a consistent, vibrant culture across locations in line with the organization's Culture Codes.
• Support the Manager – People and Culture in refreshing policies and practices that make the organization a more inclusive place to work.
• Notice early signals  in surveys, conversations, or attrition patterns —that something needs attention, and flag them in time.

E) Others

• Prepare management reports and dashboards for leadership, presenting data and analysis that help in decision making.
• Track emerging practice in people and culture practice within the social sector and outside as to bring ideas back for evaluation

Qualifications and Experience:

• MBA or equivalent Master's degree with a specialisation in Human Resources.
• 4-6 years of relevant experience, preferably in a role combining recruitment and culture work.
• Prior experience in a not-for-profit or mission-driven organisation is welcome but not required.

Non-negotiable capabilities

• Process discipline. Ability to run several hiring cycles in parallel without
  dropping threads, losing candidates, or missing deadlines.
• Warmth in communication. Candidates and new joiners form impressions of the organization from their first exchanges with this role. Those impressions last.
• Curiosity about the work. The Senior Associate represents the organization's programs to every candidate. That requires real understanding of what the organization does and why it is hard.
• Judgement about people. Ability to read candidates, assess fit beyond the CV, and spot both potential and risk early.
• Data fluency. Ability to work with hiring and engagement data and turn it into actionable insight for leadership.
• A collaborative style across functions — hiring managers, program leads, administration, and finance.

What success looks like (12 to 18-month view)

• Hiring cycles run on predictable timelines, and hiring managers trust the function.
• New joiners have a consistent, well-coordinated first month and can describe the organization's work confidently within weeks.
• An engagement calendar is live, used, and refreshed each year based on what staff actually value.
• The function has reliable data on who is joining, who is leaving, and why — and uses it to inform decisions.