Lead People Partner, Beam
£75-90k
+ equity
Reinventing welfare services with Tech & AI
Posted today
Reinventing welfare services with Tech & AI
101-200 employees
Posted today
£75-90k
+ equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To give everyone access to human-centred welfare services.
Role
Who you are
- Deep experience as a People/HR Business Partner in a high-growth, high-performance environment. You understand how the business works, speak the language of goals and metrics, and can connect people decisions to commercial outcomes
- The credibility to influence senior leaders. You build trust quickly, form a view and say it clearly. You're comfortable challenging leaders, navigating difficult decisions and holding your ground when it matters
- A strong performance and ER toolkit. You've raised the bar on performance, coached managers through underperformance, and independently handled complex grievances, disciplinaries, capability and absence cases
- Experience making change happen. You've led teams through organisational change and know how to take an initiative from a good idea to something managers actually understand, use and stick with
- An instinct for scale. You simplify rather than add process, build things that work without you in the room, and reach for data, technology and tooling before you reach for another meeting
- AI as part of how you work. You use it routinely to think, analyse, create and automate, and you're constantly looking for ways to increase the quality and scale of your impact without adding headcount
What the job involves
- As our Lead People Partner, you'll work closely with leaders to build a high-performance culture across Beam. You'll understand what's getting in the way of teams performing at their best, then help leaders take action, whether that's raising the bar on performance, coaching a manager, evolving a team structure or leading through complex organisational change
- You'll bring strong judgement and a point of view. Using your understanding of the business, people data and what you're seeing across teams, you'll diagnose problems, challenge leaders when needed and turn insight into practical action
- You'll also help turn our People strategy into reality, leading the implementation of key initiatives across the business and ensuring changes don't just launch, but genuinely stick
- Partner with leaders to improve team performance
- Build trusted relationships with senior leaders, acting as a thought partner on the people and organisational challenges affecting their teams
- Diagnose what’s getting in the way of performance, using data, judgement and a strong understanding of the business to get to the root of problems
- Challenge leaders constructively on team effectiveness, organisational design, management quality and difficult people decisions
- Turn data, performance, attrition and ER insights into clear recommendations and action
- Own key strategic initiatives and drive organisational changes and ensure roles, structures and accountabilities are set up to deliver
- Raise the quality of management
- Coach managers and leaders to set clear expectations, give effective feedback and address underperformance early
- Build manager capability through practical interventions rather than heavy programmes or frameworks
- Help managers navigate difficult situations with confidence and good judgement, stepping in directly where the complexity or risk warrants it
- Identify recurring management challenges and work with the wider People team to address the underlying causes
- Own performance and complex people matters
- Own complex ER and performance casework across Beam, including investigations, grievances, disciplinaries, capability and complex absence
- Work directly with managers to resolve issues pragmatically, fairly and at the right level of formality
- Partner with the Associate Director of People on the highest-risk or legally complex decisions
- Maintain a strong view across individual cases, spotting patterns and turning them into improvements in management practice or People processes
- Embed Beam's approach to performance across probation, ongoing performance and formal capability
- Strengthen how Beam operates as we grow
- Embed clear levelling across teams, partnering with leaders on new roles, promotions and evolving organisational structures
- Hold leaders accountable for acting on engagement and organisational health issues within their teams
- Bring together insights across performance, engagement, ER, absence and attrition to identify emerging organisational risks
- Contribute to People strategy by bringing a close understanding of what's actually happening within teams and where Beam needs to change
Our take
Trusted by over 100 government partners, Beam is a social enterprise that brings AI to welfare services. Enabled by tech and AI, their caseworkers have supported thousands of underserved people into homes and jobs, whilst their software has slashed admin for thousands of frontline workers across the UK.
Beam is funded by established names in the UK tech scene, the world's top impact funds and the Mayor of London. Founder and CEO, Alex Stephany, brings a track record from his previous startup backed by Index Ventures and was even named Purpose Entrepreneur of the Year 2024. The rest of Beam's senior team has their own wealth of experience from a variety of leading startups, tech, and social impact businesses like Arm, Multiverse, and GoCardless.
Beam has also won multiple awards, including a Queen's Award - one of the UK's most prestigious business awards - and has twice been voted as one of the top 100 places to work in the UK. Their work has been covered widely in the media, with features from the BBC, The Times, FT, Forbes and The Independent.
AI has the potential to be a game changer for social workers and in a recent pilot, Beam's AI tool, Magic Notes, reduced the time spend on administrative tasks by over 60% and cut assessment write-ups from four hours to just 90 minutes. As councils explore next steps, Beam's technology is already redefining how frontline workers deliver care, so they can spend more time on what matters most.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Meet the team
5 people
Rachel Astall, CCO
Our mission
Our 5-person C-Suite brings together leaders from tech, care work and AI - bringing a wealth of diverse experience.Insights
61% female employees
61% employee growth in 12 months
Glassdoor (3.9)
Company
Company benefits
- Share options: Be a Beam owner with EMI-qualifying share options
- Access to therapy, coaching, classes & content - powered by Oliva
- 1:1 workplace coaching with Oliva
- Your own financial well-being coach, through Bippit
- Generous Holiday - 25 days with 3 additional days over the Christmas period + bank holidays
- Work remotely up to 6 weeks a year
- Eligible for a 6-week sabbatical after 3 years in service
- Nursery scheme through Gogeta
- Healthcare cover through Benenden Health
- Enhanced parental leave: Primary Caregiver leave 18 weeks and Secondary Caregiver leave 4 weeks
- £200 WellBeam budget for activities enhancing wellbeing and professional development
- Annual membership to Shoreditch Exchange gym (London office only)
- Pension scheme where we contribute 4% of your salary and you contribute 5%.
- Free subscription to the Calm meditation app
- Discounted bike and accessories with Cyclescheme, and tech products with Techscheme
Company values
- Mission first: We drive the mission for those we serve with heart, grit and zero ego
- Aim high and deliver: We deliver outsized impact through setting and executing against ambitious targets
- Raise the pace: We move with urgency and accelerate others, without compromising excellence
- Get better together: Everything is a work in progress. We constantly work on improving ourselves and Beam
Company HQ
London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Alex Stephany
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously CEO of JustPark, a leading online marketplace for parking with over 4M customers backed by Index Ventures. Expert on the sharing economy and author of The Business of Sharing (Macmillan).
Seb Barker
(Co-Founder & COO)Helped pioneer personalised healthcare for the NHS. Worked on the world's first social impact bond in homelessness.
People progressing
Ryan joined in 2020 as an Operations Executive. Since then, they have held a number of roles and are now the Head of Operations.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Beam
- We work hard to build teams that are diverse in every way.
- We’re committed to creating inclusive hiring processes which allow people with diverse backgrounds to showcase their talents
- We particular encourage applications from those who are underrepresented in startups: those from black and underrepresented ethnic groups and people with lived experience of homelessness/social disadvantage
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