Senior Manager, HR Business Partner

Icertis•Reston, VA

About The Position

The Senior Manager, HR Business Partner acts as a trusted strategic adviser to assigned business leaders, converting business strategy, workforce data and employee insight into integrated people decisions that strengthen organizational capability, leadership effectiveness, and commercial performance. The role is both strategic and hands-on: it partners with executives and HR specialist teams across workforce planning, organization design, talent, succession, performance, rewards, employee experience and change to deliver measurable people outcomes while also executing core people processes. This role supports an assigned business unit, function, region, or leadership portfolio in a matrixed environment. Success depends on influencing business leaders, people managers, and HR specialist teams through partnership, data-driven advice, and direct program execution. The incumbent balances strategic people decisions with execution and delivery, connecting enterprise practices to local context while managing employee experience, risk, productivity, skills-based capability building and long-term organizational health.

Requirements

Graduate or postgraduate qualification in Human Resources, Business, Organization Development, Industrial Relations, Organizational Psychology or a related discipline—or equivalent demonstrated experience delivering business impact through people strategy.
HR Certifications: SPHR or SHRM-SCP required, GPHR a plus. Professional HR certifications are required but do not substitute for business judgment and demonstrated impact.
Typically, 10-15 years of progressive HR experience, including significant HR business partnering and exposure to talent, organization development, employee relations, rewards or workforce-planning roles.
Demonstrated experience advising senior executives in a global or matrixed organization.
Strong experience with organization design, skills-based workforce planning, succession, performance, retention and change.
Experience interpreting compensation, business and workforce data and applying predictive people analytics.
Proficiency with enterprise HRIS, dashboard, analytical and AI-enabled HR tools.
Experience leading cross-functional HR programs through influence rather than direct authority.
Demonstrated ability to operate across HR Centers of Excellence, HR Operations, Legal, Finance and Talent Acquisition to deliver joined-up business outcomes.
Judgement — Weigh risk, business impact, and trade-offs — and know when to trust or override AI. Make sound hiring calls under uncertainty and know when to challenge an AI-generated shortlist.
Curiosity — Question how work is done and ask, “Is there a better way?” Continuously redesign sourcing and recruiting workflows using AI rather than accepting legacy practice.
Communication — Explain decisions clearly — to humans, stakeholders, and AI systems. Translate labor market and pipeline data into clear guidance for hiring managers and executives.
Collaboration — Connect and build teams across functions and human + agent teams. Partner across HR, Finance, Legal, and the business, and orchestrate recruiters alongside AI tools.
Ownership — Take full accountability for outcomes — even when AI executes. Own hiring outcomes and the integrity of the process end-to-end, never deflecting to tools or the team.
Hustle — Move with urgency and execute through ambiguity. Keep critical and executive searches moving at pace, using AI-enabled workflows to compress time-to-fill.
Creativity & Problem Solving — Frame better problems and design novel solutions where no playbook exists. Invent new sourcing strategies and verification methods for challenges like candidate fraud and deepfakes.

Responsibilities

Partner with business leaders to understand priorities, operating constraints, financial context and capability requirements, then translate those priorities into measurable workforce, talent, organization and culture interventions.
Lead strategic workforce and skills-based planning by assessing headcount, critical skills, critical roles, spans and layers, performance, compensation and attrition trends; convert plans into hiring, resourcing, build-buy-borrow and productivity actions in partnership with Talent Acquisition and Finance.
Facilitate talent reviews, succession planning, readiness calibration and critical-role continuity discussions; drive successor coverage, internal mobility and single-point-of-failure mitigation.
Advice on organization design, role clarity, job architecture, operating-model changes and change-adoption plans.
Coach leaders on performance management, leadership effectiveness, feedback, capability building and difficult conversations; strengthen inclusive, equitable and skills-based talent practices that build belonging, psychological safety and organizational culture.
Diagnose retention risks using predictive insights and partner with Total Rewards, Finance and leaders on compensation, promotion and retention recommendations.
Maintain a real-time view of employee sentiment, engagement, onboarding, career concerns and organizational climate; close the loop with actionable insights.
Lead and govern annual and mid-year people processes including goals, performance, promotions, compensation, calibration and succession.
Advise leaders on complex employee relations, conduct, policy interpretation, performance risk and workplace concerns in partnership with Employee Relations, Legal and HR Operations.
Orchestrate HR Centers of Excellence and HR Operations to deliver integrated, consistent and scalable people solutions across the employee lifecycle.
Leverage people analytics, predictive modeling and AI-enabled tools to surface workforce risks and opportunities; prepare executive-ready people insights, decision papers, case summaries, communication plans and action trackers.
Help drive AI adoption, focusing on simplification with strong positive impact for the business.