SR HR Specialist - Team Member Relations

Veteran Hiring Solutions•Hopkinsville, KY

9d•$82,500 - $103,000•Onsite

About The Position

This role owns the relationship between the plant's team members and the company. It exists to keep that relationship stable, fair, and consistent inside a brand-new smart plant that started production in late 2025. Toyota Boshoku Western Kentucky is the company's first smart plant in North America. It opened in December 2025. A $225 million investment. Advanced robotics and automation. Roughly 157 full-time positions standing up from scratch, with more Kentucky headcount behind it. A member of the Toyota Group building the interior of the vehicles you already know. A plant that new does not yet have deep roots in its people practices. Policy gets applied for the first time. Precedent gets set in real time. The first exit interview, the first investigation, the first opinion survey, the first hard conversation between a team member and a leader all happen on this person's watch. Whoever sits in this seat is not maintaining a mature team member relations function. They are building one. What they set now becomes the standard the plant lives by for years. That is the stake. Get the human systems right early and the plant runs stable through its growth. Get them wrong and the company pays for it in turnover, grievances, and lost trust at exactly the moment it can least afford them.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant experience. Military equivalent: senior enlisted or officer professional military education plus S1 or Adjutant General experience. Army 42A Human Resources Specialist, USMC 0111 Administrative Specialist, or equivalent personnel and administration career fields. Maps to: the full role.
More than six years of relevant HR generalist experience, with advanced experience in a team member relations or employee relations role. Military equivalent: a senior HR or personnel NCO who ran a unit S1 shop, managed personnel actions at scale, and advised commanders on people issues. Maps to: Objectives 1, 2, and 6.
Corporate and manufacturing setting experience required. Military equivalent: operating inside a large, hierarchical, standardized organization with strict process discipline. Garrison or installation HR, or personnel operations supporting a deployed force, both count. Maps to: Objectives 1 and 3.
Ethics and investigations capability (the role investigates Ethics Point matters). Military equivalent: AR 15-6 investigating officer experience, Equal Opportunity or EEO advisor duty, or command climate investigation work. This is one of the cleanest military-to-civilian maps in the entire role. Maps to: Objective 3.
Strong verbal and written English communication. Spanish and/or Portuguese preferred. Military equivalent: Foreign Area Officer background, DLI-trained linguists, or partner-nation and coalition liaison experience in Latin America. The role supports TBA operations that can extend to Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. Maps to: Americas region support.
Solid working knowledge of Microsoft Office and experience with large-scale HRIS and enterprise systems, Oracle preferred. Military equivalent: fluency with military personnel systems such as IPPS-A, DEERS, or eMILPO translates directly to enterprise HRIS competence. Maps to: Objectives 4 and 5.
Must have served in the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Space Force, U.S. Reserves, or U.S. National Guard.

Nice To Haves

PHR or SPHR designation preferred. Military equivalent: no direct analog. Transitioning veterans without the certification but with heavy personnel-actions experience should still be presented. The credential is preferred, not required.

Responsibilities

Establish a consistent, documented team member relations practice across the plant within the first 6 months, so that policy and past practice are applied the same way regardless of shift, department, or leader.
Resolve day-to-day team member issues at the lowest level through direct interaction with team members and department leaders, measured by a downward trend in escalations and repeat complaints across the first 12 months.
Own the investigation process for Ethics Point and related matters end to end, with every case documented, timely, and closed to a defensible standard, measured by cycle time and zero open-and-forgotten cases.
Stand up the plant's team member opinion survey and turn the results into a morale read leadership can act on, delivered as a clear analysis with prioritized recommendations, not raw data.
Administer benefit programs and leave of absence cases in coordination with the third-party administrator, so that no team member falls through a gap between the plant and the TPA, measured by clean handoffs and resolved cases.
Reduce early-tenure attrition by acting on what exit interviews and daily interaction reveal, feeding specific, evidence-backed fixes to HR and plant leadership across the first 12 to 18 months.