Senior HR Associate

About the Role 

We are looking for a strategic, creative, and passionate person to own key HR initiatives. You will bring fresh insights and a relentless drive for perfection to all of Apollo’s current HR processes, including onboarding/offboarding, compliance, policy maintenance, and payroll and benefits administration, among others. You will ensure that Apollo’s HR practices can scale as our business becomes more complex, and you will keep Apollo’s mission to maximize profits for small-scale farmers at the heart of everything you do. This is an exciting opportunity for an early- to mid-career HR professional to oversee a global mandate and help us scale Apollo to new heights! 

Reporting Lines: This role reports to the HR Lead

Responsibilities:

• Proactively identify and take ownership of key HR Operations across all Apollo entities
• Support the HR Ops Team to manage the full employee experience, from on-boarding to exit management, ensuring all processes are performed in a timely, efficient, and meticulously documented manner.
• Design and own a structured approach to performance management for short-term staff, overseeing probation, KPI reviews, and offboarding processes.
• Manage payroll administration, statutory filings, and reporting in collaboration with the Finance team.
• Implement a structured approach to benefits administration across Apollo entities, ensuring alignment with best practices.
• Independently seek and utilize information to resolve complex HR issues and compliance matters.
• Lead policy updates and conduct bi-annual reviews of the employee handbook, ensuring it addresses employees across all entities and adheres to the latest HR updates in national policies.
• Proactively ensure legal compliance across all Apollo entities by actively seeking and leveraging pertinent information in collaboration with company lawyers as well as your own independent research, and update the necessary documentation accordingly
• Deeply understanding every detail of the existing HR processes and policies and champion improvements, fostering an environment of critical thinking and inquisitiveness within the team.
• Meticulously document key processes, and ensure that documentation is accessible and easily searchable by relevant staff. 
• Demonstrate an interest in data analytics, extracting actionable insights, collaborating on stakeholder reports, and taking a proactive approach to address highlighted gaps for improvements.
• Promote the use and optimization of systems and tools to streamline processes and enhance the overall employee experience.
• Assist in implementing HR programs, collaborating with the team and staff to identify and establish efficient and scalable process improvements.
• Contribute as a team member by challenging traditional practices, bringing fresh perspectives, and collaborating to drive innovation and performance enhancements.
• Participate in the implementation of HR initiatives, working with the team and staff to help identify and create streamlined and scalable process improvements across the function
• Use existing tech tools to create efficiency and relentlessly advocate for new ways that technology can increase scalability and efficiency of HR processes

Requirements:

• You don’t have to be an HR expert, but you should be passionate about HR and ideally have a minimum of 7 years of experience working in an HR team
• You don’t want to do things the way they have been done – you want to find ways to improve them 
• You’ve worked in a medium to large-sized fast-paced start up (or a similarly fast-paced context) 
• You are a stickler for process, and you balance this with inquisitiveness, curiosity, and a desire to collaborate with your team and across Apollo
• When faced with a problem, your brain can’t help but generate solutions.
• You want to join a team of passionate people who love what they do
• You care deeply about enabling Apollo to deliver its mission to help farmers increase their profits.
• You own your mistakes and see them as an opportunity to grow and improve. 
• You love a challenge and you love the feeling of owning outcomes. You have a deep sense of accountability.  
• You’re an excellent communicator – you’re comfortable writing documents that clearly explain the context for a given challenge, as well as your recommendations and next steps. 
• You love and actively solicit critical feedback on your performance, because you know this will help you grow
• You love to use data to draw conclusions. 
• You maintain the highest ethical standards, particularly around maintaining confidentiality
• You may not check every qualification on this list, but you’re confident you could still excel in this role. You are resilient when unexpected challenges come your way, because you know they will! You’re calm and steady in a crisis and set an example for others to follow 

We:

• Are a collaborative team of smart and ambitious people who are dedicated to serving our customers 
• Make magic happen to solve hard problems and always come with solutions when challenges arise 
• Are comfortable taking risks that can result in radical scale, and understand that failures are opportunities to learn and improve
• Are considerate listeners and take the time to deeply understand and seek out ideas from the people around us, even when we disagree
• Offer a dynamic environment that fosters talent, collaboration and growth
• Take pride in our work and share the responsibility to see it through from conception to deployment
• Back up our talk with a competitive compensation and benefits package including equity