Senior HR Consultant Location: Oxford / Oxfordshire
Salary: £50,000 per annum, depending on experience
Working pattern: Hybrid / flexible, with regular travel to client sites
Reports to: Head of Client Delivery
Go beyond HR with SYLO
At SYLO | Beyond HR, we believe great HR should do more than keep businesses compliant. It should help businesses grow, leaders lead better and people thrive. We’re a growing team of 20+ HR professionals, supporting SMEs through to national and international organisations across a diverse range of sectors. Since 2010, we’ve built our reputation on being trusted, pragmatic and genuinely invested in our clients.
Now, we’re looking for an experienced Senior HR Consultant to join our team. This is a role for someone who
knows their HR inside out, enjoys variety, loves solving problems and wants to make a genuine difference to the businesses and people they work with. If you’re looking for a role where you can be both strategic adviser and hands-on HR expert, this could be the opportunity for you.
Why SYLO?
At SYLO, we become an extension of our clients’ teams. Our clients come to us because they need more than textbook HR advice. They need someone who understands their business, gets to the heart of an issue and gives them clear, commercially sensible advice they can actually use. You’ll have the opportunity to work across a broad client portfolio, advising business owners, senior leaders and managers on everything from complex employee relations and organisational change to people strategy, leadership and development.
No two days are the same. And that’s exactly how we like it. Our values sit at the heart of how we work:
Bold pragmatism. Open-mindedness. Empathy. Boundary-pushing.
We’re ambitious about what HR consultancy can be, and we want people who are excited to help us continue to push it forward.
The Role
As a Senior HR Consultant, you’ll take ownership of a portfolio of clients, becoming a trusted HR adviser and an extension of their team. You’ll provide a mixture of strategic and operational HR support, working directly with business owners, leadership teams and managers. You’ll be expected to bring confidence, sound judgement and commercial awareness to every client interaction — knowing when to advise, when to challenge, when to coach and when to take action. You’ll also play an important role in helping our clients become better at managing and developing their people.
Your client portfolio
You will:
· Manage a portfolio of clients, building strong and trusted long-term relationships.
· Provide expert HR advice by phone, email, virtually and onsite.
· Deliver consistently high-quality, pragmatic and commercially focused HR support.
· Take ownership of client issues from initial advice through to resolution.
· Ensure advice and documentation are accurate, legally compliant and appropriate for the client.
· Proactively identify risks, opportunities and improvements rather than simply responding to problems.
· Work collaboratively with the wider SYLO team to deliver an excellent client experience.
What you'll be doing
Strategic HR & People Consultancy
· Advise clients on people strategies aligned to their business objectives.
· Conduct HR audits, identifying risks, gaps and opportunities.
· Develop practical people plans and support clients with implementation.
· Act as a trusted sounding board for business owners and leadership teams.
· Help clients build scalable HR practices that reflect their size, culture and ambitions.
· Support organisational development, culture and people initiatives.
Employee Relations
· Lead complex employee relations cases from start to finish, including disciplinary, grievance, capability and performance matters.
· Provide confident advice to managers and leaders throughout the process.
· Attend meetings with clients, virtually or onsite, and provide practical guidance.
· Ensure processes are fair, consistent and legally compliant.
Organisational Change
· Lead redundancy, restructure and TUPE projects.
· Advise clients through organisational change with empathy, clarity and commercial awareness.
· Support consultation processes, documentation and implementation.
· Help clients navigate difficult people decisions confidently and appropriately.
Absence, Family & Flexible Working
· Advise on short- and long-term absence management.
· Support welfare meetings, return-to-work processes and complex absence cases.
· Advise on family-friendly rights, flexible working and associated processes.
· Help clients develop effective and commercially appropriate policies and practices.
Recruitment & Onboarding
· Advise clients on recruitment strategy and effective selection processes.
· Develop job descriptions and recruitment documentation.
· Support recruitment campaigns, interviews and selection processes.
· Help clients create engaging onboarding and induction experiences.
· Advise on probation and early-stage employment concerns.
Learning & Development
· Identify learning and development needs with clients.
· Design and deliver engaging HR and people-focused training.
· Support leadership development and management capability.
· Help clients address skills gaps and build stronger teams.
Reward & Benefits
· Advise on salary structures, benefits and reward approaches.
· Support pay reviews and fair pay practices.
· Provide guidance on statutory pay and wider reward considerations.
· Support clients with gender pay gap reporting where appropriate.
Policies, Compliance & HR Projects
You’ll work across a wide range of projects, which could include:
· HR policy development and reviews
· HR audits
· Employment law updates
· Settlement agreements
· ACAS early conciliation
· Exit interviews
· Employment documentation
· Performance management frameworks
· EDI initiatives
· People processes and systems
· Client communications and HR projects
The variety is one of the best things about consultancy — and we want someone who thrives on it.
More than just client delivery
As a senior member of the consultancy team, you’ll also contribute to the growth and development of SYLO.
This could include:
· Representing SYLO at networking events and within the Oxfordshire business community.
· Building relationships with prospective and existing clients.
· Identifying opportunities to expand client relationships and introduce additional services.
· Supporting proposals and business development activity.
· Sharing knowledge and expertise with colleagues.
· Contributing to the development of our consultancy processes, tools and resources.
· Staying ahead of employment law and HR developments and sharing relevant insight with the team and our clients.
You won't be expected to be a traditional salesperson. We want you to be someone who naturally spots where we can add value and is confident having commercial conversations with clients.
What success looks like
Within your first 12 months, you'll have:
· Built strong relationships with a portfolio of clients who see you as their trusted HR adviser.
· Successfully led complex ER cases, including disciplinary, grievance, capability, redundancy and TUPE matters.
· Delivered practical, engaging HR training for clients.
· Helped clients implement meaningful improvements to their people practices.
· Built confidence with senior leaders and business owners.
· Proactively identified opportunities to add value to client relationships.
· Contributed to repeat and referral business through exceptional client service.
· Become a valued and trusted member of the SYLO consultancy team.
· Shared your knowledge and experience to help develop colleagues and our wider consultancy offering.
About you
You’re an experienced HR professional who combines strong technical knowledge with excellent people skills. You’re confident giving advice, but you’re also comfortable saying, “I think there’s a better way of
doing this.” You can deal with a complex employee relations issue in the morning, advise a leadership team on their people strategy in the afternoon and deliver a training session the next day. You enjoy working independently, but you also value being part of a team. Most importantly, you're commercially minded, solutions-focused and genuinely care about delivering great outcomes for clients.
You'll ideally bring:
· Strong generalist HR experience, ideally within an HR consultancy, professional services or multi-client environment.
· Strong knowledge of UK employment law and HR best practice across the employee lifecycle.
· Significant experience managing complex employee relations cases.
· Experience of redundancy, TUPE and organisational change.
· Excellent coaching and consultancy skills.
· Confidence working with business owners, senior leaders and managers.
· Strong written and verbal communication skills.
· Excellent organisation, prioritisation and time-management skills.
· Experience managing multiple clients, projects and competing priorities.
· Strong attention to detail.
· Commercial awareness and a solutions-focused approach.
· Experience delivering HR training.
· Good knowledge of Microsoft 365.
· Experience using HR systems and CRM platforms.
· A high level of integrity and discretion when handling confidential information.
· The ability and willingness to travel to client sites across Oxfordshire and the surrounding area. CIPD qualification (or equivalent experience) is desirable.
Why you'll love working here
We’re serious about delivering exceptional HR advice — but we’re equally serious about creating a great place to work.
You'll get:
· £55,000 salary, depending on experience.
· Flexible and hybrid working.
· A varied portfolio of interesting clients.
· Regular client-facing opportunities.
· Support from an experienced and collaborative consultancy team.
· Opportunities for professional development and progression.
· The chance to work across the wider people and business landscape, not just traditional HR.
· A values-led environment where your ideas and expertise are genuinely welcomed.
· The opportunity to help shape a growing consultancy.
About SYLO | Beyond HR
SYLO | Beyond HR was established in 2010 with a simple ambition: to provide clear, trusted HR advice to businesses across Oxfordshire and beyond. Since then, we've grown into a team of 20+ professionals supporting SMEs, national and international organisations across a wide range of sectors and countries. Our clients value us because we don't feel like an external supplier. We're an extension of their team.
Alongside expert HR and employment law advice, we support clients with leadership development, learning and development, recruitment and wider people solutions. We also work closely with carefully selected specialist partners to give our clients access to expertise across the wider people and business landscape.
We’re proud of what we’ve built — but we’re not standing still.
That’s where you come in.
Ready to go beyond HR?
If you're an experienced HR professional who wants to do work that genuinely matters, we'd love to hear from you. This isn't a role where you'll simply give advice, update policies and move on to the next query. You'll build relationships, you’ll challenge thinking, you'll solve problems, you'll influence leaders. You'll help businesses grow. And you'll make a tangible difference to the people within them.
If that sounds like you, we want to hear from you. Apply now to join SYLO | Beyond HR.
Pay: £45,000.00-£50,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Casual dress
- Company pension
- Employee mentoring programme
- Work from home
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Oxford
