HR Director Belgium & Bakery Products Europe

Vandemoortele

Ghent, Belgium

Your role

As the HR Director Belgium and Bakery Products Europe, you will be responsible for executing strategic HR topics for Belgium and the Bakery Products Europe organisation, effectively integrating the group’s priorities. In this role, you will be part of the HR leadership team and partner with business managers to enhance their managerial capabilities and support their strategic people decisions, such as talent and succession planning, people development and team performance. You also ensure HR operational support for the Export organization. In this role, you will be reporting to the CHRO and will be leading a team of ~20 FTE’s. You will be based in our HQ in Ghent.

Your key responsibilities

Executing the Group strategy for People & Organisation matters across Belgium and the European Bakery products organisations:
- You will be responsible, together with the business leaders, for the development and implementation of HR practices, aligned to the Vandemoortele HR & business strategies, to drive business success (People 4 Growth) and associate engagement (Growth 4 People);
- You act as sparring partner of business leaders, provide HR support and advice on complex issues, involving all relevant stakeholders;
- You contribute, as a member of the HR management team, to the definition and deployment of the HR strategy of the group, with the view to achieving of sustainable performance (PPP);
- You prepare the Human Resources budget, with particular emphasis on alignment with strategic objectives, ensuring effectiveness of planned programs.
Contributing to developing a high performing organisation:
- You will be leading a high performing HR team, developing people and capabilities;
- You implement progressive HR practices and drive innovation to create a competitive advantage for Vandemoortele to attract, retain and engage associates;
- You contribute to the ESG effort for the group on the ‘social’ dimension of the sustainability strategy (enhancing lives);
- You ensure a robust talent pipeline strategy to deepen and strengthen capabilities, proactively implement plans to address key talent gaps and build pipelines to meet future growth plans;
- You drive the development a robust and transparent performance culture;
- You will contribute to designing, implementing and sustaining a compensation and benefits practice that to attract, retain, engage, focus and offboard associates at the level of capability required;
- You partner with business leaders to enable business transformations (e.g. organisational design and ways of working).
Leading a best-in-class function in many aspects:
- You drive associate engagement and strengthen Vandemoortele’s position as an employer of choice;
- You ensure effective management of Industrial/Employee Relations;
- You will develop and monitor Learning and Development programs while taking into consideration strategic direction and Group requirements.

Are you the one we’re looking for?

You are a proven HR leader with experience across all aspects of the HR function (including both “hard” and “soft” HR);
You have both a business partner-mindset and a people partner-mindset: you are close to the business and the associates, able to translate both business priorities and people priorities into an actionable HR plan;
You have experience in leading HR for manufacturing/plants & for commercial/marketing functions;
Experience in successfully managing union and labour relations, knowledge of socio-legal matters/pay-roll, experience in Compensation & Benefits and Learning & Leadership Development are a plus;
You have a proven track record in building and leading high-performing and collaborative teams and have experience with organisation design & development;
You worked in an international company before, prior exposure to the FMCG-sector, having had multi-countries responsibilities and experience with a family company are nice to haves;
You are down-to-earth & hands-on;
You are agile & comfortable with ambiguity;
You act as a problem solver and are solution oriented;
You possess excellent communication, relationship building and influencing skills;
You are fluent in English, a good knowledge of French & Dutch is a plus.