People Partner Lead, Germany & Sweden

Phase one: build the foundation, pre-launch

• Ensure the German employment framework is appropriately set up with legal, external counsel, key internal teams, like People Ops and Workforce Planning – contracts, working-time and rostering models, pay structures, policies, payroll and people systems
• Design the clinic organisation from a blank sheet, and a staffing model sized to Neko’s ambition for the market rather than to the first clinic
• Own the launch workforce plan, the cover and contracting model, and reward in a German context – pay, pension, equity
• Build a German clinical employer proposition from zero with TA, and a playbook the next market can reuse

Build for German employment structures from day one

• Design workforce policies (scheduling, pay, performance) with German labor law and employee representation requirements in mind from the start
• Work with legal counsel to determine the right structure for German clinic operations
• Ensure people systems and tools are built to comply with German labor regulations

Phase two: run clinical people strategy live

• Be the day-to-day People partner across German clinical leadership, from senior operations and medical leaders through to frontline clinic managers
• Spend real time in clinics, and read what members experience there as signal about how teams are resourced, structured and led – spotting strain, inconsistency or risk early, because it usually shows up in the clinic room before it shows up in the data
• Coach clinic leaders through hiring, performance and the conversations that are hard but important – and build the leadership capability and multi-way feedback culture that keep employee relations issues from piling up, while supporting teams and leaders through the ones that do
• Support first-time clinic managers as they build confidence, capability and steady leadership habits
• Hold the staffing model against the growth plan: German absence, leave and part-time realities, the clinical qualification and mobility pipeline, and honesty when the plan and the labour market disagree
• Turn central People programmes into clinic-ready practice, and call out where a centralised approach misses frontline reality
• Revisit what you built pre-launch as clinics run, and put data and AI to work in how the People agenda actually operates – sharper decisions, less manual effort, more time on the judgement calls
• Take change from decision to genuine adoption, bringing clinic teams with you without pausing delivery to do it

Beyond Germany

• Help drive the global People Partner team’s clinical strategy rather than just feed into it
• Bring the German clinical reality into that team's agenda, so decisions made at scale hold up on the ground
• Support the wider European market as it grows, and other markets as needed

What you bring

• 8+ years as a senior People or HR Business Partner leader, across senior levels of leadership and frontline leaders of larger teams
• A builder's mindset – comfortable starting from a blank sheet, having opened or scaled operations in Germany or built a German people function from close to nothing
• Deep, practical command of German employment law and co-determination, with the judgement to know when to bring in counsel
• Germany is the core requirement; multi-market European experience is strongly preferred – you have worked across more than one European employment landscape (Sweden a significant plus) and know what scales beyond a single market
• Has built a staffing model that had to scale on an opening cadence, and has localised reward in Germany – pay, pension, equity
• Comfortable in both phases – the ambiguity of pre-launch and the discipline of running something live
• Moves at the pace of the business and leads people through change – you have taken teams through reorganisations, new operating models or rapid scaling, and kept trust and delivery intact while doing it
• A local delivery mandate and a real seat in cross-market strategy, held at the same time, at pace
• Fluent with people data and using AI in your own work, and ties people decisions to what members actually experience in the room
• Fluent German and English, based in Berlin, and ready to spend regular time in clinics

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Source: Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), table; dl-de/by-2-0; StarIn's calculation

Posted Nov 01, 2026