Circle Lead

Key Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end daily operations for assigned employee lifecycle services, ensuring delivery against agreed service levels, quality standards, risk requirements, and customer expectations.
• Manage a broader and more complex scope across multiple services, countries, and stakeholders, ensuring clear prioritization, capacity planning, workforce management, and business continuity.
• Lead and support migrations, transitions, and onboarding of new countries, services, processes, or capabilities into Manila, including readiness planning, knowledge transfer, service rehearsal, hypercare, and post-go-live stabilization.
• Build and maintain strong stakeholder relationships with global and local People Services teams, HR Business Partners, Service Owners, Quality & Control partners, and senior leaders to align priorities, manage expectations, and resolve escalations.
• Provide global influence and support by representing the Manila operations perspective in global forums, shaping service improvements, and driving consistent ways of working across locations.
• Ensure strong operational governance, including performance reviews, SLA and KPI monitoring, issue management, risk escalation, control evidence, audit readiness, process documentation, and compliance with applicable policies.
• Lead, coach, and develop experts, and team members, fostering accountability, performance discipline, collaboration, and a strong people-focused culture.
• Oversee people management activities across the employee lifecycle, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, development planning, succession readiness, engagement, and retention.
• Drive continuous improvement, simplification, automation, and standardization initiatives that improve service quality, operational efficiency, employee experience, and scalability.
• Act as senior escalation point for complex service delivery, migration, people, risk, or stakeholder matters, ensuring timely resolution and transparent communication.

Key Capabilities/Experience

• Strong operational management discipline, with proven experience managing complex service delivery environments, performance routines, workforce capacity, risk controls, and continuous improvement.
• Proven stakeholder management capability, with the ability to influence, align, and challenge senior stakeholders across countries, functions, and global teams.
• Strong migration and transition management experience, including knowledge transfer, go-live readiness, issue management, stabilization, and change adoption.
• Solid understanding of HR operations and employee lifecycle processes in Workday such as onboarding, employee data changes, organizational management and offboarding.
• Demonstrated ability to manage experts and specialists, build capability, manage change, and create a high-performance culture in a global shared services or operations environment.

Minimum Qualifications

• Minimum of 15 years of relevant experience in operations, HR shared services, people services, business services, or a comparable service delivery environment.
• At least 10 years of people leadership experience, preferably leading experts, large teams, or multi-country operational teams.
• Experience managing employee lifecycle processes, HR operations, or shared services delivery in a global or regional setup.
• Proven track record in managing migrations, transitions, transformation initiatives, or large-scale operational change.
• Strong understanding of operational governance, service management, SLA/KPI management, process controls, audit readiness, and risk management.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence across senior, global, and cross-functional audiences.
• Strong coaching, performance management, talent development, and succession planning capability.
• Comfortable working in a fast-changing, matrixed, international organization with multiple priorities and stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, Management, Psychology, or a related field; master’s degree or relevant professional certification is an advantage.
• Fluent English communication skills, both written and verbal.