Chief Human Resources Officer

Seprod Group is seeking a dynamic, hands-on Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) to join the Group Executive Leadership Team. In this strategic executive role, you will be responsible for developing and executing the Group's overall people, organization, culture, and human capital strategy to support business and financial objectives.

The CHRO provides strategic leadership across all companies, manufacturing operations, distribution businesses, commercial operations, and corporate functions within the Group, ensuring that the organization has the right structure, leadership, capabilities, workforce, culture, reward systems, and talent required to achieve its strategic and financial objectives.

Key Responsibilities

1. Human Capital Strategy:

• Set and drive the Group's human capital strategy, aligning HR priorities directly with revenue growth, profitability, productivity, customer service, and shareholder value.
• Own the Group's organizational design agenda, ensuring structures, spans of control and role architecture keep pace with business growth and complexity.
• Represent the people and payroll agenda at the Board and EXCO level, translating workforce risk and opportunity into commercial terms.

2. Payroll Leadership & Compliance:

• Own end-to-end payroll accuracy, timeliness, internal controls, and audit-readiness across all Group entities while ensuring full compliance with Jamaican labour law, tax, and pension regulations.
• Drive continuous improvement in payroll systems and processes, in partnership with HR technology and shared services.

3. Field Presence & Employee Trust:

• Maintain a regular cadence of site visits across factories, warehouses, and commercial sites to build trusted relationships with front-line supervisors and employees.
• Feed field intelligence directly back into policy, communication and engagement design, ensuring decisions are grounded in shop-floor reality.

4. Talent, Performance & Organizational Capability:

• Lead Group-wide talent acquisition, succession planning, performance management, and leadership development, including oversight of the Seprod Leadership Institute.
• Own the performance management framework and its consistent, ensuring disciplined application across all entities.
• Manage the Group’s competence framework to ensure that key competences and levels of mastery are appropriately described in a competence dictionary.

5. Culture, Communication, Industrial & Employee Relations:

• Shape and steward Group culture, with particular focus on communication effectiveness, given its consistent identification as a top employee concern.
• Own employee relations strategy, ensuring fair, consistent and legally sound handling of grievances, disciplinary matters and organizational change.
• Advise senior management on employment risks and potential liabilities.

6. Health & Safety

• Ensure occupational health and safety standards are embedded and consistently enforced across all Group operations, treating safety as a non-negotiable field priority.
• Partner with plant and operations leadership on safety incident review, root-cause analysis and corrective action.

7. HR Governance, Systems & Shared Services

• Oversee the HR shared services model, ensuring consistent service delivery across entities while preserving local responsiveness.
• Sponsor the Group's HRIS/payroll platform strategy, ensuring data integrity, reporting capability and system governance.
• Maintain robust HR policy governance, ensuring policies are current, legally compliant and consistently applied.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

• Master’s degree in Human Resource Management, Business Administration, Industrial Relations or a related field. SHRM-SCP certification.
• A minimum of twelve to fifteen years of progressive human resources leadership experience, including direct or indirect oversight of a payroll function.
• Proven experience operating in a multi-site, operationally intensive environment — manufacturing, FMCG, distribution or similar — with a demonstrated pattern of field engagement rather than head-office-only leadership.
• Experience operating across multiple legal entities.
• Strong working knowledge of Jamaican labour law, payroll and statutory compliance requirements.
• A track record of building trust with unionized and non-unionized front-line employee populations.

CORE COMPETENCIES

• Strategic, commercially literate HR leadership at Executive Committee level.
• Genuine comfort and credibility in the field — on factory floors, in warehouses and with front-line teams — not just in the boardroom.
• Payroll and compliance rigor, with an instinct for control and audit-readiness.
• Trust-building and relationship management across all levels of the organization.
• Change leadership, particularly in driving cultural shift with strong employee involvement.
• Clear, direct communication, both upward to the Board/CEO and downward to the shop floor.
• Data-driven decision-making, balanced with field-tested judgment.