Senior People Partner

Location: Ōtāhuhu, Auckland

Type of Contract: Fixed Term Contract (1st December 2025 – 1st January 2027)  

Reports to: People Director, DB Breweries

Are you ready to influence the future of performance, capability, and culture in a business that’s bold about its people agenda?

We’re looking for a strategic and commercially minded Senior People Partner — someone who builds trust through strong collaboration, communicates with clarity and impact, and brings a thoughtful, critical lens to robust conversations to join us at DB/Heineken NZ.

In this key leadership role, you will help to deliver DB’s 2026 People Plan by driving performance through productivity, focused talent management, building talent pipelines through succession planning across the business. Positioned at the heart of a time of transformation, you’ll embed our Talent to Growth Framework, sharpen organisational capability, and partner with senior leaders to deliver our strategic agenda. You’ll lead workforce planning, ER/IR strategy, change management, and help drive a high-performance culture, ensuring our people agenda is tightly aligned to commercial outcomes across local, APAC regional and global Heineken priorities.

What we want you to deliver:

• Talent to Growth: Embed a systematic approach to match the right talent to roles using our global talent framework and mapping our talent pipeline to accelerate readiness and mitigate gaps.
• Performance & Productivity: Deploy and embed our updated Performance Management Framework and HEINEKEN Behaviours to lift organisational capability to drive results.
• Strategic Partnering: Collaborate with functional leads and their senior teams to deliver their strategic plans, ensuring people priorities are tightly linked to business outcomes.
• Employment Relations/Industrial Relations Leadership: Proactively manage employment and industrial relations, supporting unionised sites and leading any negotiations/change management that enables sustainable business performance and a winning inclusive culture.
• Transformation Support: Ensure the business remains focused on delivering our key transformation programmes in 2026 as well as keeping focus on ‘business as usual’
• Productivity Initiatives: Identify and implement initiatives that unlock productivity performance and ensure our People and business KPI’s are met.

A successful Senior Business Partner in this role is someone who bring:

• Proven experience in strategic HR business partnering, workforce planning, change management, and organisational design at a senior functional lead level.
• Strong HR generalist background with deep expertise you can demonstrate in employment relations and industrial relations.
• Hands-on experience working with unionised workforces, including leading negotiations and change management.
• Must have operational experience across multi-site manufacturing environments—experience in medium to large FMCG or industrial settings.
• A collaborative style with the courage to challenge and influence senior stakeholders on people priorities.
• Commercial acumen with a deep understanding of how strategic HR drives P&L outcomes and business transformation.

At DB Breweries, part of the HEINEKEN family, we’re unlocking our full potential through bold people strategies and pioneering leadership development. You’ll be part of a high-impact team shaping the future of work in Aotearoa where performance, purpose, and people come together to drive lasting impact.

Please note: We are not accepting candidates from recruitment agencies for this role.

When you join DB Breweries, you join the global HEINEKEN whanau, where everyone is encouraged to be themselves, contribute their ideas, learn, and grow as part of one of the largest beer and cider brewing companies in the world spanning 70 countries. 

We believe diverse views make great brews, and the vibe in our team is very much reflected in our four values: PASSION for consumers and customers, CARE for people and planet, ENJOYMENT of life, and COURAGE to dream and pioneer.

We offer a great range of employee benefits and positive culture which includes:

• Monthly allowance of beer, RTDs, cider or zero alcohol beverages.
• A range of other benefits including free confidential counselling support, digital wills, feminine hygiene products, retail discounts and more.
• Free learning and wellbeing tools and leadership development programmes.
• As a member of Mind the Gap, we’re committed to addressing gender pay gaps and we’ve also supported the Pacific Pay Gap Inquiry.
• Free parking, and EV charging once a week.
• Onsite subsidised cafe