[Hiring] People and Talent Partner @Job Crystal

Role Description

A standalone role. One person, 20 hours a week, no team to manage, reporting directly to management. You will not lead an HR department. You are the HR function, and the scope is deliberately sized to 20 hours.

Recruiting and people development have been handled by management directly. That has worked, and it does not scale. Candidates wait too long, hiring processes get run inconsistently, development conversations happen when there is time rather than when they are due, and nothing is documented properly.

At 20 hours a week the priority order has to be honest. While a search is active, hiring process and candidate communication come first. Development work runs to an agreed quarterly rhythm.

You run this function independently and decide within agreed criteria. Offers, compensation and formal people decisions come to management with your recommendation.

What you own

• People and development.
• Run our quarterly development conversations with the team.
• Make sure every person has clear, written goals, and that those goals are properly recorded and kept up to date in Sage HR.
• Maintain our skills map in MuchSkills.
• Own onboarding as an experience, not a checklist.
• Be the person team members can raise something with when they do not want to go straight to management.
• Spot people issues early, come with a recommendation, and bring management in when formal action is needed.

Hiring process and candidate experience

• Own each search from brief to signed contract: write and publish the advert, manage applications, screen candidates and run first conversations.
• Run our existing hiring funnel consistently: application, culture test, case study, interview with management.
• Coordinate the external hiring partners we use for senior technical searches.
• Every candidate gets a meaningful update within two working days of each stage.
• Decide who progresses and who is declined in the early stages, within agreed criteria.
• Source directly where it is the right route for a specific search.

HR administration, shared

• Personnel files, sick notes, leave requests and onboarding logistics are split with our Office & Finance colleague in Germany.
• Employment contracts are drafted by German lawyers and administered in Germany.

Who we are looking for

• Three to six years in HR or people operations, ideally in a small company, a scale-up or an agency.
• Proven ownership of hiring processes.
• Comfortable holding a development conversation with someone more senior or more technical than you.
• Documentation discipline.
• Cross-cultural instinct.
• AI tools in your daily work.
• Fluent business English, written and spoken. German is not required.
• A reliable remote setup, including stable internet and power.

Nice to have, not required

• Experience hiring technical profiles: data, BI, software engineering.
• Experience hiring in South Africa specifically, including local salary benchmarks.
• Experience with Sage HR, MuchSkills or comparable HR and skills-mapping tools.
• Experience working for a company headquartered outside South Africa.

This role is not for you if ...

• You want to build an HR function from scratch and design your own strategy.
• You expect a team, a separate budget or direct reports.
• You prefer policy work to talking to people and moving decisions forward.
• You are uncomfortable telling management that something they decided is not working.
• You need a detailed brief for every task, or daily check-ins.
• A candidate sitting in the pipeline without an update would not bother you.

What you get

• Direct access to management.
• Real ownership of a function rather than a slice of one.
• A part-time role with genuine substance, not administrative leftovers.
• Full budget for the AI tools you want to use.
• A company that is actively growing its South African presence.
• Competitive compensation, discussed individually.

What the first months look like

• After 3 months: you own our open searches. Candidates get answers within days, not weeks.
• After 6 months: every team member has current, documented goals in Sage HR and a current skills profile in MuchSkills.

Monthly Salary

R - R