Stores People Partner - Central Zone (Central & East Midlands)

Location:

This is a truly regional role, giving you the opportunity to work across our locations throughout the Central & East Midlands (e.g., Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Birmingham, and Warwickshire).

You can expect to travel around 3–4 days per week, so you’ll need to be comfortable working flexibly and travelling regularly across the region

Why join us

Joining Sainsbury’s as a Stores People Partner means being part of a collaborative, future‑focused People team committed to driving meaningful change across our store estate. You will play a key role in shaping how our people plans come to life in stores, ensuring consistency of execution and supporting leaders to build high‑performing teams. With the opportunity to influence regional people strategy, support effective workforce planning, and continually improve the colleague experience, you’ll be making a tangible impact every day. This role offers challenge, variety, and the chance to grow your career in a fast‑paced, customer‑centric, and people‑driven environment.

What you'll do

As a Stores People Partner at Sainsbury’s, you will be responsible for delivering consistent, high‑quality execution of the people plan across all stores in your region, setting the standard for great people delivery under the leadership of the Regional People Partner. You will support workforce and talent and succession planning to ensure stores have the right people and skills in place, and use data, insight, and trends to identify risk stores, diagnose root causes, and agree targeted actions to improve performance, capability, absence, and engagement. You will review progress against people plans, work closely with store leadership teams to embed agreed actions, and carry out sampling and quality checks to ensure People products and processes are implemented consistently and effectively. Alongside this, you will lead the delivery of cyclical people activities - such as performance, engagement, talent and succession and support people‑impacting change projects including transformation by ensuring strong communication, clear expectations, and operational readiness in stores. By building strong, trusted partnerships with Store Managers, Store People Leads, and operational leaders, you will translate strategic priorities into practical, store‑ready actions that enhance colleague experience, build capability, and drive improved outcomes across your area.

Who you are

As a Stores People Partner for Sainsbury's, you are an experienced professional with a proven track record of delivering people plans within fast-paced, complex, commercial organisations. Your ability to collaborate effectively, analyse data, and support the delivery of people-impacting change projects is essential for translating strategic objectives into consistent execution that drives performance, capability, and colleague experience. With a focus on building strong relationships, championing continuous improvement, and driving business transformation, you lead by example and inspire a culture of excellence, always putting colleagues and customers first in every action you take.

Essential Criteria

• Demonstrable experience delivering people plans and cyclical people activities within a fast-paced, complex, commercial environment.
• Proven experience using people data to inform decisions, identify risk areas, track progress, and measure the impact of interventions.
• Evidence of supporting or implementing people-impacting change projects, including change management and communication.
• Ability to collaborate with diverse stakeholders, presenting insight clearly and enabling consistent delivery across multiple locations.
• Experience planning, coordinating, and executing talent, performance, and reward activities in line with organisational processes and timelines.
• Experience supporting workforce planning and resource forecasting activities.
• Ability to review performance and risk stores, identify root causes, and drive targeted actions.
• Experience conducting sampling or quality checks to ensure consistent implementation of people processes or products.

Please note this vacancy may close early if we receive a high level of interest

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. As the link between sellers and buyers, retail and head office, our retail operations team is the cog that keeps things running. With teams focused on store facing, labour, transformation, online, delivery and contact centre work, we touch almost every part of the business. It’s an incredibly fast-paced environment where you need to pivot not just daily, but often hourly. So while we plan all we can, it’s vital that we all think outside our job descriptions and look to optimise and improve how we do everything. There’s also a real team ethos. After all, it’s people like you who are going to truly transform this part of the business.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 10% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).