People Director - Level Shoes

For over seven decades, Chalhoub Group has been a partner and creator of luxury experiences in the Middle East. In its pursuit to excel as a hybrid luxury retailer, the Group has curated a portfolio of over 10 owned brands and strengthened its distribution and marketing expertise for over 400 international names across luxury fashion, beauty, jewellery, watches, eyewear, and art de vivre categories.

Every step at Chalhoub Group is taken to build a future where luxury dreams become reality — bridging cultures and crafting memorable experiences for our consumers. Be it by constantly reinventing itself, committing to innovation, or embracing new technologies, the Group is shaping the future of luxury retail. It delivers seamless omnichannel experiences across more than 950 stores, online platforms, and mobile apps. Driving this innovation journey is The Greenhouse — the Group’s innovation hub, incubator, and accelerator for startups and emerging businesses, regionally and globally.

Chalhoub Group fosters a people-at-heart culture rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and a workplace catalysed by forward thinking and future-proofing. Today, it brings together over 16,000 talented professionals across eight countries in the Middle East, with a presence in LATAM. Their collective efforts have earned the Group the Great Place to Work® certification in several markets.

Sustainability is at the core of the Group’s strategy, guided by a clear commitment to people, partners, and the planet. Chalhoub Group is proud to be a member of the United Nations Global Compact, a signatory of the Women’s Empowerment Principles, and to have pledged to reach Net Zero by 2040.

What you'll be doing  

In this role you will own the People and Culture strategy for Level Shoes on a global scale, ensuring the organisation has the leadership, capability, structure and culture required to deliver the growth and diversification ambitions. Drive the talent, performance and change agenda that gets it there.

Act as the CEO’s and Level leadership closest partner and most honest challenger on every decision that involves people.

People strategy and Business Partnering

• Translate Level’s commercial strategy into a people strategy with clear priorities, milestones and measures, and own its delivery.

• Act as trusted advisor and challenger to the CEO and the leadership team on all people, organisation and culture matters. Contribute to commercial decisions — not only to the people consequences of them.

Talent, Succession and Workforce Planning

• Build the workforce plan for the business including the roles, capabilities and numbers required over the short and long term, aligned to the business ambitions and expansion plans.

• Own talent identification, assessment, development as well as the succession for all leadership and critical roles.

• Drive the hiring of senior and business-critical roles in partnership with Group Talent Acquisition and executive search (when needed) and hold quality-of-hire to a world class standard.

• Design and sponsor the development of talent. Build visible career paths for the team and make internal mobility real rather than aspirational.

• Own the people cost line and strategic budgeting for the business in partnership with Finance and Commercial heads.

Performance Management and Reward Partnering

• Own the performance management agenda for the division: goal setting aligned to commercial targets, honest performance dialogue, calibration and consequence — both for the strong and the underperforming; ensure to keep reputation of Level Shoes as a high performing team and talent incubator.

• Partner with Group Rewards on the reward and incentive architecture for the division, ensuring that pay, grading and benefits remain externally competitive and internally coherent and that store and head office incentives drive the right behaviours and support omnichannel rather than channel conflict.

Organisation Design and Effectiveness

• Lead organisation design and effectiveness across the division globally (structures, spans, layers, role clarity, ways of working, etc.), sized for where the business is heading; continuousely and proactively evaluating evolving capability and structural requirements in line with the business strategy.

• Ensure to build and optimize global vs. HQ ways of working, structures, and accountabilities especially between the US and HQ in UAE.

Change Management and Transformation

• Lead the people side of major changes such as markets’ expansion, private label growth, the omnichannel / digital transformation, new systems’ implementations and any restructuring.

• Build the change capability of the leadership team, and ensure change is communicated, sequenced and landed rather than announced.

• Anticipate and manage the organisational risk in periods of rapid growth — capability gaps, span overload, key-person dependency and employee burnout.

Culture and Engagement

• Continue to uphold and implement the culture of Level including authenticity, agility, growth mindset, entrepreneurial spirit, continuous innovation and genuine accountability across all markets and functions as a key competitive advantage.

• Own people engagement measurement and, more importantly, the action that follows it; hold leaders accountable for the engagement of their teams; designing both total and functional engagement strategies.

• Shape the employee experience across the lifecycle (onboarding, recognition, career progression and retention).

Employee Relations, Data and Workforce Planning

• Ensure compliance with employment laws and regulatory requirements across markets and partner with the HR Operations team on employee relations matters and investigations with fairness and control.

• Utilize data to maximize the D&I agenda of Level Shoes across all factors; ensure to drive both the Nationalization and POD inclusivity strategy and successful integration.

• Establish the people data and reporting framework for the division (headcount, cost, turnover, org health metrics, productivity, etc.) and use it to make decisions and drive actions.

• Drive equity and fairness in all decisions across the board from exits to hiring, promotions, recognition and talent assessment.

What you’ll need to succeed  

 Experience

• 12–15 years in HR, with substantial time as a senior business partner to executive leadership.

• Experience in retail, fashion, luxury with solid understanding of a multi-brand environment.

• Must have an in-depth understanding of all ecommerce functions.

• Experience in omnichannel / digital is a must.

• Stays ahead of global and regional competitor/industry trends across retail, ecommerce, tech, private label, creative/marketing, and logistics to continuously provide strategic people advice that provides competitive advantage opportunities.

• Proven track record in organisation design, workforce planning and leading change through periods of rapid growth.

• Hands-on experience building talent, succession and leadership development agendas.

• Experience managing and dealing with multi-cultural teams. International or global expansion experience (exposure to the US is preferable)

Skills

• Strong commercial acumen, reading a P&L, framing people decisions in business terms and advising / challenging the leadership team when needed.

• Strategic ability and innovative mindset are crucial; ability to connect over-arching people strategy to short and medium-term business strategy/vision

• Strong on data, able to build and use people analytics to make decisions.

• Skilled coach to senior leaders, with the judgement to know when to support and when to challenge.

• Highly independent and willing to take an unpopular position with a strong commercial leadership team.

• High personal credibility and discretion; trusted with sensitive matters at the top of the business.

Education

• Degree in HR, Business, or a related field. Masters’ degree, CIPD, or equivalent professional qualification are a plus.