HR Business Partner – RBS & EHS - GBS Americas

HR Business Partner – RBS & EHS - GBS Americas

SGS is the global leader in inspection, testing and certification, setting the international benchmark for quality and integrity. Through GBS by SGS, we centralize essential services such as Finance, Human Resources, IT and Procurement to drive efficiency and innovation. Our GBS Americas hub in Bogotá supports transformation across Latin America and North America, enabling smarter operations and delivering exceptional value to our clients worldwide.

The HR Business Partner (HRBP) for RBS & EHS is a senior strategic role responsible for shaping, enabling, and strengthening the People and Organization system of a rapidly expanding global function. This position exists to build long-term organizational sustainability, drive capability growth, ensure operational readiness, and mitigate people and legal risks across RBS & EHS teams in the Americas.

This HRBP acts as the integrator between global EHS functional leadership, RBS operations, the Bogotá Service Center, HR Centers of Expertise (TA, Learning, Rewards), and GBS Manila—ensuring a unified talent architecture, consistent people processes, and scalable leadership routines across all hubs.

The HRBP for RBS & EHS will serve as the strategic architect of all people-related systems required to stabilize, professionalize, and scale Remote Business Support and Environmental Health & Safety operations across the Americas. This role is responsible for designing and maintaining the end-to-end talent system, including organizational structure, workforce planning, leadership capability, talent pipelines, and long-term succession architecture. A core responsibility is to lead the creation of career ladders, capability matrices, and role families that bring clarity, transparency, and predictability to career growth within these rapidly scaling functions.

The HRBP will act as the principal business partner for RBS and EHS leaders—local (Bogotá), regional (Americas) and global—ensuring alignment of priorities, decisions, and people strategies across hubs. This includes facilitating leadership routines, enabling decision-right clarity, and ensuring that communication across GBS, RBS and EHS flows consistently and reliably. The role will also define and drive the People & Organization health cycle, including monthly dashboards, quarterly Org Health Reviews, leadership effectiveness assessments, talent reviews, and interventions for organizational bottlenecks.

Critically, this role serves as the guardian of employee relations, risk mitigation and compliance within Colombia and across the Americas region, ensuring subordination-risk controls, governance clarity, adherence to labor law, escalation protocols, and crisis management routines. It is also accountable for integrating performance and development systems—such as MyVoice engagement insights, performance management, succession planning, workforce upskilling, and leadership development—into a cohesive and actionable roadmap for RBS & EHS.

1. Strategic HR Partnership

• Serve as the primary HR thought partner to RBS & EHS leaders at local, regional, and global levels.
• Translate business priorities into a clear People Strategy across talent, capabilities, workforce planning, engagement, and organizational effectiveness.
• Provide data-driven insights using organization dashboards (attrition, spans/layers, productivity, absenteeism, manager load, quality-of-hire).
• Drive leadership routines that reinforce focus, accountability, and operational excellence.

2. Organization Design, Workforce Planning & Leadership Effectiveness

• Lead workforce planning and structural design to support growth, scalability, and operational continuity.
• Evaluate spans and layers, role clarity, organizational load, and team capacity—recommending redesigns where needed.
• Partner with leaders to strengthen managerial capability, succession depth, and readiness for future scale.
• Facilitate Quarterly Org Health Reviews, converting insights into targeted actions.

3. Career Architecture & Growth Pathways (Critical Priority)

• Build the end-to-end career architecture for RBS & EHS, including:
• Role families and job ladders
• Leveling framework and capability matrices
• Technical and leadership competency models
• Transparent progression criteria and mobility pathways
• Partner with Learning & Development to design robust development journeys, technical certification alignment, and 30-60-90 onboarding roadmaps.

4. Talent Acquisition & Capability Building

• Act as functional leader for the dedicated TA cell (two TA Partners), ensuring prioritization, SLAs, and hiring quality.
• Co-own the RBS–EHS Hiring Playbook and ensure consistency in interview standards, assessments, and selection decisions.
• Build internal feeder pools through structured capability development, targeted learning programs, and a 6-week "RBS–EHS Academy" for upskilling.
• Drive diversity, mobility, retention, and succession outcomes.

5. Culture, Engagement & Employee Experience

• Lead engagement action planning cycles and partner with leaders to strengthen team climate, recognition, inclusion, and psychological safety.
• Deploy SGS "BeneFITS" offerings to enhance wellbeing, resilience, and productivity (EAP, mental health, ergonomics, recognition programs).
• Ensure employee experience consistency across recruitment, onboarding, performance, and development touchpoints.

6. Employee Relations, Compliance & Risk Mitigation

• Act as the guardian of labor compliance, ethical standards, and risk mitigation across Colombia and the broader Americas region.
• Lead subordination-risk controls through:
• Solid/dotted-line governance
• Delegation of Authority (DoA)
• Clear SOPs and decision matrices
• Manage ER cases with discipline, rigor, and consistency, ensuring fairness and alignment to local law and SGS policies.
• Conduct root-cause analyses for ER, governance, or performance issues and implement preventive actions.

7. Governance, Operating Model & Cross-Hub Alignment

• Co-lead the creation and deployment of the RBS–EHS Service Charter (SLAs, OLAs, escalation paths, ownership).
• Drive cross-hub alignment between Bogotá, Manila, and NAM EHS functional teams.
• Support Change Control Board (CCB) governance for scope changes, overtime, and capacity management.
• Ensure onboarding and system access processes are executed consistently, partnering closely with Global IT.

The role requires a seasoned HR professional with extensive experience in strategic HR business partnering within complex, multi-hub, high-growth operational environments. The ideal candidate brings at least 8–10 years of progressive HR responsibility, with demonstrated experience designing and implementing talent systems, organizational structures, and capability frameworks in shared services, operations, or technical safety/field environments.

Prior experience supporting functions that operate under regulatory frameworks (such as EHS, compliance-oriented operations, or customer-facing service platforms) is highly beneficial, as is experience partnering with global leadership teams across multiple time zones. The HRBP must have a deep understanding of Latin American labor laws, particularly in Colombia, as well as exposure to matrix structures with dotted and solid lines. Experience managing ER cases, crafting SOPs, and implementing governance mechanisms (DoA, service charters, escalation protocols) is essential.

This individual should be fluent in English and Spanish, comfortable operating in high-pressure, high-growth contexts, and adept at building trust with leaders at all levels—from local supervisors to global executives. Experience leading cultural transformation, running talent reviews, facilitating workforce analytics, and deploying employee engagement programs is expected.

The HRBP must demonstrate strategic foresight, the ability to anticipate organizational needs, and the capability to translate operational complexity into clear people strategies. Strong consulting and influence skills are essential, particularly in navigating matrix environments and balancing global functional priorities with local operational realities. The role requires a high degree of communication excellence, not only for leader engagement but also to maintain consistent messaging and alignment across RBS, EHS, and GBS.

A strong analytical mindset is critical: the HRBP must interpret data, diagnose organizational health issues, identify talent risks, and propose actionable interventions. Equally important is organizational courage—the ability to challenge assumptions, escalate concerns, and recommend structural or leadership changes when needed. This role also requires execution discipline, ensuring that governance routines, talent cycles, onboarding processes, and access workflows are implemented with consistency and reliability.

Empathy, listening, and people-centric leadership are foundational competencies, as the HRBP will often support teams navigating ambiguity, workload pressure, and process transitions. The ideal candidate balances firmness with diplomacy, risk mitigation with business pragmatism, and long-term capability building with short-term operational stability.

Success in this role will be measured by the HRBP's ability to stabilize the workforce, strengthen leadership capability, and create a coherent, scalable people system for RBS & EHS. Key indicators include: