People Operations Specialist

At Pencil, we are driving innovation in advertising technology through our state-of-the-art SaaS product, which harnesses Generative AI to redefine content creation. Our mission is to make AI the default in advertising without replacing creative people. To achieve this, we need to make sure that our technology isn’t just in the hands of big brands - we need to try to help small businesses and creative individuals too.

We’re looking for an experienced, proactive People Operations Specialist to join us on a permanent basis and play a hands-on role in scaling our team. You’ll own full recruitment cycles across multiple functions, build high-quality talent pipelines, and act as a trusted advisor to our hiring managers. This is a role for someone who loves pace, autonomy, and problem-solving - someone who can dive straight in, shape how we hire, and deliver exceptional results.

You’ll bring expertise, energy, and commercial thinking to help us elevate our hiring standards, develop stronger processes, and ensure every candidate has an outstanding experience.

Key responsibilities:

• Onboarding: manage the new joiner process end to end: offer-to-start logistics, account and equipment provisioning coordination with IT.

• HR tech stack: administer and maintain HiBob (HRIS), Ashby (ATS), and Remote (EOR), including workflows, permissions, and integrations between them as we scale.

• Data integrity: act as the steward of clean employee data across all systems. You won't run payroll, but you own ensuring the data feeding payroll inputs is accurate.

• Process documentation: create and maintain SOPs, checklists, and playbooks for onboarding, offboarding, and systems admin current as processes evolve, so nothing lives only in your head.

• Lifecycle administration: process employee lifecycle changes (promotions, transfers, terminations) accurately and on time across all systems.

• First-line support: be the go-to for employee questions on policies, benefits, and systems access, and know when to escalate.

• Compliance support: support compliance and audit requests tied to the systems and data you own (access reviews, data retention, audit evidence).

• Continuous improvement: you're inheriting a clean setup, not a messy one. Part of the job is noticing friction before it becomes a problem and fixing it.

Your background:

• You’ve worked in a high growth environment, ideally remotely and across multiple geographies.

• You’re comfortable owning HR tech - whether that’s building onboarding workflows and automations, or ensuring data integrity - our stack is across HiBob, Remote & Ashby - you've been the systems administrator, not just an end user.

• Experience running onboarding end to end, including cross-functional coordination with IT, finance, and hiring managers.

• Sharp attention to detail - you know how a small data error in one system creates a downstream mess in payroll.

• Comfortable working async across EMEA time zones as part of a distributed, remote team.

• Discretion and good judgment handling sensitive employee information.

• Experience with UK employment is a must, experience with French employment is a bonus.

You’ll Thrive Here If You…

• You're an Owner. You don't wait to be told the HR tech stack needs attention - you notice a HiBob field going stale or an Ashby workflow adding friction, and you just fix it.

• You're Fast. You'd rather ship a working onboarding flow this week and improve it next week than spend a month designing the perfect one. Getting a new joiner set up and productive matters more to you than getting every process pixel-perfect on the first try.

• You like Simple. You default to the fewest steps and the clearest doc, not the most sophisticated system. If a process needs a diagram and three exceptions to explain, you see that as a problem to solve, not a feature to document.

• You're Human, even with systems. You know onboarding and HR tech aren't just data entry - they're someone's first week at a new job, or a colleague's benefits question. You bring warmth to People Operations instead of treating people like tickets.

• You find Surprising in the unglamorous stuff. You get a kick out of turning a clunky, three-tool onboarding process into something a new hire actually notices and appreciates - the opposite of what people usually expect from "HR ops."

KPIs & Success Measures

• HiBob/Ashby/Remote data accuracy rate

• Time to resolve employee systems requests

• New hire satisfaction score on onboarding experience.

Benefits:

• 25 days PTO plus public holidays, although we operate a Flexible Time Off scheme

• Health insurance / private medical cover

• Monthly stipend towards wellness, fitness, and learning and development

• Remote - work from anywhere in your home country

• Enhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacy

• Access to our Pencil office in The Shard, London for UK employees

• Flexible working hours