GiveDirectly is the first - and largest - nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to the world’s poorest. They operate under the belief that people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives, and cash enables that choice.
The Head of People role is a strategic leadership position responsible for ensuring that the People function acts as a primary driver of organizational performance
—including talent density, speed, quality, and reliability—rather than solely a compliance, people support, or administrative team.
Key Responsibilities (What you'll do):
- Make talent a competitive advantage: Raise the hiring bar; build a repeatable “hiring machine” (calibration, principles/values assessment, structured loops, quality-at-30/90 days). Build a proactive network and bench for executive and scarce roles.
- Design performance + rewards: Implement a lightweight, high-signal performance system tied to development and consequences; refresh compensation and total rewards to attract and retain top talent in our markets while preserving our lean model and staying economically efficient as an organization.
- Be the steady employee relations advisor: Lead on sensitive personnel matters with discretion and fairness; support investigations, safeguarding, crisis response, and change communications.
- Coach and level up leadership: Partner with the CEO/COO and executives on org design, succession, and leadership effectiveness; intervene early to raise or replace when needed.
- Build scalable global people ops: Improve HRIS/workforce tools; standardize core processes; ensure compliant, efficient operations across countries (subsidiaries, contractors, EOR/PEO) in close partnership with Finance and Legal.
- Strengthen culture and engagement: Ensure our values are felt and lived across the organization; that staff are supported to be at their best thanks to inclusive practices that build growth, trust, belonging, creativity, and execution speed.
- Own people analytics: Ship leadership dashboards (headcount, hiring velocity/quality, retention, eNPS/voice, performance distribution) to inform decisions and accountability.
- Operate with leverage: Keep the People team small, senior, and high-output; set SLAs, clarify ownership, and continuously remove friction for program and fundraising teams.
Candidate Profile (What we’re looking for):
- People-as-performance operator: Must possess strong business acumen and a track record of utilizing the People function as a strategic driver of organizational outcomes (talent density, speed, quality, and reliability).
- A builder in lean, distributed environments: Demonstrated success in building simple, scalable systems (hiring, performance, rewards, workforce models, HRIS) across multiple countries and regulatory contexts, coupled with high judgment on necessary tradeoffs under tight constraints.
- Trusted pair of hands for complex employee relations: Proven depth in handling sensitive employee relations, risk management, and safeguarding across very diverse contexts and cultural settings; must be calm, discreet, and principled.
- Exceptional leader and manager: Ability to recruit, calibrate, and develop senior talent; proven ability to set a high bar; and capacity to build a small, high-leverage team with an effective operating cadence that scales.
- First-principles, outcome oriented problem solver: A structured, analytical thinker capable of disaggregating complex problems, designing solutions from first principles, iterating quickly, and measuring tangible results.
- Varied context experience: Comfort moving effectively between private sector and NGO settings and adapting to different organizational sizes; able to incorporate best practices from both models into GiveDirectly’s framework.
Qualifications
- Minimum requirement of BA/BSc/HND.
