Payroll Manager

At MHR, our employees are central to our success and play a key role in helping customers achieve sustainable high performance. With a team of over 900 professionals, we work to make things flow smoothly, whether it's for large organisations or individual employees. As businesses face rapid changes in the world of work, our team is here to help them adapt and thrive.

By focusing on the core needs of efficiency, productivity, growth, and impact, our employees use their expertise to deliver real solutions through our People and Finance platform. This system, which covers finance, HR, payroll, and learning, helps businesses run more smoothly and make better decisions in real time.

With over 40 years of experience behind us, MHR's track record as a high-performance organisation is built on clear goals, a shared vision, and strong communication - all of which we pass on to our customers.

MHR is more than just a place to work; it's a platform for empowerment. Joining us means bringing innovation, technology, and teamwork seamlessly removes obstacles, enhances your skills, and allow you to focus on what's most important to you- work that matters.

With us, you'll grow, find your flow , and make a lasting difference in your career, your team, and your impact.

This role offers the opportunity to shape and influence the future direction of payroll expertise across Managed Services. You'll lead and develop Principal Payroll Analysts, strengthening specialist capability and creating depth of knowledge across the service. Working alongside Service Design, you'll define technical standards, sector specialisms, and best practice approaches that support long-term service growth and quality.

You'll continue to build your leadership experience while expanding your expertise in governance, risk management, and strategic service delivery. From supporting major payroll incidents and escalations to driving knowledge development and continuous improvement initiatives, you'll play a key role in shaping how payroll services evolve and scale.

You'll also deepen your influence across the wider business through collaboration with Product, Operations, and Service teams - providing specialist input into service enhancements and customer solutions.

Your Team

You'll lead a specialist payroll function at the heart of Managed Services, working closely with Principal Payroll Analysts, Operations Managers, Service Design, Product teams, and the Academy to drive service excellence. As a senior leader and technical expert, you'll develop specialist capability across the team, ensuring expertise is shared, scalable, and embedded throughout the organisation. You'll also collaborate with customers and key stakeholders, providing strategic payroll guidance and supporting service enhancements.

Your Impact

Your leadership will directly shape the quality, consistency, and reliability of payroll services across Managed Services. By defining and owning payroll control frameworks, service standards, and quality expectations, you'll ensure payroll services remain compliant, robust, and aligned to business objectives.

You'll lead the response to complex incidents and escalations, providing expert guidance while ensuring lessons learned are translated into stronger controls, improved knowledge, and better ways of working. Through proactive risk management and continuous improvement initiatives, you'll enhance service quality, strengthen operational resilience, and improve scalability.

Ultimately, you'll drive a culture of accountability, quality, and continuous improvement - ensuring teams, processes, and services consistently deliver exceptional outcomes for customers.

Benefits to support you personally and professionally

Alongside the opportunity to work with an incredible team and express your individuality, we offer a range of personalised benefits including:

• Access to over 60 internal training courses, professional qualifications, and cross-departmental mentoring and coaching programs
• 24/7 access to a GP through Help at Hand for you and your family, confidential mental health support, and paid sick leave
• Ability to purchase or sell additional holiday days beyond 25 days and bank holidays
• Enhanced Family leave
• My MHRewards offering discounts at over 900 retailers
• Monthly employee recognition program and departmental awards
• Referral bonus scheme of up to £2,000
• Employee-led social events such as running clubs, football teams, book clubs, and bake-offs
• On-site subsidised restaurants offering a variety of fresh meals daily
• Opt-in benefits schemes such as private medical insurance and dental coverage

We value the well being, financial stability, and inclusivity of our employees, and strive to provide a supportive working environment.

At MHR, we're completely committed to creating a supportive and inclusive workplace where all voices are heard, and everyone feels valued and supported.

Whatever your background, abilities and experiences, if you're excited by this role we want to hear from you. If you require assistance for an interview, please let us know and we'll make sure your needs are met when you arrive.

If we receive an exceptionally high volume of applications, we reserve the right to close this vacancy earlier than originally advertised.