Senior Manager, People Experience

About Us

Our vision is to be the world’s leading social travel platform.

We are on a mission to help travellers find their people and create unforgettable moments together. Connections matter as much as destinations, and we are building a global ecosystem to enable them.

Since the launch of our social network in the hostelling category in 2022, Hostelworld has experienced transformational growth. We have successfully welcomed over 2.6 million social members to our platform, proving the strong demand for connection in travel. This vibrant community is not just booking trips; they are actively engaging, co-creating, and becoming our most powerful brand advocates. The platform is rich with user-generated content, including a rapidly growing volume of customer testimonials and authentic travel stories that provide powerful social proof.

The growth in engagement is remarkable: the number of messages sent between travellers has grown significantly faster than the number of trips booked by social members, demonstrating the deep social utility of our platform. This momentum is reflected in our robust financial health, underscored by a strong balance sheet powered by an asset-light, cash-generative business model.

We are not just another Online Travel Agent (OTA); we have created a new category of travel altogether: Social Travel. Our singular focus on helping travellers find people to hang out with is the foundation of our strategy. It has allowed us to build a powerful and defensible market position, which attracts highly valuable customers and shifts more of our business onto our mobile-native apps.

While our app and social features create a sticky user experience, our true competitive moat stems from the incredibly rich, proprietary data set generated by our social network. As our community grows, so does the value of this data, creating a compounding network effect that is nearly impossible to replicate. This "social flywheel" allows us to understand traveller behaviour, predict needs, and personalise experiences in ways that generalist OTAs cannot match. It is the engine that will power our long-term, differentiated growth and solidify our position as the sole player in the Social Travel category we created.

The Opportunity

This vacancy arises to support a period of personal leave for one of our team. It will be a 10 month fixed term contract to enable us to continue delivering exciting people projects in 2026. We’re excited to welcome a new person to our People team on a full time FTC basis to support the people agenda across all of our locations as well as supporting our employees at every stage of their journey. You must be based in, and have the required permissions to work in, Ireland.

LOCATION

This role is based in Ireland. We have an office hub in Dublin City Centre available for those who prefer a hybrid model where you can spend time with colleagues in-person. The People Team typically come together in person once a week in our Dublin office hub.

Our Culture

The People Team at Hostelworld exists to enable people to connect, learn, and deliver by providing cost-effective products that equip managers to help realise the potential in every person. We support everyone to nurture a culture that lives through everyday interactions. That culture is built around our shared love of travel. Over the past 25 years, we have learned, through the good and bad times, the power of combining a start-up spirit with experience. Being resourceful matters to us. We protect carefully the agility our scale brings – driving focus, speed and connections. It helps us to always do the right thing, by all our stakeholders – our people, customers, partners and our planet.

The Role‍‍

As Senior Manager, People Experience you’ll lead the delivery of a positive employee journey by optimising HR technology, streamlining people processes and deliver a frictionless employee experience for our global teams. You’ll support the wider People Team with a range of important project work in 2026, including preparing for the Pay Transparency Directive, Global Payroll review and, leveraging AI. You’ve got to be open to new challenges, as the list will change during the year as we learn more about our employee needs. To be successful in this role you must have a customer-centric, agile and continuous improvement mindset, and a proven ability to leverage technology and data to elevate the employee experience. Attention to detail and anticipating blocks to a positive employee experience are essential in this role.

This is a strategic and hands‑on role that blends operational excellence, service delivery leadership, and people experience innovation within a fast-paced e-commerce environment. This role reports to the CPO and has two direct reports.

The role will require you to be able to see the big picture as well as roll your sleeves up. There is always lots to do across all the activities in the employee life cycle, to ensure we deliver HR excellence across all our locations. That requires an ability to focus on short term activities whilst delivering on longer term projects.

What You'll Do ‍

People Experience & Operations

• Deliver an exceptional employee experience at each point of the employee lifecycle.
• Lead the People Operations team to deliver service excellence, operational consistency and continuous improvement.
• Ensure compliance with employment law, GDPR and policy standards across all locations.
• Drive the enhancement of HR processes, systems and administrative frameworks.
• Oversee global payroll operations in partnership with finance teams and third‑party providers.
• Oversee delivery of the annual Performance Development cycle, ensuring processes and systems are effective and user‑friendly.
• Build strong relationships with leaders and team members, ensuring a high‑support, high‑trust service culture.
  
  

Recruitment & Talent Acquisition

• Oversee the end‑to‑end recruitment process, ensuring a seamless candidate experience.
• Partner with hiring teams to understand role requirements, workforce planning needs and capability gaps.
• Implement recruitment strategies that attract diverse, high‑quality talent across all markets.
• Own and optimise the applicant tracking system (ATS), ensuring hiring workflows are efficient, data‑driven and compliant.
• Leverage AI‑enabled sourcing, screening and assessment tools to enhance hiring speed, quality and fairness.
• Ensure recruitment policies and processes are up to date and aligned with best practice.
• Develop and optimise employee onboarding and offboarding experiences.
  
  

Technology, Data, AI & Analytics

• Own and continuously improve the HR Tech Stack to create a seamless digital experience, ensuring systems are integrated, intuitive and scalable.
• Contribute to AI‑enabled HR strategy, identifying opportunities where automation and generative AI can streamline workflows, enhance employee interactions and support better decision‑making.
• Leverage HR analytics and AI‑driven insights to inform decision‑making, identify trends, and drive proactive improvements across the employee lifecycle.
• Ensure all HR systems, workflows and data structures support operational efficiency, compliance, and robust data governance.
  
  

Project Delivery

• Maximise our HR Tech: Lead delivery of our 2026 roadmap to continuously improve our HR tech and enhance the employee digital experience.
• Pay Transparency: Support activities needed to ensure we meet the requirements of the upcoming Pay Transparency Directive. We have already begun to prepare. We see an opportunity to focus on skills and competency mapping, so any experience you have in this area is welcome.
• Global Payroll Enhancement: Optimize of payroll for 12 locations and EOR arrangements, focusing on accuracy, scalability, and enhanced vendor management.
  
  

What We’re Looking For

You’re likely working in a startup environment and want to keep that way of working, while getting the benefit of learning from 25 years of experience in a company listed on the London Stock Exchange. Or you could also be in a large organisation and want to have an opportunity to work more closely with business decision makers. You could also be coming from some other experience that will allow you to bring:

Experience & Qualifications

• 10+ years’ broad generalist experience managing end to end employee lifecycle activity across multiple locations (experience within in a fast-growing e-commerce environment an advantage)
• CIPD accreditation or a third level qualification in Human Resources, Organisational Behaviour, or a related field
• Proven experience leading and developing HR/People Ops teams.
• Experience of managing and implementing cloud-based HR technology solutions (HiBob and Teamtailor experience a plus)
• Experience of outsourced payroll processes and experience working closely with third party providers.
• Skilled at leading and delivering projects and balancing project management with operational demand.
• People analytics and reporting capability to support people related decisions.
• AI & Automation: Proficient in identifying and implementing automation opportunities, including the deployment of People Team AI products to improve operational efficiency and employee experience.
• A knowledge of current employment legislation with experience across multiple jurisdictions (Ireland, UK, Portugal) and previous employee relations experience preferable.
  
  

Knowledge & Skills

• Relationship Builder: How you work with others matters to us. You won't hear anyone say “that’s not my job.” We require people to have strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to communicate and build strong relationships across all levels of the organisation. You will have strong English language skills, both written and verbal.
• Data Driven: We use data to influence and drive decisions. You’ll bring analytical and project management skills, proven ability to design clear processes, and a very detail oriented yet flexible approach to problem solving.
• Creative Mindset: Things don’t always work exactly the way we want. You’ll have the ability to innovate and think creatively to find solutions quickly to improve HR processes and systems
• Customer centric: We are a highly customer focused team. You’ll bring a strong commitment to providing excellent HR service with attention to detail, discretion and confidentiality.
• Deliver: One of our core Hostelworld behaviours is Deliver and we have an ambitious People Plan for 2025. You will be highly organised, with strong prioritisation skills and the capability to independently manage multiple priorities simultaneously in a fast-moving environment.
• Cultural Fit: We build inclusion into everything we do. To integrate into our culture, you’ll have a passion for travel, curiosity about the solo travel experience, and a commitment to fostering a positive, inclusive workplace culture.
  
  

What We Offer

• Competitive salary & benefits
• Enhanced annual leave plus 3 Wellbeing Days per year
• Paid family leave (maternity, paternity, surrogacy & adoption)
• Agile working (plus a Working from Abroad Policy!)
• Support for your ongoing growth & development
• Inclusive people policies (sickness, menopause, compassionate and fertility leave)
• A chance to give back to your local community with 5 paid volunteering days
  
  

OUR BEHAVIOURS

• Grow others - We fundamentally believe that investing in growing others benefits everyone, whether it's helping them develop hard or soft skills. We want learning and growing to be part of our DNA to help makes us a better team, together.
• Master it - We are obsessed with our area of expertise and enjoy developing our skills. We rarely take things at face value; we investigate, interrogate, and always look for ‘the why,’ and wherever possible, we use data to find the best solution.
• Collaborate - We are in it together, for the tough stuff and the celebrations too. To achieve the best results, we need expertise from all areas of the organisation, and we wholeheartedly welcome diverse thinking.
• Adapt - We work fluidly, adapting to new information and the evolving environment while staying committed to our goals. Innovation and experimentation fuel our projects and we’re never afraid to pivot.
• Deliver - Our focus is always on the end result; we value outcomes over activity. We collaborate to deliver work at speed without dropping any of our other behaviours.
  
  

We believe in talented and diverse teams that reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Everyone brings different perspectives and experiences. We lay out the above requirements to guide applicants to the experiences that we believe will allow you to be successful in the role. If you don’t meet them all, please consider applying if you think you can still perform the role as described.

Hostelworld Group Plc is a ground‐breaking social network powered OTA focused on the hostelling category.

Hostelworld Group PLC is a ground-breaking social network powered Online Travel Agent (“OTA”) focused on the hostelling category, with a clear mission to help travellers find people to hang out with. Our mission statement is founded on the insight that most travellers go hostelling to meet other people, which we facilitate through a series of social features on our platform that connect our travellers in hostels and cities based on their booking data. The strategy has been extraordinarily successful, generating significant word of mouth recommendations from our customers and strong endorsements from our hostel partners.

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Ireland, Hostelworld is a well-known trusted brand with almost 230 employees, hostel partners in over 180 countries, and a long-standing commitment to building a better world. To that end, our focus over the last few years has been on improving the sustainability of the hostelling industry. In particular, over the last two years we have commissioned independent research to validate the category’s sustainability credentials, and recently introduced a hostel specific sustainability framework which encourages our hostel partners to move to even more sustainable operations and also provides the data points for our customers to make more informed decisions about where they stay. In addition, our customers are now able to offset their trip’s carbon emissions should they wish to do so, and we have maintained our ‘Taking Climate Action’ label awarded by South Pole.