HR Solutions Partner in Darmstadt

The Opportunity: What You'll Do

Employee Relations & Advisory Support

• disciplinary, grievance, absence, performance, and termination cases in Germany, ensuring timely coordination and appropriate escalation where required.
• Advise managers on employee relations matters and help identify ER risks in absence trends and engagement data.
• Manage absence cases including return-to-work, occupational health coordination, and statutory compliance.
• Provide practical HR advice on employment law topics in Germany; engage legal counsel or senior HR support when appropriate.
• Build trust through consistent, reliable HR advice and apply growing judgement by escalating cases with a proposed path rather than only raising issues.

Local Compliance, Policy & Reporting

• Keep country HR policies legally current and accessible; update promptly when legislation changes.
• Support statutory reporting obligations, including social declarations, labour inspectorate filings, gender and pay equity reporting.
• Ensure employment contracts, addenda, and HR documentation comply with German employment law and internal standards.
• Respond to requests from labour authorities, social security bodies, and equivalent institutions.
• Maintain awareness of relevant local employment law changes and proactively flag implications, required actions, or risk areas to the Cluster Lead or senior HR stakeholders.

Works Council Engagement

• Participate in works council meetings, prepared and aligned with stakeholders, and support a coherent HR position.
• Prepare consultation documentation, WC agreements, dossiers, and meeting briefings.
• Identify and flag consultation obligations and timelines proactively to key stakeholders.
• Train and advise managers on WC processes and obligations before situations arise.

Audit & Document Governance

• Keep Germany audit-ready for ISO and customer audits on relevant HR elements, collaborating across HR functions.
• Support mandatory archiving and retention of personnel files per local law and GDPR.
• Contribute to and validate local HR knowledge articles, templates, and policies.
• Maintain a structured country audit folder that is complete, current, and retrievable at any time.

HR Systems & Programme Execution

• Deliver global HR programmes locally — performance, compensation cycles, engagement surveys, and DEIB initiatives.
• Be the local expert and champion for Workday: train managers and employees on self-service and hold them accountable for usage.
• Manage HR requests through the ticketing system (ServiceNow); redirect transactional queries to HR Shared Services consistently and document handover.
• Produce regular country briefs covering ER status, absence trends, WC calendars, and compliance deadlines.
• Use HR data to identify patterns and share proactive insights with the HR Solutions leadership team and relevant stakeholders.
• Support onboarding activities where local HR input is required, including right-to-work checks, new starter documentation, and Workday data validation until fully automated or transitioned to HR Shared Services.

Continuous Improvement

• Identify opportunities to simplify or standardise country HR delivery and raise them with a concrete proposal.
• Own the country knowledge base — policies, templates, handbooks — ensuring content is current, compliant, and in plain language.
• Partner with HR Shared Services to improve the manager and associate experience in Workday and MyHR.
• Identify at least one simplification or improvement opportunity per quarter and follow through with a clear proposal and implementation support where agreed.
• Feed recurring Workday, MyHR, or process friction points back through the Cluster Lead and partner with HRSS on sustainable improvements.

Culture & One Avantor

• Operate within and reinforce the One Avantor HR framework in Germany, supporting consistent policies, standards, and associate experience across business units.
• Contribute to employee engagement and communication initiatives by helping managers and associates understand HR programmes, changes, and available support channels.

Avantor is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

Why Avantor?

Dare to go further in your career. Join our global team of 14,000+ associates whose passion for discovery and determination to overcome challenges relentlessly advances life-changing science. The work we do changes people's lives for the better. It brings new patient treatments and therapies to market, giving a cancer survivor the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle. It enables medical devices that help a little boy hear his mom's voice for the first time. Outcomes such as these create unlimited opportunities for you to contribute your talents, learn new skills and grow your career at Avantor. We are committed to helping you on this journey through our diverse, equitable and inclusive culture which includes learning experiences to support your career growth and success. At Avantor, dare to go further and see how the impact of your contributions set science in motion to create a better world.

EEO Statement

We are an Equal Employment/Affirmative Action employer and VEVRAA Federal Contractor. We do not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religious creed, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state/province, or local law. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at recruiting@avantorsciences.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Requests for accommodation will be considered on a case‑by‑case basis. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

Avantor®, a Fortune 500 company, is a leading global provider of mission-critical products and services to customers in the biopharma, healthcare, education & government, and advanced technologies & applied materials industries. Our portfolio is used in virtually every stage of the most important research, development and production activities in the industries we serve. One of our greatest strengths comes from having a global infrastructure that is strategically located to support the needs of our customers. Our global footprint enables us to serve more than 225,000 customer locations and gives us extensive access to research laboratories and scientists in more than 180 countries. We set science in motion to create a better world.