Head of People & Talent (f/m/x)

About Lemon.markets

Our mission is to provide better opportunities to invest in capital markets. By empowering FinTechs and Banks to offer investment products, we help create financial well-being for their customers. In pursuit of this goal, we strive to open 100 million securities accounts within Europe this decade.

lemon.markets builds infrastructure for financial services and technology companies powering the next generation of investment products. From enabling a FinTech to launch their first investment product, to allowing a Neobank to embed investing into their product, we bring investing into a completely new context. Our API-first infrastructure makes launching an investment product customer-centric and compliant. We abstract all complexity for our partners through a well-documented API, a self-service customer operations portal, and a clear regulatory framework, enabling partners to launch in weeks, not months.

We have experienced first-hand that brokerage infrastructure is broken. Building an investment product used to be highly expensive, challenging, and cumbersome. We ease this pain by shielding our partners & their customers from the underlying complexity, making investing more accessible to everyone. This is exactly what we enjoy—going to places nobody else dares and solving hard problems. This not only creates tons of value when done right but also attracts the smartest minds. Outlier companies are built by exceptional (& diverse) people like you.

Your Mission:

As a Head of People & Talent at lemon.markets, you will take full accountability to lead our efforts in attracting, retaining, and developing top-tier talent while building a strong company culture that aligns with our principles and growth trajectory. This role is critical for ensuring that lemon.markets has the right frameworks and processes in place to enable every lemoneer to grow to their full potential and to achieve our ambitious goals. Given lemon.markets early stage, you will be working both very strategically, when implementing new ideas & frameworks, as well as very hands-on when helping teams to bring their ideas to life.

Reporting directly to our CEO, Max, you will lead our stellar Talent and People team and represent these function in our senior leadership team. Thereby, working closely with your peers and the entire executive leadership team (ELT) to ensure all lemoneers are set up for success. Key pillars of the role include:

• Talent: Own all recruiting efforts at lemon.markets, developing & implementing effective strategies to attract great people. Customer first in everything we do: delivering a seamless and delightful candidate experience through onboarding and beyond.
• Business Partnering: Partner with leaders across the company to help them grow the lemoneers in their teams by implementing the right frameworks and trainings.
• Culture Building: Create initiatives to measure and enhance our people-first performance culture as we scale through our next phase of growth and improve the overall employee experience.
• People Ops: Help us improve our people operations support, providing a great service to all lemoneers setting a high standard of performance.
  
  

You will:

Talent & Recruitment:

• Develop our hiring plan and implement scalable hiring strategies, including employer branding, outreach, and assessment processes.
• Lead our Talent team to execute full-cycle recruitment efforts for all roles, from entry-level to senior leadership positions, as well as own the hiring for important positions yourself.
• Build and maintain a pipeline of high-caliber candidates, leveraging networks, sourcing platforms, and partnerships with external recruiters. Oversee and optimize the candidate experience from initial contact through onboarding.
  
  

Business Partnering:

• Act as a strategic partner to the leadership team, advising on talent and culture-related challenges and opportunities.
• Drive the design and implementation of initiatives that support (personal &) leadership development, team collaboration, and a strong sense of community.
• Create and design initiatives, to keep our employee retention & satisfaction as great as it is. Drive the iteration of our feedback framework and performance management tools.
• Collaborate with finance and leadership to continue making data-driven compensation decisions and support the company in evolving its compensation packages to remain competitive.
  
  

Leadership & Culture Building:

• Develop, implement, and continuously improve HR policies and practices fostering a positive, inclusive, and high-performance work environment, promoting company culture and vision.
• Lead diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts to ensure a diverse, equitable, and welcoming workplace.
• Drive company events and activities that build lemoneer culture and morale and ensure the office is a great place to work.
• Continuously review our Guiding Principles, ensuring they depict our ways of working
  
  

People Operations:

• Oversee People process of handling employee relations matters, conflict resolution, disciplinary actions, and investigations.
• With the People team, administer employee benefits, perks, and programs to enhance work-life balance and employee satisfaction.
• Lead by example, to support with automation of workflows in order to make life at lemon.markets more efficient for everyone.
• Ensure compliance with local, state, and federal labor laws and employment regulations (in particular Germany) and help manage the broad range of operational People topics.
  
  

You will be successful if:

• You possess a growth mindset and have operated in scaling an international tech company. You have a thirst to develop beyond Talent and People topics. Bonus points for scaleup tech hiring experience.
• You have a sharp eye for what ‘quality’ looks like, are creative and data-driven in equal measure, keep our managers in the loop at all times. You are generous with your expertise and share insights on continuously improving engagement and culture topics.
• You possess a strong understanding of people operations, including compensation, benefits, employee relations, and organizational development.
• You are ready and willing to take ownership. “This is not my job!” is not part of your vocabulary - you identify problems, take initiative to take them on and challenge the status quo.
• You’re a people-centric, solution-oriented person who isn’t afraid of tackling a variety of people projects and bringing in just the right amount of process as needed, whether this is onboarding, HRIS admin, salary benchmarking or employee engagement initiatives.
• Knowledge of employment law and compliance, specifically in Germany
• Experience with HR tech and tools to automate and optimize recruitment and people operations processes.
• You enjoy working autonomously and as part of a team. You are comfortable prioritizing your own workload and are ready to ask for support internally or externally as the need arises.
• You possess strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate with stakeholders at all levels with a passion for fostering a positive and dynamic company culture that aligns with company principles and goals.
• Industry experience: we don’t require previous FinTech experience, yet expect your journey so far to include significant time in a software company, ideally from Series A/B and beyond. Most important: you were in a company that cared deeply about providing great people experiences.
  
  

How we take care of you:

Competitive compensation package: We will offer you a mix of cash and stock options based on your appetite for upside.

Make a real impact: Shape the experience for our customers and us alike. Decide on tools, processes and the architecture design of our system, while building, learning and growing together.

Flexible working hours: We value focus time. Encouraging everyone to minimize fixed meetings and leverage asynchronous communication.

Build your perfect setup: MacBook, IDE, productivity tools. These are not expenses but investments. Please tell us what is needed to make you productive, and we will take care of it.

Hybrid Work: We all believe that in-person collaboration is an integral part of working together, but we offer flexibility to work from home across Europe. That means leadership lemoneers work 7 days or more per month on-site & we come together for a team off-site twice a year.

Grow with us: We take your personal development seriously, ensuring that we constantly mentor and challenge you. You will have access to a wide network of highly experienced technical leaders, enabling you to advance on your personal trajectory.

Create your perfect setup: Whether you are starting a family or pursuing a passion on the side, we want to offer you a setting that fits your current stage in life.

As an equal opportunity employer, lemon.markets is committed to building an inclusive workplace. The company welcomes people from all different backgrounds, including age, citizenship, ethnic and racial origins, gender identities, individuals with disabilities, marital status, religions and ideologies, and sexual orientations to apply.

About the process:

• Introductory Call - Teresa - Chief of Staff | 45 minutes
• Deep Dive - Max - CEO | 60 minutes
• Culture at lemon.markets - Markus - MD Front office | 60 minutes
• Meet us @lemon.markets HQ
• Case Study - Max, Laura P, Teresa | 60 minutes
• Meet the team: Melissa - Talent Partner, Laura - Sr People Manager | 45 minutes
• Principles Session - A selection of lemoneers | 45 minutes