HR Compliance and Payroll Manager

Click Learning is tackling South Africa’s education crisis with smart, scalable solutions that make a real difference. We deliver interactive online programmes that boost literacy, numeracy, and digital skills for primary school learners in under-resourced communities. By combining technology with on-the-ground support, we’re helping children build the foundations they need for long-term success and to build sustainable livelihoods. As a secondary outcome, we create jobs for previously unemployed youth to support in the schools and provide them with skills development to move onto better employment opportunities.

We’re growing—and we’re looking for people who want their work to matter. Click Learning is one of the leading EdTech organisations in Africa. With rapid growth over the past few years and now maturing as an organisation, Click reaches over 235,000 learners in 307 schools across 4 provinces. With over 1,100 staff — spanning on-site facilitators, regional programme staff, and executive leadership — we operate at real scale. This role is central to ensuring our people operations run like a precision engine.

This role:
This is not a traditional HR generalist role. We are looking for someone who has strong systems thinking and operates with the rigour of a compliance officer. You will design, build, and run HR and IR processes that scale. You will own payroll accuracy, IR resolution timelines, compliance reporting, and people data integrity across a large, geographically dispersed workforce. This is an exciting challenge for anyone who has experience with scale whilst maintaining cost efficacy. The non-negotiables are analytical rigour & a love for data, process design capability, and a genuine appetite for strong HR and compliance work.

Key traits we are looking for:

• Systems thinker — designs scalable processes, not one-off solutions
• Data-driven — comfortable with numbers, analytics, and reporting
• Compliance-focused — thrives on accuracy, organisation, SLAs, and audit readiness
• Pragmatic risk manager — balances labour compliance with operational reality
• Process designer — designs and builds repeatable systems, not ad hoc fixes
• Speed at scale — resolves IR and HR queries within defined SLAs

Key responsibilities:

1. Design and maintain scalable HR systems and processes for onboarding, offboarding, contracting, and records management across 1,100+ staff within resource constrained environment.
2. Own end-to-end payroll review on a monthly basis, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and clean audit outcomes across employee and facilitator categories. This includes all related statutory returns and submissions.
3. Assume full ownership of industrial relations: oversee all disciplinary processes, grievances, and CCMA matters with speed, consistency, and sound legal grounding.
4. Develop and enforce clear IR case management protocols — ensuring no case sits unresolved beyond agreed SLAs, and that managers are equipped to handle first-line issues independently.
5. Build and maintain HR dashboards and reporting: headcount, leave liability, IR pipeline, contract status, and compliance metrics — available on demand to leadership.
6. Manage full labour law compliance with BCEA, LRA, COIDA, EEA, and POPIA requirements — including statutory reporting, equity planning, and workplace health and safety oversight.
7. Create and maintain policy documentation that is clear, current, and operationally implementable — work with the talent team to train managers to apply it consistently.
8. Manage the salary budget with the Chief of Staff: tracking against budget, flagging variances, and reporting on workforce cost projections.

You'll thrive in this role if you bring:

• Exceptional attention to detail, with strong analytical and numeric ability
• A data-driven approach to decision-making
• A proven ability to develop processes and deploy systems at scale
• Composure under pressure and the ability to think on your feet
• Critical, outcomes- and solution-based thinking
• Energy and initiative — a self-starter who works independently
• A pragmatic approach to compliance — understanding the gap between policy and the field
• A willingness to learn, adapt, and continuously improve systems
• An understanding that taking full accountability and ownership delivers real outcomes

Qualifications & Experience we are looking for:

• Bachelor's degree in HR, Law, Business, Engineering, or a related analytical discipline.
• Minimum 5 years' experience managing HR, IR, and/or payroll operations across large workforce— or equivalent experience in operations/general management with significant HR responsibility.
• Demonstrable track record of designing and implementing HR or operational processes at scale (500+ employees strongly preferred).
• Hands-on experience managing CCMA cases, disciplinary hearings, and navigating South African labour law.
• Strong payroll systems experience; proficiency in spreadsheets, pivot tables, formulas, and HR reporting tools.
• Experience in project/process management.

Key compliance areas: BCEA · LRA · COIDA · EEA · POPIA · CCMA