Workday Absence Functional Consultant - 12 month + contract (daily rate UK, hourly rate USA)

WPP is the transformation company. We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients, and communities.

Working at WPP means being part of a global network of more than 100,000 accomplished people in 110 countries. We create transformative ideas and outcomes for its clients through an integrated offer of communications, experience, commerce, and technology. WPP and our award-winning agencies work with most of the world's biggest companies and organisations – from Ford, Unilever and P&G to Google, HSBC, and the UN. Our clients include 61 of the FTSE 100, 325 of the Fortune Global 500, all 30 of the Dow Jones 30 and 62 of the NASDAQ 100.

WPP has headquarters in New York, London and Singapore and a corporate presence in major markets worldwide. We are quoted on the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Key performance indicators for WPP (2020) include Billings of £46.9bn and Revenue of £12bn.

Visit our LinkedIn page to see what we're up to!

Why we're hiring:

WPP IT provides IT services for WPP, the world’s largest communications services group. As a creative transformation company, WPP is helping its clients transform the future through extraordinary work. WPP IT is an integral part of that journey and we are proud to provide technology for some of the world’s most creative brands.

At WPP, technology is at the heart of everything we do, and it is WPP IT’s mission to enable everyone to collaborate, create and thrive. WPP is undergoing a significant transformation to modernise ways of working, shift to cloud and micro-service-based architectures, drive automation, digitise colleague and client experiences, and deliver insight from WPP’s petabytes of data and breadth of expertise.

Reporting to the Workday Global Absence Functional Lead this role is responsible for the design and deployment of WPP’s Global HR Processes for your respective process area enabled through Workday. The role will work hand in hand with their WPP Global Process Owner, Brand and Country representatives and Workday Implementation partner.

What you'll be doing:

• Global/Local design of the respective process areas, working closely with the Global process owner to design the Workday business processes and configuration.
• Acts as the subject matter expert for your specialised area (HCM, Absence, Recruitment or Compensation) within Workday, supporting markets to understand the Workday design concepts and globally defined configuration.
• Lead workshops and design review sessions with HR business users, Workday technical and functional resources at all levels, including global owners of the specific work streams.
• Gather business requirements and working with the implementation partner translate those into Workday configuration.
• Create business requirements, system configuration and functional specification documents, test plans, test cases and input into development of user training and support documentation.
• Work closely with other functional leads and the technical workstream to ensure a cohesive design and that cross functional impacts are considered and mitigated.
• Support the technical team on integration design between Workday and internal enterprise systems and external vendors.
• Support the data migration team on data mapping requirements as part of the migration process.
• Work with the Workday implementation partners to validate configuration and test Workday to address the local requirements.
• Support business users during testing, undertake testing ‘triage’ process to validate true testing defects.
• Support global process owners identify change impacts and remediation plans, communication message, learning delivery content and support aids, including development of a Q&A knowledgebase.
• Undertake formal knowledge transfer activities to the support team and provide warranty support post go-live

What you'll need:

• Experience with Workday HCM configuration (certification is an advantage); with specialised knowledge in your subject domain (HCM or Absence & Time or Recruitment or Compensation) 
• Implemented Workday for 3 projects.
• Attention to detail and the ability to see the big picture, pragmatic problem solver.
• Excellent planning, interpersonal and time management skills with a track record of following through on dedications.
• Solid understanding of Human resources function and business processes within a global and complex organization.
• Exceptional, effective, proactive communication skills at all levels and with all stakeholders, including project team members, peers, business stakeholders and managers.
• Ability to build effective relationships with internal and external stakeholders at multiple levels in a global, regional and local team.
• Ability to understand legal and cultural requirements and concerns raised by country stakeholders and the impact of these on design.
• Ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment.
• Ability to challenge to clarify understanding.
• Good team player

Who you are:

You're open: We are inclusive and collaborative; we encourage the free exchange of ideas; we respect and celebrate diverse views. We are accepting: of new ideas, new partnerships, new ways of working.

You're optimistic: We believe in the power of creativity, technology and talent to create brighter futures or our people, our clients and our communities. We approach all that we do with conviction: to try the new and to seek the unexpected.

You're extraordinary: we are stronger together: through collaboration we achieve the amazing. We are creative leaders and pioneers of our industry; we provide extraordinary every day.

What we'll give you:

Passionate, inspired people – We promote a culture of people that do extraordinary work.

Scale and opportunity – We offer the opportunity to create, influence and complete projects at a scale that is unparalleled in the industry.

Challenging and stimulating work – Unique work and the opportunity to join a group of creative problem solvers. Are you up for the challenge?

WPP is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, age, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, military/veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical or mental disability. We believe in creating a dynamic work environment that values diversity and inclusion and strives to recruit a diverse slate of candidates to help us achieve that goal.

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