Our HR team spends its days finding great people for everyone else at Daniel’s Donuts.

Factory leaders. Retail teams. Support-office roles. Specialists. Managers. And the occasional role where the brief starts with “we need someone yesterday…”

Now it’s our turn.

We’re recruiting the person who will lead us — and help lead Daniel’s Donuts through its next stage of growth.

We’re looking for aHead of HR who can bring together the best of people, performance and commercial thinking. Someone who can build a great HR function, lift leadership capability and help make Daniel’s an even better — and higher-performing — place to work.

And yes, there will be donuts.

A little about us

Daniel’s Donuts has built a cult following around classics like Nutella and Fresh Jam & Cream, but there’s a lot more happening behind the blue teal boxes which out donuts are lovely, packaged in.

We’re a fast-growing, brand-led bakery business spanning manufacturing, retail and wholesale , with national ambitions ahead of us.

We’re consolidating onto a single ERP, Odoo, strengthening our leadership team and building the systems, capability and accountability needed for the next stage of growth.

This isn’t an HR role sitting on the sidelines. You’ll report directly to the CEO and operate as a full member of our Executive Leadership Team, bringing the commercial people’s voice to the decisions that shape the business.

What you’ll actually be here to do

At its heart, your job is simple:

Help us build great leaders, capable teams and a high-performing culture as Daniel’s grows.

The execution, of course, is a little bigger.

You’ll inherit plenty to work with — a HRIS, position descriptions, a performance framework and an established HR team — so this isn’t about arriving with a giant HR textbook and starting again.

It’s about embedding what works, fixing what doesn’t, and building what’s missing.

You’ll:

Lead and develop our HR team — overseeing our capable and talented Safety, Recruitment, and HR Business Partnering, legends.

Sit on the ELT as a genuine commercial peer — contributing to business decisions, not simply reporting the latest HR statistics.

Turn the CEO’s and business strategy into a practical, costed and executable people plan, ensuring we focus on increasing revenue, reducing cost and maturing the business all the way through.

Embed clear KRAs, KPIs, position descriptions and accountability across leadership roles.





Build a genuine performance culture where expectations are clear, conversations happen, and accountability means something.

Coach managers managetheir people, rather than creating an HR department that does it for them.

Own the performance planning and review cycle and make sure the framework becomes part of how Daniel’s operates — not another document sitting in a folder.

Lead employee relations with good judgement, commercial pragmatism, and minimal drama.

Own remuneration, benefits, and incentive governance.

Strengthen our HR systems, processes, data and compliance as we embed our ERP (Odoo) and continue developing our HRIS (Tanda).

Build succession and leadership capability for the roles that matter most.

Help us keep Daniel’s structure fit for purpose as we grow.

Embed Safety leadership accountable into all levels of the business and provide governance in WHS, psychosocial risk, injury management and workers compensation.

Bring Daniel’s values to life through the way we hire, lead, recognize and manage performance.

There’s a sizeable remit here. We’re deliberately looking for someone who can make it simpler, not more complicated.

Performance & accountability matter here

We want Daniel’s to be a great place to work.

We also want it to be a place where great performance is expected.

You’ll help our leaders become better at setting expectations, giving feedback, having difficult conversations, recognising great work, and dealing with underperformance early.

Importantly, HR won’t become the manager.

Your team will provide the systems, coaching, advice, and guardrails. Our leaders will be expected to lead their own people.

You’ll need to be commercial

You won't need to pretend EBITDA is your favourite acronym — but you will need to understand it.

We want a Head of HR who can talk comfortably about:

Labour ratios, workforce costs, productivity, remuneration, incentives, redundancy modelling, organisational structure and cost-to-serve.

When you walk into an ELT meeting, you’re there as an executive first and a functional expert second.





You'll use workforce data and people's insight to help the business make better decisions — and you'll be comfortable constructively challenging the CEO and your peers when the evidence says we should think differently.

What we’re looking for

You’ll bring substantial senior HR leadership experience and, importantly, experience within a manufacturing or blue-collar workforce. That part is essential.

Experience across multi-site retail or another large frontline workforce would be a big advantage.

You’ll also know your way around:

Fair Work, the NES, Modern Awards and enterprise agreements

Employee and industrial relations

Remuneration, benefits and incentives

Performance management

HR systems and process improvement

Workforce planning and people analytics

Organizational design and change

Learning and Development

Leadership development and succession

HR compliance and governance

Experience with Tanda would be useful, but we're more interested in whether you know how to make systems work in the real world.

We also expect our HR function to embrace automation and AI. If your solution to every new requirement is “we'll need another person”, this probably isn't your role.

The kind of leader who’ll thrive here

We’re looking for someone with low ego, high energy and very good judgement.

You’ll be equally comfortable talking with the CEO, walking on a factory floor and spending time with our store teams.

You'll know when to coach, when to challenge and when a decision simply needs to be made.

You’ll be:

You’ll protect confidentiality fiercely, create an setting where people can speak candidly and hold yourself and your team to the same standards you expect from everyone else.

You won’t be coming in to maintain a perfectly finished HR machine.

You’ll help build the next version of it.

You'll have direct access to the CEO, a seat on the Executive Leadership Team and the opportunity to materially influence how Daniel’s operates as we scale.

And for once, our Recruitment Manager gets to recruit someone for their own team. Dogs in the office has already been approved!

If you’re a commercially minded HR leader who likes pace, accountability, building capable leaders and getting things done — we’d love to hear from you.

Come lead the team that usually does the recruiting.

And help us build the people’s side of the next chapter of Daniel’s Donuts.

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📌 Head of HR (City of Yarra)
🏢 Daniels Donuts
📍 City of Yarra