Katie Allen

Professional Profile

Katie Allen is Director of People Consulting at Altair with over 25 years’ experience working with leadership and HR Teams undertaking HR Director/VP of People roles, leading on People and Culture strategy, and building the capability of HR functions and organisations to align with business strategy and operational delivery. 

She has led HR Teams across Technology, Engineering sectors, Consultancy and Financial Services. In more recent years, she has been an Interim HR Director and Independent HR Consultant, working with Housing, Sustainable Energy and Third Sector organisations on a wide range of strategic and complex organisation development projects as well as running a development programme for HR professionals.​  

Katie has been accountable for leading on People and Culture throughout her career and is passionate about her aligning culture, business strategy, leadership and people experience to create the optimum environment for success. 

She joined Altair in June 2025, leading our HR and Board and Executive Recruitment teams and continuing to build our people consulting services. 

Core Expertise

• HR Strategy – review and development of People and Culture Strategy to align with corporate plans 
• Organisation development – improving organisation effectiveness, culture, structure and people capability 
• Succession Planning and leadership support 
• Change management and engagement – delivering change management through positive employee engagement 
• Fractional/Interim HR support for Executive and HR Teams 
• Merger and TUPE related advice and support 
• Board, Executive and Organisation Pay benchmarking and reward advice 

Project Experience

Client:

Recent Altair Assignments

Project Name and Client: Pay Benchmarking Support – Tai Tarian 

Date: October 2025 – March 2026

Role on Project: Tai Tarian required a partner to work with their HR and leadership team to review their existing pay structure, develop options and solutions for the future with supporting pay benchmarking.

Katie’s role included:

• Providing extended support to the HR Team
• Reviewing the current pay structure to align with wider business/HR and Reward strategies
• Working with business leaders and function leads, providing options and bespoke pay structure solutions
• Researching pay and reward best practices relevant to Tai Tarian

The impact and outcomes included:

• Positive engagement, accountability and “buy in”.
• Presenting reports and facilitating discussions with the Executive team and heads of service to achieve the right outcomes.
• Distilling recommendations and providing implementation support on request.

Project Name and Client: Senior Skills/Behaviour Alignment/Succession Planning – Platform Housing Group

Date: June 2025 – May 2026

Role on Project: During a period of change at Board and leadership level, Platform Housing Group wanted to create a cohesive and aligned skills and behaviour framework which could be used for both recruitment and succession planning purposes.

Katie’s role included:

• Initially working with Platform Chief People Officer and both Altair and Platform governance colleagues to agreed the skills and behaviour framework and conduct review at both Board and Executive Team levels
• Progressing this work to include the wider SLT so that it could be incorporated into succession planning and recruitment and selection

The outcome and impact included:

• A bespoke skills/behaviour framework co-designed with Platform
• Reports and presentations to Board, People and Executive Teams showing our findings and facilitated discussions on an informal succession plan

Project Name and Client: Lead HR Advisor – Merger – Beacon Housing

Date: November 2023 – September 2024

Role on Project: Two housing associations – RHA and Coastal HA, required HR advice and support through the pre-merger phase

Katie’s role included:

• Attending and providing HR advice and papers to Shadow Board
• Working with governance, pension and external legal advisors to ensure advice was  pragmatic and compliant
• Engaging, supporting and communicating with respective Chairs, CEO’s and HR Teams to ensure that the pre-merger people plan comprehensive, pragmatic and deliverable
• Leading on the HR aspect of the Executive Team (Designate) recruitment process
• Working with HR and Communication teams to develop and provide ongoing input to the staff communication and engagement plan

The outcome and impact included:

• Successful handover to Executive HR Director (Designate) once in place
• Pre-merger HR Project momentum and delivery which was a key component to successfully meeting the merger delivery date

Qualifications & Professional Memberships

• CIPD (Fellow) – 2025 
• BA (Hons) European Business Studies – Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Lille/University of Wolverhampton – 1992 – 1996  
• Personality Profiling/Psychometric testing – Qualified to deliver Thomas International PPA – 2016