Talent & Talent Acquisition Manager

The Talent & Talent Acquisition Manager is responsible for attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining high quality talent across the organisation. This role owns the end-to-end talent lifecycle, from recruitment through to internal mobility, succession planning, and talent development frameworks.

This is a blended role with some hands on recruitment, alongside team management. The role partners closely with the HR Business Partnering team and senior leaders to ensure the right capability is brought into the right roles, at the right time, and that talent decisions are data led, inclusive, and aligned to business strategy.

What will you do?

Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning

• Lead the talent acquisition strategy across all roles and functions, ensuring plans align to business priorities and future capability needs.
• Partner with HRBPS/ leaders on workforce planning, role design, and succession risk.
• Own and continuously improve the end-to-end recruitment process for non-volume hiring, balancing pace, quality, cost, and candidate experience.
• Build strong talent pipelines for critical and hard to fill roles.
• Oversee external partners (agencies, RPO, assessment providers) where used and track monthly spend against budget.
• Strengthen the organisation’s employer brand and EVP, ensuring consistent and inclusive attraction messaging.
• Own and continuously optimise the organisation’s Talent Acquisition system, maximising functionality, automation, and self service to improve efficiency, data quality, and the end-to-end candidate experience.
• Work closely with the HR Service Lead to upskill and support HR Administrators to deliver high volume recruitment activity, building capability, confidence, and consistency in recruitment processes and candidate experience.

Talent Management & Development Design and lead key talent management processes, including:

• Talent reviews & high potential identification
• Succession planning & Internal mobility frameworks
• Partner with HRBPs/ leaders to identify capability gaps and shape development pathways.
• Support the development of career frameworks and progression routes.
• Use insight from recruitment data to inform longer term talent and development strategies.
• In conjunction with the HR Leadership define and lead learning strategy where applicable to ensure development activity supports organisational capability needs.

Stakeholder & Business Partnering

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leaders on talent strategy, hiring decisions, and people risk.
• Influence leaders to take ownership of talent and succession in their areas.
• Collaborate with HR colleagues across Employee Relations, Reward, and L&D to deliver joinedup people solutions. Data, Insight & Continuous Improvement
• Track and analyse key talent metrics (e.g. time to hire, quality of hire, attrition, bench strength, succession coverage).
• Use insight to continuously improve recruitment and talent processes.
• Ensure talent practices are fair, inclusive, and compliant with employment legislation and best practice.
• Keep up to date with external market trends and evolving talent practices.
• People Management Lead and develop a small but focused Talent team, providing clear direction, coaching, and stretch opportunities.

What are we looking for?

Essential

• Significant experience in talent acquisition, with exposure to broader talent activity.
• Proven ability to operate at both strategic and delivery level.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, including influencing senior leaders.
• Experience using data and insight to inform talent decisions.
• Sound understanding of inclusive hiring and talent practices.

Desirable

• Experience leading or contributing to talent reviews and succession planning.
• Exposure to organisational growth, transformation, or change environments.
• Experience with employer branding or early careers programmes.
• People management experience.

Personal Attributes

• Commercial and pragmatic, with a strong business mindset
• Confident and credible, able to challenge constructively
• Curious and improvement focused
• Collaborative and relationship driven
• Passionate about developing people and organisational capability