Responsibilities of the role:

As a Senior Digital Talent Partner, you will lead difficult hiring, advise senior leaders and help your team deliver brilliant recruitment campaigns.

You will:

• Own our hardest searches end to end. Lead priority and difficult-to-fill campaigns from brief through to accepted offer. Map the market, identify prospective candidates and make direct approaches rather than waiting for applications.
• Be a real partner to senior leaders. Get underneath the problem behind a vacancy, sharpen the brief and agree a realistic hiring strategy. Challenge constructively when requirements, timelines or expectations do not match the market.
• Build talent before we urgently need it. Develop relationships with people in specialist and hard-to-find markets and create engaged pipelines for recurring workforce needs.
• Turn market evidence into better decisions. Bring leaders honest insight on talent availability, location, reward, candidate motivation and competing opportunities. When the original plan is unlikely to work, recommend a better one.
• Lead candidate engagement and conversion. Build relationships with high-value candidates, understand what might make them move and support senior leaders through offer and closing conversations.
• Set a high and fair hiring bar. Shape assessments that test what genuinely matters in the job and make sure decisions are proportionate, inclusive and based on clear evidence.
• Lead and develop the team. Manage up to three Digital Talent Partners, set clear priorities and coach them to become stronger advisers and campaign leads. Step in when a campaign needs senior judgement, challenge or direct-search expertise.
• Improve how we recruit. Use data, market insight and lessons from delivery to improve our tools, campaigns and ways of working. Share what works and raise standards across the wider recruitment function.

Skills and experience required:

You will have:

• Found scarce technical talent directly. You have personally mapped markets, approached passive candidates and built credible pipelines in areas such as engineering, AI, data, cyber, product or digital delivery.
• Delivered difficult hires. You can explain how you changed the strategy when the original advert, channel, timeline or candidate profile was not working.
• Acted as a genuine talent partner. You are comfortable advising and challenging senior hiring leaders, including when expectations are unrealistic or the brief needs to change.
• Used market evidence well. You can turn recruitment data and talent insight into clear recommendations, rather than simply reporting activity.
• Built and converted strong candidate relationships. You understand what makes experienced people consider a move and know how to maintain trust through a complex hiring process.
• Led other recruiters or talent partners. You have set priorities, coached colleagues and created the conditions for a small team to deliver consistently high-quality work.
• Improved recruitment beyond an individual campaign. You can show how you have strengthened a process, tool, sourcing approach or way of working for the wider team.

Experience using Greenhouse, LinkedIn Recruiter or other sourcing and applicant-tracking platforms would be useful. We care more about what you have achieved with the tools than the logos on your CV.

What success looks like

• senior leaders involve the talent team earlier because its advice improves hiring decisions
• priority digital roles have clear search strategies and realistic routes to market
• difficult campaigns are supported by direct approaches and engaged talent pipelines
• Digital Talent Partners run their campaigns confidently and know when to draw on your expertise