Talent Acquisition Lead

About the role

Talent Acquisition Lead 📍 Manchester, UK (Hybrid 4 days WFH) | 💰 £60,000 - £70,000 Street Group is scaling fast toward an ambitious growth plan, and hiring is about to get harder: more senior roles, a higher bar, and a market where the best people don't apply; they get found and won. We need someone who owns how we hire, not just who we hire. We're looking for a TA Specialist with a truly commercial mindset. Skilled at your craft - able to land the hardest hires yourself, but also understanding what will make a whole team better at hiring - from candidate attraction to relationship building; employer brand to candidate experience. Why this role exists now Our recruiting team is strong but stacked - and as we get busier, there’s no real capacity to ensure we’re constantly innovating and improving the mechanisms that let us hire quality people at pace. We’ve recently raised investment, and have ambitious goals to achieve - now is the time to fine-tune our recruiting engine so we can scale effectively over the next few years. The role This is a role of two halves. The first half is hands-on delivery. IC L5s at Street Group are expected to confidently own the hardest searches - senior roles, niche roles, brand new roles we’ve no experience hiring for. You’ll be expected to understand how the roles you’re hiring for tie in to commercial goals, what to prioritise and why. When you run into issues, you investigate, gather qualitative and quantitative data, conduct market research, and ultimately develop solutions to solve your own problems. You share your knowledge with the team in ways that bring them on the journey - not just the “what and how” but the strong “why” behind it. The second half is taking our TA function from great to exceptional. Candidate experience, employer brand, AI, tooling, sourcing strategy, assessment - we do all of them well already, but our team holds ourselves to a high standard - and we want to do it all exceptionally well. You’ll collaborate with our Head of People on the most impactful initiatives to prioritise - the what, why, why now, and how it will be achieved and measured. We expect you to be passionate about TA; part of communities, intrigued by industry trends, new tools, best practices, and what other companies are nailing (and making sure we do it even better). Growth opportunities The business and People team will grow significantly over the next few years, and there is potential for this role to grow into a management role or specialise in a specific area, but the initial focus and goals will be hands-on, IC L5 work as mentioned above. Who we're looking for A senior recruiter with deep expertise across the full lifecycle, and the outside-in view: what the market's doing, what great TA teams do, and what it means for us. Someone who holds themselves to a high standard - e.g. measuring their results against quality of hire rather than hires made. Someone whose judgement colleagues calibrate against, trusted with delivering the most senior and confidential searches without a steer. An AI-native mindset: you treat AI as leverage and are keen to learn from our team, and share what’s been working for you. The credibility and communication skills to challenge a department head on a bad hiring decision, deliver hard market news to leadership, and come out with the relationship stronger. Someone who makes the team better on purpose, not by accident: you share what you know and help develop the people around you. Why you might not want to apply We'd rather be honest up front, because this role won’t be for everyone. If you want to move into people management now. This is a senior IC role. You'll coach, share knowledge, and set standards, but you won't have direct reports on day one, and you'll still be carrying reqs yourself. If a management title is what you're chasing now or in the imminent future, this isn’t the job for you. If you're a brilliant solo recruiter but you don't have a h

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