Job Description:

Talent Acquisition Partner
Middlesbrough (Hybrid working)
Salary: Up to £55,000 plus benefits

Calling all Strategic Talent Partners!
This is a brand new role within our client's award-winning People function and represents a genuine opportunity to shape and influence the future of talent at our organisation.
As they move through a significant period of cultural transformation, they are looking for a Talent Acquisition Partner who can play a pivotal role in redefining how they attract, assess, develop and retain talent. This role goes far beyond transactional recruitment, it is about influencing mindset, embedding behaviours, and building sustainable talent capability for the future.
You will work closely with the wider People team, People Business Partners, Senior Management Team and key stakeholders across the business to develop modern, inclusive, and robust talent practices that reflect who they are and where they are going.
Key Responsibilities (will include but not limited to):
Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning:

• Lead and deliver end to end recruitment across permanent, temporary and fixed term roles using the Dayforce system.
• Shift recruitment focus from skills based hiring to assessing mindset, behaviours and potential, ensuring alignment with their evolving culture.
• Build and maintain strong talent pipelines, including proactive sourcing, benchmarking, and market mapping.
• Introduce greater governance and consistency around the use of temporary recruitment agencies, ensuring best value and strong controls.
• Define, improve and embed scalable recruitment processes, tools and frameworks as the function continues to mature.

Cultural Change & Influence:

• Act as a trusted advisor, influencing leaders and hiring managers to think differently about talent, promotion, and development decisions.
• Support cultural change by challenging traditional approaches and encouraging a stronger focus on development and potential, not just qualifications or experience.
• Facilitate conversations that encourage leaders to reflect on how and why they make talent decisions.

Employee Experience & Onboarding:

• In the first six months, place particular emphasis on relationship building and understanding the employee experience across the organisation.
• Support the design of and implement a clear, engaging and consistent onboarding and induction journey, ensuring new starters feel connected, supported and productive from day one.
• Continually review the employee experience journey to identify opportunities for improvement and alignment with our values and culture.

Leadership Development & Succession Planning

• Partner with People Business Partners and senior leaders to strengthen leadership development and succession planning across the organisation.
• Support managers to think more deliberately about future capability, talent readiness and internal progression.
• Encourage accountability and challenge leaders to look critically at how they are developing their people.

Employer Brand & Attraction

• Work closely with their Communications team to strengthen our employer brand and clearly articulate who they are, what they do, and why people should join them.
• Ensure a consistent and compelling candidate experience that reflects their values and reputation.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Work in close partnership with the wider People team, particularly PBPs and the SMT, to ensure talent strategies are aligned with broader organisational goals.
• Build strong, credible relationships across the business, acting as a collaborative and highly influential partner.

Criteria:

• Significant experience in a senior or strategic talent acquisition role.
• Proven ability to influence, challenge and facilitate change at all levels of an organisation.
• Strong experience designing recruitment processes, governance, and talent frameworks from the ground up or significantly improving existing ones.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, evolving environment with ambiguity and opportunity.
• Experience using recruitment systems (experience with Dayforce is desirable but not essential).

Personal attributes:

• Highly proactive with a strong sense of curiosity, someone who asks the right questions and seeks to understand the bigger picture.
• Incredibly collaborative, with the ability to bring people together and build trust quickly.
• Strategic thinker who can balance detail with long term impact.
• Passionate about people, development and creating meaningful, inclusive employee experiences.