Head of Talent

Join us at EIT:

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we're on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity's greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you'll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.

Your Role:

Joining EIT Oxford as Head of Talent offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of the Institutes' workforce from the ground up. You won't just be filling positions - you'll be crafting the recruitment strategies and processes that will help define EIT's culture and success long term. We have scaled fast, hiring over 400 people in three years. A small in-house Talent team is already in place, and they have built structures and processes to get them to where we are today. In this role you'll have full creative freedom to innovate, build scalable hiring systems, and create a truly engaging candidate experience. Your impact will be felt immediately, and you'll play a pivotal role in driving the institutes' growth. This is a high-impact, dynamic role perfect for someone who is proactive, adaptable, and thrives in a fast-paced, ever-evolving environment.

You will have the opportunity to play an active role in not only recruitment but also supporting and leading the internal talent team and hiring managers. You will be responsible for upskilling stakeholders in recruitment best practice, while ensuring compliant and consistent processes are followed to deliver an exceptional candidate experience. In addition, the role will contribute to onboarding, employer branding, employee engagement, and the ongoing development of our overall employee value proposition.

Your Responsibilities:

• Full-Cycle Recruitment: The Head of Talent oversees the entire recruitment process, from job requisition creation and approval, supporting HR colleagues on salary/package benchmarking, sourcing and screening candidates to conducting interviews and managing offers. In a startup, this will span a wide variety of roles and levels. This will include:
  • Building a talent pipeline strategy by both role and function
  • Design inclusive selection processes and review and measure to ensure they remain fair, market leading and support employee value proposition
  • Source and provide market insights to provide evidence and business justification for compensation decisions, benefits, reward and recognition structures
• Employer Branding: In a competitive talent market, especially for startups/scaleups, you will work with the Talent team to support building and promoting EIT's brand to attract top talent. This includes crafting compelling job descriptions, highlighting EIT's culture, and utilising social media and other platforms to promote and raise awareness of EIT Oxfords mission and values
• Process Development: You will be responsible for developing and implementing recruitment strategies and processes where none may currently exist. This includes creating efficient candidate experience, establishing KPIs for recruiting success, and recommending and implementing tools or technologies to streamline hiring
• Sourcing Strategy: Identifying the best sources for top talent is critical. You will explore a mix of traditional (job boards, LinkedIn) and innovative sourcing channels (networking, events, conferences, communities, referrals) to attract both active and passive candidates
• Stakeholder Management: Working closely with department heads and leadership to understand the needs of each role, aligning recruitment strategies with the Institutes' growth goals. In a startup/scaleup, this may also mean working with limited resources, existing systems that need optimising and adapting recruitment to changing priorities
• Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives: You will be an advocate for a diverse and inclusive workforce, ensuring that recruitment processes are unbiased and that the company attracts a wide variety of candidates from different backgrounds
• Culture and employee engagement: You will put people experience first, creating a workplace of inclusion and kindness. Working with department leads to define and communicate the team culture - nurture and cultivate it. You will be a facilitator of leadership behaviours and operating principles, helping to embed best practice and keep it alive through observation, measurement and feedback
• Talent Management: Working with the wider HR team you will be integral to assessing individual/ team/organisational needs and support identifying and delivering training needs. In collaboration with the central HR team, you will support the creation of best practice in terms of creating a connected workplace community. Succession mapping, career planning and development pathways will be an ongoing output of your talent focus.