The People & Talent Lead exists to design and implement those core systems. This is a builder's role: you'll create the practical frameworks, tools, and processes that give managers the structure and confidence to lead their teams well. You will not own people decisions on behalf of managers or leadership; you will make those decisions easier, fairer, and more consistent to make.

You’ll report to the leader responsible for People and Finance, with strategic sponsorship from the CEO. You’ll work closely with our Talent Partner, and draw on existing operations and admin support for coordination and delivery.

How The Role Works

This role sits within a clear operating model:

• The People & Talent Lead designs and implements the systems that managers and leaders use.
• Managers remain accountable for leading their teams and for the people decisions within them.
• Existing operational support provides administrative and coordination capacity.

In short: you build the system, managers run their teams within it, and operations help deliver it.

Key Responsibilities

Manager enablement

• Build practical tools, templates, and guidance that help managers hire, develop, and lead effectively.
• Design manager training covering feedback, performance conversations, role clarity, and decision-making.
• Support managers as a coach and partner, while ensuring accountability stays with the manager.

Talent & hiring systems

• Define and implement a structured, high-quality hiring system, including role definition, interview frameworks, scorecards, and assessment criteria.
• Establish a clear hiring bar and a consistent approach to evaluating candidates.
• Manage and develop the Talent Partner, who continues to run hiring processes end-to-end.
• Use hiring data and funnel insights to improve quality, speed, and consistency.

Performance & progression

• Design lightweight performance and progression frameworks.
• Ensure roles have clear expectations, success measures, and progression paths.
• Build the process, tools, and guidance needed for consistent performance conversations and decisions.
• Support calibration and consistency across teams.

Reward, benchmarking & fairness

• Support the development of a compensation philosophy and benchmarking approach.
• Build guidance for pay reviews, promotions, and reward decisions.
• Ensure pay, progression, and performance frameworks are applied fairly and consistently.
• Partner closely with Finance on affordability, planning, and trade-offs.

Onboarding & Early Employee Experience

• Design a consistent onboarding framework that helps new joiners become productive quickly.
• Define manager responsibilities across the first 30, 60, and 90 days.
• Improve the employee experience through the first 6–12 months, particularly around role clarity, expectations, and development.

People communications & adoption

• Own the communication and rollout of people frameworks, processes, and initiatives.
• Ensure changes are clearly understood and adopted across teams.
• Partner with existing operations/admin support on coordination and delivery.

System design & implementation

• Define how people and talent systems work end-to-end.
• Keep frameworks simple, practical, and scalable.
• Establish clear ownership for each people process so it is applied consistently across the organisation.
• Support Xapien's evolution towards an AI-enabled workforce, including defining the capabilities required and helping leaders adapt team structures.

What Success Looks Like

• Managers take greater ownership of hiring and performance decisions, with the tools and confidence to do so effectively.
• Hiring quality and consistency improve across teams.
• Performance, progression, and reward decisions become clearer, fairer, and more consistent.
• Employees have stronger role clarity, particularly in the 6–12-month tenure group.
• Onboarding becomes more structured and effective.
• People systems are simple, adopted, and scalable.
• Leadership has better visibility and data to support people decisions.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience building people systems in scaling companies, ideally through comparable periods of fast growth.
• Strength across performance, progression, hiring systems, and reward frameworks.
• A practical, hands-on approach – comfortable building from scratch rather than inheriting an established function.
• Strong judgement and a commercial mindset.
• The ability to influence managers and senior leaders through credibility rather than authority.
• Comfort with ambiguity, pace, and a deliberately low-process environment.
• A systems-minded outlook, balanced with a healthy dislike of bureaucracy.

Here’s our promise to you:

• We are going to work with you - to build a rewarding and fulfilling career with the opportunities, challenges and resources you need to do you your best work.
• We succeed together- you will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme.
• Private health insurance to keep you in tip-top condition.
• Life Insurance – let's hope nobody ever needs this!
• Unlimited holidays – yes, it really is uncapped – take the time you need, when you need it.
• Everyone is learning, developing and challenging themselves so we have a £1k professional development fund per year if you want to learn new skills, even new things outside of work.
• Most importantly of all, we will work with you, to help you realise your fullest potential, always.