People & Talent Lead

You run talent at Hire Space. You hire well, you help line managers hold a high bar on their teams, and you make sure the admin and office run themselves in the background. This is a hands-on, operator-first role - your wins show up in who we hire, who we keep, and how quickly we can do both.

You own three things, in priority order:

1. Talent acquisition - the pipeline, the process, the hires themselves

2. Performance management - holding line managers accountable for running their teams at a high bar, and giving them the tools and cover to do it

3. Office & people ops - the workplace works, the admin runs itself, the business doesn't trip over itself

Roughly: 50% hiring, 25% performance management, 15% office & workplace, 10% people ops, comp and reporting.

1. Talent acquisition

• Full-cycle hiring for every role in the business, end-to-end

• Competency frameworks and interview scorecards for every role — hiring decisions are evidence-based, not gut-feel

• Direct sourcing and headhunting for senior and critical hires; own the outreach, build a referral engine

• Screen candidates so line managers only see the top of the pile

• Run the candidate experience end-to-end — scheduling, comms, status — using automation and AI-assisted tooling (ATS workflows, AI interview notes, LLM-drafted JDs and outreach sequences)

• Retrospective every bad hire and every final-stage rejection. Fix the process upstream.

• Build a targeted employer presence in the events-industry talent pool, leaning on the Growth team's network and industry knowledge

2. Performance Management

• Run quarterly 9-box grid reviews across the whole team, with clear board-level reporting

• Operate an "Up or Out" policy for the bottom quadrants — you coach managers through the conversation; they own the call

• Hold line managers accountable for running 30/60/90 probation reviews with real pass/fail gates. No surprise reviews. Swift exits when the bar isn't met.

• Work with managers to define minimum standards for every role — zero ambiguity on what "good" looks like

• Build cadence for recognising strong performance — specific, public, tied to real outcomes. People who smash the bar should know they did, and so should the rest of the team.

• Feed performance data into payroll for bonus cycles

• Spot-check payroll and comp outputs; Finance owns payroll, you sanity-check

3. Office and Workplace

• Own the London office as a working environment: space, layout, suppliers, kit, the things that make people want to be there

• Execute the hybrid / in-office policy — attendance patterns, visibility, logistics

• Onboarding logistics: a new hire's first day should feel designed, not improvised

4. People Ops & Comp

• Automate the admin: holiday, sickness, attendance, onboarding and offboarding checklists. If you're doing it manually twice, build the workflow.

• Run a regular team engagement survey as a retention signal — tight, consistent, and useful. The output is a handful of clear actions, not a 40-slide deck.

• Bi-annual benefits benchmarking against market; flag gaps, recommend changes

• Support Finance on headcount forecasting and comp modelling

• Keep our policies and process up to date; flag complex employment law or ER matters to our external employment counsel and the C-suite rather than trying to resolve them solo

AI Acceleration - how you work, across everything.

You are expected to use AI to scale your output. Concretely: CV screening and shortlisting, interview note-taking and summarisation, onboarding sequence automation, performance review prep, policy drafting, comms at volume. We want to see workflows you've built.

• 3–6 years in a People / Talent role at a scale-up or fast-moving business; you've owned hiring end-to-end

• Track record of performance management that actually moves people — not just documents underperformance

• Fluent with AI tooling. You've built workflows with AI, not just tried the demo

• Systems thinker. You automate, templatise, and build once. You dislike manual repetition.

• Comfortable being the only People hire in the business — no team below you, you're the one driving it

• Straight-talking. You'll tell a manager when they're avoiding a conversation, and you're ready to lead difficult ones yourself.

• Solid grasp of UK employment basics; you know when to escalate and when to act

• Events industry experience is nice but not needed

• Competitive Salary - £50k-£55k with annual salary reviews

• Enhanced pension contributions

• Medicash Pro-Active Health Cash Plan

• Workplace Nursery Scheme which allows you achieve tax savings by paying your nursery fees through your gross pay

• Professional Development Plans & Career Pathways

• 4 weeks Company Paid Sick Leave

• Mental Health Leave

• 32 days holiday allowance with additional for long service

• 3pm Friday finishes during BST (average 36-hour working week over the year)

• Tech and Cycle Schemes

• Access to Juno wellbeing platform

• Exceptional maternity and paternity benefits

• Regular team socials and monthly lunches

• £200 Home office spending allowance

• Free nights out in top London venues

This is a hybrid/in-person role. Our team is predominantly London-based and it is important that you are able to collaborate, attend ad-hoc events and attend our away days in-person. You can usually expect to be in/around London on average 3-4 days per week, usually working from our central London office location near London Bridge.