People Operations & Talent Manager (£55-60k + bonus)

About the role

We’re a scaling marketing agency on an exciting growth curve; and we’re building the people function to match. This is a rare greenfield opportunity: you’ll be our first dedicated People hire, shaping the culture, processes, and talent pipeline of a creative agency from the ground up.

This is a genuine 50/50 role. Half your time will be spent attracting and hiring exceptional talent across strategy, creative, account management and data; the other half building the people infrastructure that helps our team thrive once they’re through the door.

If you’ve been waiting for the chance to own something completely, then this is it.

Responsibilities

People operations:

• Design and own the entire employee lifecycle — onboarding, probation, performance, offboarding
• Build our people processes largely from scratch: policies, handbooks, templates, and tooling
• Act as the first point of contact for all team members’ relations matters
• Partner with leadership on org design, headcount planning, and workforce strategy as we scale
• Own our HRIS / people tooling (selection, implementation, and ongoing management)
• Lead on pay benchmarking and benefits review, ensuring our total reward offering stays competitive
• Instruct payroll on all changes: new starters, leavers, salary adjustments, and benefit changes including salary sacrifice schemes
• Manage the annual bonus and pay review cycle — processing awards based on KPI data provided by managers, issuing letters, and maintaining accurate records
• Maintain meticulous compensation records, ensuring data integrity across systems
• Act as the primary liaison between the business and our payroll provider, resolving queries and ensuring timely, accurate processing
• Oversee our employee experience programme, driving initiatives that build culture and belonging across a hybrid, international team
• Support our social committee, helping them plan and deliver events that bring people together

Talent acquisition:

• Own end-to-end recruitment across all disciplines — strategy, creative, content, account management and data/tech
• Manage a high-volume pipeline of 20–50 hires per year, balancing quality with pace
• Build and maintain a strong employer brand that attracts top agency talent in a competitive London market
• Source proactively — LinkedIn, referrals, communities, events
• Define roles, write compelling job specs, and run structured interview processes
• Own candidate experience from first contact to signed offer
• Track and report on hiring metrics: time-to-hire, source quality, offer acceptance rates

About you

You’ll likely have:

• 3–5 years of experience in a People, HR, or Talent role — ideally within an agency, creative, or fast-paced scale-up environment
• Proven experience managing full-cycle recruitment at volume, across varied role types
• Hands-on experience building or significantly improving people processes — not just inheriting them
• Solid understanding of UK employment law and HR best practices
• Experience coordinating payroll, processing compensation changes, and maintaining HR records to a high standard
• Genuine passion for the craft of hiring — you care about candidate experience and the quality of every hire

You’ll stand out if you:

• Have agency or creative industry experience and understand what great talent looks like in this world
• Have led a people function solo before and know what it means to be the first and only
• Have experience supporting employees across multiple countries or jurisdictions
• Are data-literate and use metrics to tell a story and drive decisions
• Are a confident, empathetic communicator — as comfortable in a board-level conversation as a 1:1 with a nervous new joiner
• Have experience mediating conflict and handling sensitive ER situations with care and confidence

What we offer

• Competitive salary (£55,000-60,000 + bonus)
• Hybrid working — flexible blend of office (London) and remote
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays
• The chance to shape a people function — and a culture — that you’re proud of

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