Talent Acquisition Manager

Location: Hybrid remote/Aldgate, London. 1-3 days per week onsite

Salary: £75,000-£90,000

SC Clearance Requirements:

Due to working with several government bodies, SC clearance is required for this position. You do not need active SC clearance as we will undertake checks upon you joining, but you must be eligible to pass SC clearance.

You must be UK-based.

At a glance

This isn’t a desk to run from the sidelines. You’ll build a team of five, and you’ll carry a quota alongside them, because the fastest way to earn a recruiter’s trust is to be in the market doing the job yourself.

The moment

Cloudscaler is 130 people today, heading to 170 by the end of this year and roughly double again across 2027. Every one of those hires has to come through a Talent Acquisition function that is being rebuilt, not simply inherited.

You’re backfilling a role, but not into the same role. We’re changing the shape of it: less oversight from a distance, more hands directly in the market, and a team built around you from close to a standing start.

We’ve leaned on agencies to cover gaps in the past, and it hasn’t delivered what it should have. That’s part of why this role exists: to build an internal team good enough that we need agencies far less.

What makes this different

Most Talent Acquisition Manager roles are one step removed from the desk. You review pipeline in a dashboard, chase recruiters for updates and step in only when something stalls. That’s not this.

• Rather than managing a desk from a distance, you’ll carry your own requisitions alongside the team.

• Rather than reviewing pipeline after the fact, you’ll build the direct-sourcing pipeline yourself, in the toughest markets.

• Rather than outsourcing hard roles to agencies, you’ll own the reduction in agency spend, personally.

• Rather than inheriting a settled team, you’ll build a team of five from close to zero.

To be clear about the level: this is a player-manager role, not a strategic seat one step back from delivery. You’ll fill roles yourself while you build and coach the team around you. That combination is the job, not a phase you grow out of.

The role

You’ll lead Talent Acquisition, reporting to the Chief People Officer, with three to five Talent Acquisition Partners reporting to you from day one. You’ll personally own the senior, technical and business-critical hires, while building your team’s capability, capacity and direct-sourcing discipline underneath you.

Two things define the job. The first is delivery: you carry your own quota and remain close enough to the market that you can spot a stalled pipeline or a shifting candidate expectation before it becomes a missed hire. The second is building: assembling a team from close to scratch, giving each Partner a vertical to own, and instilling a direct-sourcing-first culture rather than a dependency on agencies and job boards.

Where the role starts and stops

New roles get vague, so here is the boundary as we see it today.

Yours: Full-cycle recruitment delivery and team leadership. Personally leading senior, technical and business-critical hires. Building and coaching Talent Acquisition Partners. Ashby ownership and data quality. Direct-sourcing strategy and capability. Agency relationships, spend and the plan to reduce reliance on them. Cost-per-hire and pipeline reporting.

Shared: The handover from offer to start date, which the People Partner team picks up for onboarding and clearance. Early careers programmes, which a Talent Acquisition Partner will own day to day with your oversight. Broader People systems architecture, which sits with the CPO.

Not yours: Employee relations casework, onboarding delivery and clearance coordination, which sit with the People Partner team. The design of the wider People strategy and operating model, which sits with the CPO.

The stack

You won’t be handed a settled toolkit and told to leave it alone. Part of the job is making these systems earn their keep.

• Ashby: Our applicant tracking system, and yours to own. Workflows, pipeline stages, reporting and data quality all sit with you, for your whole team.

• Metaview: Interview intelligence, feeding into how you quality-assure interviews and coach the team’s technique.

• Rippling: The single source of truth for the employee record. You’ll work in it from offer through to handover and lean on its reporting for headcount and cost-per-hire data.

• Claude: Cloudscaler is an Anthropic partner. You’ll use it daily for role briefs, market mapping, candidate communication and case preparation.

What you’ll do

Carry your own quota. You’ll personally lead recruitment for our most senior, technical and business-critical roles, staying close enough to the market to spot problems before they cost a hire.

Build the team. You’ll grow Talent Acquisition to three to five Partners, giving each one a technical vertical to own and coaching them from requisition to offer.

Make direct sourcing the default. You’ll lead our Sourcing First approach in practice, not on a slide, building your own pipelines and teaching your team to do the same.

Reduce agency reliance. You’ll manage the agency relationships that remain, hold them to account, and shrink the spend as your internal pipeline strengthens.

Own the numbers. Cost per hire, time to fill, pipeline health and Ashby data quality are yours to report on, and yours to improve.

Back early careers. You’ll give a Talent Acquisition Partner room to build our graduate and apprentice pipeline, with your steer on shape and priority.

Use AI properly. You’ll use Claude and Metaview to take routine work off your desk and your team’s, so more of the week goes on the market and the people in it.

What success looks like at 12 months

• Your team is at full strength (three to five Partners), and each owns a vertical with a live direct-sourcing pipeline.

• Cost-per-hire, time-to-hire and quality-of-hire have moved in the right direction, and agency spend is materially down.

• Senior and business-critical roles are closing without stalling in interview or offer.

• Ashby data is clean enough that pipeline reporting can be trusted without checking it first.

• An early careers cohort has been hired and started, owned day-to-day by one of your Partners.

• Hiring leaders come to you with a problem, not a job description, because they trust the process.

Who we’re looking for

A full-cycle recruiter at heart. You’ve carried a quota and closed hard roles yourself, and you’re not looking to leave that behind for a purely oversight role.

A genuine direct sourcer. You build pipelines rather than waiting for applications, and you can teach that skill to others.

A first-time or early people manager, or ready to be one. You want to build and coach a small team, not just manage a desk.

Credible in technical markets. You can hold a real conversation with engineering and cloud hiring leaders about what good looks like.

Data-literate. You’re comfortable owning cost-per-hire and pipeline reporting yourself, not waiting for someone else to produce it.

Comfortable rebuilding, not just running. This team is being reshaped, not inherited whole. You’ll enjoy the first six months more than most people would.

The honest part

You’re inheriting a function that needs rebuilding, including some agency relationships that haven’t delivered and a team that doesn’t exist yet at full strength. That means real early weeks spent both recruiting for your own roles and recruiting your own team.

You are not stepping into a settled operation with a mature bench around you. What you get instead is the chance to build the team and the sourcing culture from the ground up, with a mandate to change how recruitment gets done here.

This probably isn’t for you if you want to manage from a dashboard, or if carrying your own requisitions feels like a step backwards. It probably is for you if you want to prove a leaner, sourcing-led team can outperform an agency-dependent one, and build it yourself.

If that sounds like the challenge you’ve been looking for, let’s talk.

Benefits

• Periodic offer of share options schemes

• Discretionary bonus scheme

• 25 days’ annual leave + 5 additional days for training/exams or volunteering

• Travel and accommodation expensed where eligible in line with our expenses policy

• Life Assurance

• Long Term Disability cover

• Employee Assist Programme for employee advice and support (including legal and counselling helpline)

• Health, Mental Health, Wellbeing, Financial and Legal support

• 24/7 GP access

• Public holiday opt-out scheme giving you the option to work on public holidays creating the flexibility to enjoy your time off when it suits you

• Individual training and development plans with online training and exam costs covered

• Recruitment referral scheme – referral bonus if you introduce us to someone we then hire

• Customer referral scheme – referral bonus if you introduce us to a new customer

• Cycle To Work Scheme

• Dog friendly office

Cloudscaler are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, committed to equal opportunities regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ancestry, age, marital status, disability, parental status, religion or medical history.

If you require reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process or within the workplace, please let us know when you speak to our Talent Acquisition team or contact [email protected] at the earliest opportunity.