Senior Manager, Early Careers, Head of Talent Engagement, Human Resources 12 month Secondment/FTC

Basic information

Location
Birmingham, London, Manchester, Reading
Business Line
Enabling Functions
Job Type
Permanent / FTC
Date published
19\-Jun\-2026
Req \#
23867

Job description

Connect to your Industry

Deloitte is a global leader in professional services and one of the largest employers in the UK. Each year, we recruit around 3,700 Early Careers placements through our graduate, apprentice, and work experience programmes. We are passionate about recruiting the best student talent in the marketplace—ensuring our sourcing and engagement solutions are agile, innovative, and aligned to business requirements, delivering the right skills and technical capability to fulfil our growth ambitions.

As Head of Talent Engagement, you are responsible for the strategic design and delivery of a market leading engagement approach that is innovative, brand defining and delivers both value to the firm, and quality experiences for young people across the UK.

You are responsible for shaping the firm’s reputation and strategic relationships with schools, universities, and third\-party suppliers \- setting the agenda for early talent engagement across the UK. Leveraging your market insights and networks, you ensure Deloitte remains at the forefront of the industry. You lead a specialist in\-house team delivering over 350 events each year, engaging with thousands of students across the UK, and driving top talent into our Early Careers pipelines. The team also recruits and delivers approximately 2,000 students annually onto 10 work insight and work placement programmes.

This is a senior leadership role within the Early Careers Talent Acquisition team, responsible for the design, ownership, and delivery of Deloitte’s Talent Engagement Strategy.

Talent Acquisition at Deloitte is fast\-paced, forward\-thinking, and fuelled by success—delivering a best\-in\-class experience and committed to enhancing the firm’s diversity and inclusion ambitions.

Connect to your career at Deloitte

Deloitte drives progress. Using our vast range of expertise, we help our clients' become leaders wherever they choose to compete. To do this, we invest in outstanding people. We build teams of future thinkers, with diverse talents and backgrounds, and empower them all to reach for and achieve more.

What brings us all together at Deloitte? It’s how we approach the thousands of decisions we make every day. How we behave, our beliefs and our attitudes. In other words: our values. Whatever we do, wherever we are in the world, we lead the way, serve with integrity, take care of each other, foster inclusion, and collaborate for measurable impact. These five shared values lead every decision we make and action we take, guiding us to deliver impact how and where it matters most.

Connect to your opportunity

As Head of Talent Engagement, you set the vision and direction for the firm’s engagement approach with the early careers market, ensuring our programmes are industry\-leading, innovative, and future\-focused.

You lead the end\-to\-end design, execution, and continuous improvement of our engagement and early identification programmes, ensuring they are data\-driven and responsive to evolving business needs. With direct responsibility for all school, campus, and third\-party supplier relationships, you drive Deloitte’s presence and reputation across the early talent market, creating high\-impact experiences that attract, engage, and convert thousands of students each year.

You oversee a significant budget and a high\-performing team, ensuring the effective delivery of over 350 events annually. Your remit includes the recruitment, pipeline management, and conversion of Early Identification participants across 10 programmes, embedding operational excellence, pipeline modelling, and data\-led decision making to maximise conversion and ensure a sustainable flow of diverse talent into the firm. You ensure quality and consistency, embed ROI and performance tracking, and partner cross\-firm to deliver market\-leading, inclusive initiatives. This is a highly visible leadership role, offering the opportunity to drive innovation, shape the future of early careers at Deloitte, and make a measurable impact on the firm’s growth and diversity ambitions.

Responsibilities include:

*Early Careers: Talent Engagement*

• Develop, own, and lead the firmwide Talent Engagement Strategy for Early Careers, covering all UK schools, universities, and local office engagement.


• Design and deliver a market\-leading, end\-to\-end strategy that builds aspiration and awareness of Deloitte as an employer of choice.


• Leverage your extensive network and subject matter expertise to create and implement innovative products and initiatives aligned to business requirements, ensuring Deloitte attracts, engages, and secures the right talent.


• Own and cultivate Deloitte’s external network within the early careers engagement market, leveraging your relationships and expertise to create innovative opportunities for Deloitte.


• Partner with the Centre of Excellence (CoE) Marketing team to ensure our marketing and engagement approaches are complimentary and create a seamless candidate experience through our early careers campaigns.


• Track and evidence ROI for all engagement activity, embedding robust KPI frameworks, performance reporting, and data\-led decision making to drive continuous improvement and inform investment decisions.


• Work closely with specialist suppliers and partners to co\-design and deliver high\-impact, innovative, and targeted engagement experiences, ensuring Deloitte leads the market and meets evolving business needs.


• Act as a subject matter expert and trusted advisor to senior stakeholders, providing strategic insight and thought leadership on early talent recruitment, engagement, and market trends.


• Anticipate risks, ensuring mitigation plans are in place and controls and processes are continuously improved, acting as a senior escalation point for your team and working closely with senior stakeholders across the firm and wider Talent Acquisition team to proactively resolve complex issues and market challenges.


• Actively collaborate with teams across Deloitte’s UK network, sharing best practices and fostering alignment to maximise the impact of our early talent initiatives.

• Lead all Early Identification programmes, ensuring they are innovative, commercially viable, and aligned to Deloitte’s talent acquisition goals, DE\&I priorities, and future skills needs.


• Accountable for designing and delivering high\-impact programmes that set the industry standard and deliver measurable value to the firm.


• Lead a team to oversee the end\-to\-end recruitment process for EiD programmes, including targeted attraction campaigns, assessment, selection, and onboarding, to ensure a strong and diverse pipeline of high\-potential candidates.


• Collaborate with business stakeholders, Talent Acquisition Business Partners, and the Learning team to forecast talent demand, align programme intake, and deliver a best\-in\-class participant experience.


• Develop and implement robust frameworks for pipeline management, conversion tracking, and operational excellence, using data and MI to inform decision making and maximise conversion rates.


• Champion innovation within EiD programmes, introducing new approaches, technologies, and delivery models to enhance effectiveness, reach, and candidate experience.


• Ensure all EiD activity is compliant with relevant legal, regulatory, and risk requirements, acting as the senior escalation point for complex issues and proactively managing risk.

• Foster and inspire a high\-performance culture within the Talent Engagement team, collaboratively building a shared vision and purpose, and motivating teams to deliver excellence.


• Lead, develop, and inspire a high\-performing team of Managers and Assistant Managers, setting clear expectations, building capability, and embedding a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and wellbeing.


• Deliver quality and value through effective management of an annual budget.


• Drive continuous improvement across the team by leading on operational efficiency and continually striving to innovate in the engagement space.


• Manage direct reports and the wider team to deliver high quality work, ensuring performance is optimised, recognised, and rewarded appropriately, and underperformance is addressed, whilst maintaining a healthy sense of wellbeing and role modelling Deloitte leadership behaviours.


• Monitor and respond to capacity levels within the team to allow workloads to be effectively managed, with resource appropriately aligned to various Talent Engagement activities and programmes.


• Stay up to date with the latest trends and innovations to ensure Deloitte remains ahead in the competition for hiring the best talent.


• Work closely with the Director of Early Careers to drive key initiatives, develop and execute strategic plans, and prepare presentations, reports, and other materials as required.


• Leverage long\-term relationships to significantly influence senior leaders in the firm, including HR Directors, Business Leads, COOs, and People and Purpose Partners.


• Support the Talent Acquisition Directors to drive the transformation agenda and lead on projects and initiatives outside of the day\-to\-day remit, as appropriate.

*Your professional experience:*

• In\-depth understanding of the early careers talent landscape in the UK, including school, campus, and early identification engagement, and supplier partnership management. Demonstrates operational excellence in the design and delivery of large\-scale early talent engagement and recruitment programmes.


• Proven experience creating, owni

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