People Operations Manager in London

Go Places is the UK's leading Social Commerce Agency. We run end-to-end social commerce for some of the country's most exciting consumer brands; across live shopping, affiliates, paid media, and branded content. We're around 50 people and growing fast.

The role

You’ll be our first dedicated People Operations Partner: responsible for the systems, processes, and experience that let us hire, onboard, develop, and retain a high performance team that's growing quickly. You’ll work closely with the Senior Leadership Team and team leads across three pillars: hiring, onboarding & lifecycle, culture & engagement.

What you’ll own

• Talent acquisition and hiring
  • Run our end-to-end hiring process; from job brief to offer across commercial, creative, ops, and technical roles, keeping it fast, fair, and consistent.
  • Build and maintain a warm pipeline of strong candidates so we're rarely starting from scratch when a vacancy opens.
  • Own multi-channel sourcing; LinkedIn Recruiter, job boards, async video screening, referrals — and prioritise channels by quality, not volume.
  • Partner with hiring managers to write sharp job briefs and structure interview formats, and manage agency relationships when specialist or volume support is needed.
  • Own our ATS and recruitment data; time-to-hire, source quality, pipeline conversion, offer acceptance and report regularly to SLT.
• Onboarding and employee lifecycle
  • Own the joiner-to-leaver experience: offers, contracts, pre-boarding, structured onboarding, probation reviews, internal moves, and exits.
  • Work with team leads to make sure new starters are productive fast and the first 90 days actually deliver what we promised at offer stage.
  • Handle promotions, role changes, and transitions cleanly so lifecycle moments feel intentional and full of purpose.
  • Run thoughtful offboarding, including exit interviews, and feed learnings back into how we hire and manage.
• Culture, engagement, and team experience
  • Support the performance and review cycle: timelines, templates, manager support, and follow-through.
  • Work with team leads to embed the ‘Go Places Culture Code’ into how everyone across teams approaches working at Go Places.
  • Help shape internal comms, recognition, team events, and the everyday rituals that make Go Places a good place to work.
  • Build our employer brand externally; careers page, candidate experience, so the bar we set in hiring matches the bar we set in keeping people.

What we’re looking for

• 1–3 years experience across a mix of recruitment and people work; you don't need to have done all four pillars at depth, but you should have run a hiring practice.
• Strong communication & stakeholder management skills, with ability to influence across levels.
• Confident on hiring; comfortable sourcing on LinkedIn Recruiter, running structured interviews, and improving processes rather than just executing them.
• Data-literate; comfortable tracking people metrics (hiring, retention, engagement) and using them to make decisions, not just report them.
• Organised and self-directed; you can hold multiple workstreams without dropping the ball on candidate experience, employee experience, or internal comms.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving start-up where things change quickly and you're expected to figure it out, not wait for a playbook.

What we offer

• Up to 15% annual bonus.
• Equity in a fast growing VC backed scaleup.
• Hybrid working (3 days a week in London office).
• 25 days holiday + your birthday off and public holidays.
• Pension scheme with Go Places contributions.
• Free access to a gym in our office building.
• Summer Working Hours (finish at 1pm on Fridays, June–August).
• Ability to work from abroad for 2 weeks per year.
• Quarterly team lunches paid for by Go Places.
• Free drinks and healthy snacks in the office, plus bi-weekly team socials.
• Tonnes of Go Places merch (bottles, pens, t-shirts, tote bags etc.).
• Discounts and freebies from our incredible brand partners.

Go Places is an equal opportunities employer. We hire on merit and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. If you need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process, just let us know.