Performance Associate
Find the people who change the trajectory. Build the system that finds them.
It is Monday morning, and you already know which of the new starters is going to be exceptional.
You always know. In every team you have been part of, you could tell within a week who had more in their locker than their CV showed. You read people the way other people read the news, and nobody has ever paid you a penny for it.
Here is the role most people like you never think to want. It has the word talent near the centre of it, so it reads like a step sideways into HR. That instinct is wrong here, and expensively so. Every person who ever builds this company walks through one door, and you would stand beside it. You decide who comes in. Few seats let one person shape what the whole thing becomes this directly, and fewer still where the work is this human.
Healf is Europe's fastest-growing company. Number one on the FT1000, number one on the Sifted 100. From £1m to over £100m in under three years, with a small, talent-dense team and a culture that still runs on day-one founder intensity. We are aiming for £1bn in the next three.
We curate the world's best wellbeing brands across The Four Pillars™: EAT, MOVE, MIND, SLEEP. That is the first chapter. The next is harder: more markets, a real technology platform, and the move from curating wellbeing to defining it. The team is still small enough that every person in it changes the outcome. The next person we hire moves the trajectory.
Why this role is Healf
The hardest thing Healf does is inference: reading early, noisy signal and predicting a human outcome before it is visible. Finding exceptional people is the same problem. The market waits for the proof, the badge that says someone is exceptional, and by then everyone is bidding for the same person. We read the qualities directly, before the stamp. This is not a recruiting seat. It is applied work on the most consequential capital Healf allocates: who is inside the building.
The work
Three things. One is the heart of it, and the other two hang off it.
→ Find exceptional people, and build the system that finds them. About half the role. We have mapped the talent pools where membership alone is a signal: people leaving the best companies in Europe, researchers who want to point their work at wellbeing, athletes in transition who already know what high performance feels like. You learn the pools, build relationships inside them, and bring forward the people the market has not noticed yet. And you build the engine, not one hire at a time: the proactive pipelines, the warm community a hiring manager draws from the moment a seat opens, the assessment that keeps the judgement consistent. You turn instinct into something repeatable.
→ Help run how Healf performs. A quarter of the role. Healf runs on a quarterly cadence that ties what the company is trying to do to what each person is doing: priorities set, honest reflection, real conversations, progress checked in the open. You sit inside the small team that designs it and show up where performance gets built rather than hoped for: induction, goal-setting, calibration. The next cycle reaches every person this summer, and you help make it land.
→ Help make Healf AI-native. The other quarter. RISE is Healf's programme to become AI-native, run day to day by Dhruv. You help take two hundred people from using AI to building with it. You help a whole company work at a level it could not before, and you become living proof of what an AI-native operator looks like this early in a career, which is rarer and more valuable than any title we could hand you.
Much of this you build. You would learn Claude Code in your first weeks and ship real tools: things that surface people and help us read potential consistently. The analyst doing this a decade ago had a spreadsheet and a phone. You would have Claude, on real problems from week one. Your first scouted person should be in conversation within weeks, your first tool not long after.
Why this beats the obvious roles
The roles that tempt people like you are the obvious ones. Founder's associate. Something in strategy or operations. A founder's associate orbits one person's calendar, learns a great deal, and tends to leave in two years with no domain of their own. This is the opposite. You own a domain from day one, and you build something that compounds: the community you warm this quarter is the bench Healf hires from for the next three years.
It also leaves you holding three things the market wants badly and cannot easily teach: an eye for talent that holds up under pressure, the ability to build and ship with AI, and a working understanding of how a company actually scales, seen from the inside. Hardly anyone has all three this early. People choose founder's associate or consulting to keep their options open. This opens more of them, and whatever comes next, you do it from a stronger position than any badge would have given you.
Why you're Healf
You read people, and you cannot switch it off. You have always known who around you was going to be exceptional, usually before they had proved it to anyone. People fascinate you in a what-makes-them-tick way, not an HR way.
You build, or you obviously will. Handed a hard problem and a good tool, you make something rather than wait for it. We are reading the ability, not the receipts.
You are a connector, and you are on the front foot. People are drawn to you, you move before the meeting, and you would rather write the playbook than be handed one. Half your week is reaching people who do not yet know they want to work at Healf.
Wellbeing is personal. How you train, how you sleep, what actually works. Healf is not a market to you. Finding the people who build a company like this feels less like a job than the obvious thing to do.
The deal
Permanent and full-time, UK-based, reporting to the Chief Performance Officer. A small, tight team, and the intention is to keep it that way. Competitive base plus meaningful incentives for the right person, and a meritocracy: strong delivery in the back half of 2026 sets up a real step in scope or reward in early 2027.
We ask a great deal: high standards, full ownership, and a genuine commitment to give this chapter everything you have. In return we give you the same, invested in your growth, your wellbeing, and the defining skills of the next decade.
The next person we hire will change the trajectory of the company. If the most important work of your career is ahead of you, this is the place to do it.
One question
Include your answer in your CV or cover letter attachment when you apply.
Answer both, briefly.
1. Name one person you know who is going to be exceptional and has not been recognised yet. What did you notice, and how would you find a hundred more like them?
2. You have a list of 500 names and a set of good tools, including Claude. Describe what you would build, in a week, to work out which ten are worth a conversation. You do not need to have built anything like it before. Show us how you would think it through.
200 words total. Plain English. Show us how you think.
