Senior Talent Acquisition Lead

The Senior Talent Lead is responsible for shaping and delivering talent strategies across defined business units in the UK and the Middle East. This role combines partnership with hands-on delivery, ensuring the business attracts, hires, develops, and retains high-performing talent.

Working closely with business leaders and HR Business Partners, the role provides expert insight, market intelligence, and data-led recommendations to support critical workforce and hiring decisions. The Senior Talent Lead will play a central role in aligning talent activity with business planning, ensuring the right people are in place at the right time.

A key focus of the role is driving continuous improvement across talent processes, enhancing both internal capability and external hiring outcomes.

The Senior Talent Lead will:

• Lead the end-to-end talent lifecycle, including attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development, and retention of high-performing employees.
• Partner with business leaders and HR to deliver talent reviews, succession planning, and targeted development initiatives.
• Act as a trusted advisor, using market insight and data to inform hiring strategies and workforce decisions.
• Identify and respond to external talent trends, ensuring the business remains competitive in attracting critical skills.
• Support workforce and resilience planning for key programmes, identifying capability gaps and future talent risks.
• Develop and deliver recruitment strategies to support new business opportunities and programme growth.
• Lead large-scale or complex hiring campaigns, from planning through to execution and delivery.
• Oversee the full recruitment lifecycle, ensuring a consistent, high-quality hiring experience.
• Present and interpret recruitment data and market intelligence to support decision-making.
• Build and maintain proactive talent pipelines for critical and hard-to-fill roles.
• Work in partnership with the RPO provider, setting direction, managing performance, and ensuring delivery against business objectives.
• Establish and monitor effective resourcing metrics, KPIs, and SLAs to drive continuous improvement.
• Support the establishment of hiring capability in new countries or regions as required.
• Act as an escalation point for complex or high-risk resourcing challenges.
• Contribute to wider EMEA and enterprise talent initiatives and projects including Employee Value Proposition, ATS roll out and new country set ups.

Proven experience within an in-house talent acquisition or resourcing function. Demonstrated ownership of end-to-end recruitment processes. Strong knowledge of UK and Middle East employment legislation, frameworks and practices. Experience operating in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. Track record of delivering recruitment campaigns, including in skills short or specialist markets. Experience working with and managing RPO or external recruitment partners. Exposure to international hiring, particularly across Europe and/or the Middle East. Ability to translate business needs into effective talent strategies.

This role requires an individual who brings both strategic thinking and delivery focus, with the ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, evolving environment. Proactive and resilient professional who takes ownership of outcomes and remains focused under pressure. A strong sense of accountability, motivated by delivering high-quality results, even in complex or ambiguous situations. A natural collaborator, able to build strong credible relationships across all levels of the organisation. Confident engaging with senior stakeholders, able to challenge constructively, and skilled at influencing decisions through insight and evidence. Demonstrates a strong team ethic, contributing positively to the wider HR function and supporting collective success.

The Talent Acquisition team sits within the central HR function, partnering closely with business leaders and local HR teams across the EMEA region. The team delivers an end-to-end Talent Acquisition process for 24 countries across the region. This role operates across multiple business areas in the UK and the Middle East, playing a key part in ensuring the organisation has the capability and talent required to deliver its strategic objectives.

At Lockheed Martin our employees come first and therefore your physical, mental and financial wellbeing matters to us. On top of working in a highly supportive, friendly, respectful environment you can expect so much more. We are an employer in support of and offering flexible working with the option to also work a 4-day week depending on business requirements, where you have the option of Fridays off. We offer competitive salaries alongside a flexible holiday entitlement. We have a wealth of benefits available to you that can be selected through our wellbeing tool upon commencement of employment.

Just a few of our amazing benefits are shown below:

• Private Medical Insurance
• Competitive Pension
• Dental
• Critical Illness
• Life Assurance
• Travel Insurance
• Employee discounts for top high street shops
• Employee Assistance Program which includes free face-to-face counselling sessions, Legal advice, Financial advice, etc.
• Internal training and development alongside our Education assistance programmes
• Reimbursement for a professional membership
• Competitive policies that support flexibility and family leave inclusive of enhanced maternity leave.