Talent Acquisition Associate (Contract)

Accelerate the growth of our team — hiring the people who forecast risk on HS2, Heathrow and Sizewell C. If you're early in your career and want a job that’s aligned with your exceptional achievements, not your tenure, join nPlan.

Own the whole thing. Five to seven live searches, brief to accepted offer. No coordinator beneath you, nobody above you doing the interesting parts. We're a company of around fifty people, so one hire visibly moves it. Hunt for people who don't answer job ads: ML researchers, product people who can hold their own with programme directors, enterprise sellers who sell into infrastructure. Small pools, no inbound shortcut. This is most of the job.

Work like a talent team of five, as one person. We’re an AI company, so obviously we know what AI can do. We'll give you the AI tooling and the time to learn it properly. What we need is someone who'll actually run with it. We’re looking for the person who’s blowing the roof off the expectations of what good looks like at your level and wants to take real ownership and accelerate their growth. This is a contractor role that has the potential to grow into more.

nPlan is growing fast and we’re always on the lookout for exceptional talent that can help us create a step-change in the growth of our business. Ready to reshape one of the world's largest industries? nPlan has built a unique AI platform that turns the data behind major construction projects into decisions their leaders can act on — forecasting delay and cost risk on some of the world's most important infrastructure, and helping the people running those projects decide what to do about it.

Behind that is a machine learning capability that forecasts project risk more accurately than anything else on the market, trained on one of the largest datasets of construction schedules in existence, and built by a world-class engineering and research team recognised as a MacRobert Prize finalist, the UK's top engineering award. Every hire you make goes into that team.

The role — please make sure this excites and energizes you. We don't have a talent team. We have this role, and the hiring managers you'll partner with. That's a wider remit than someone a few years in usually gets. That’s because we'd rather back one person who is hungry and learning fast, with real ownership and real support, than hire someone senior to do a fraction of what they're capable of.

The bet only works if you close the gap quickly, so we've been specific below about where we'll carry you and where we won't. One important thing: If you’re not comfortable picking up the phone, please don’t apply.

You’ll have three main focus areas:

• Sourcing is the engine, not the fallback. We hire for competencies that are genuinely scarce, and passive channels don't fill those roles. You'll run active, targeted outbound as the default, with the structure to keep five to seven searches alive at once without any of them going quiet for a fortnight. This is the part we expect you to already be good at.
• We want recruiting here to be data-driven. We've started building the infrastructure, and now need you to use it and help us improve it. You will be asked to keep the data honest, know your own numbers cold, and change what you're doing when they tell you to. We'd rather you kill a sourcing channel with evidence and move on to the next one than defend one with anecdote.
• AI is how one person covers this much ground. We’re an AI company, so obviously we know what AI can do. We don't expect you to arrive with a built-out AI workflow but we do expect someone who teaches themselves quickly and is truly curious. You'll get proper onboarding on the tooling, a budget for more, and roughly a quarter to get fluent. After that it's the difference between coping and being genuinely good at this.

What you'll do:

• Source actively, every day. Build target lists and market maps, find people who aren't looking, and write outreach that gets replies from people who ignore twelve InMails a week.
• Pick up the phone — our experience tells us this is still the most effective way to source and accelerate time to fill in our talent pools.
• Run five to seven searches end to end. Intake, market map, outbound, screen, coordination, offer, close. You'll know where every search stands without having to look it up.
• Help us close. Our preferred candidates are in demand and will have counter-offers and multiple processes moving at speed. Getting someone across the line when they have options is a team effort, and you’ll help us make sure they’re excited and we’re prepared.
• Keep the numbers honest and use them. Log properly, know your key metrics, understand and own what’s happening in each role you’re working, and bring data to our weekly one-to-one with a view on what you're changing.
• Get fluent with the AI stack. Research, list-building, enrichment, drafting and personalising outreach, structuring screens, pulling your own reporting. We'll teach you the first version; we expect you to build on it and make it better.
• Learn the domains properly. Machine learning, product, enterprise sales into infrastructure. You don't need to arrive knowing any of this. You do need to reach the point where an ML engineer or construction industry insider takes your call seriously. That means immersing yourself with our team, our products, our industry, and our clients.
• Work closely with hiring managers. Run real intake conversations, keep them moving, and get comfortable telling them when the brief and the market don't agree.

Please mention the word 'crane' in your application.

What we're looking for:

• Around two years of hands‑on recruiting where you found your own candidates — outbound, headhunting, referrals, networks — rather than working a queue of inbound applicants. Agency, in-house, embedded or RPO; we care about what you did, not where you did it.
• You teach yourself things. Tell us about something you learned on your own initiative and what you did with it. This matters more to us than what you already know, because the tooling and the domains here will move faster than any of us can keep up with.
• Ambition in the specific sense we mean it: reaching past the brief. The person who researches a market unprompted, who asks why we're hiring the role at all, who comes back with the candidate nobody asked for.
• Not longer hours - that’s a meaningless (and often negative) metric. Placements you can actually evidence. How many people you put into roles, into what, over what period, and roughly what your outreach reply rate looks like. We'll ask, and we'd rather have a modest honest number than a large vague one.
• You've carried a heavy concurrent load and can describe the system that made it possible — the actual mechanics, not "I'm organised."
• Experience recruiting in technology, data, or adjacent fields, for mid-career and experienced professionals rather than graduate or early careers programmes.
• You're comfortable with numbers — conversion rates, funnel maths, honest reporting on your own performance.
• You write well. Outreach, candidate updates, hiring manager summaries. Writing is most of this job.
• You can set your own pace. Nobody here will be setting your daily targets. We'll give you cadence and support, but the discipline has to come from you. Some people find that liberating and some find it disorienting — be honest with yourself about which you are.

Nice to have:

• You already use AI tools in your workflow and can show us how.
• Exposure to hiring machine learning, data science, or enterprise sales talent.
• Recruiting into the UK, US, or Australian markets.
• Working knowledge of an ATS beyond submitting into it.
• Something you've built or automated in a recruiting workflow — a scoring rubric, a sourcing agent, a report nobody asked for.
• Some interest in construction, infrastructure, or AI. You'll be selling this company to sceptical people; caring about it helps.

What working at nPlan will be like:

We are still a relatively small team, so there is plenty of opportunity for a high degree of ownership and growth, and you will be directly exposed to all areas of the business. This role sits close to the leadership team from day one. This is a contractor role that has the potential to grow into more. nPlan is growing fast and we’re always on the lookout for exceptional talent that can help us accelerate the trajectory of our business.

Generous paid holiday, because time with the people and things you care about matters. Flexible working hours, with the team in the Shoreditch office regularly enough to build real relationships, plus quarterly company get-togethers. Regular lunches, socials and opportunities to connect as a team. A Learning & Development budget, strong Health & Wellbeing support, and generous family leave. Your voice will always be heard. What you do or say counts, not who you are or where you're from.

We are a cross-disciplinary team, and come from all backgrounds and cultures. We have three core values that underlie everything we do:

• Learn from Everything
• Be Radically Truthful
• Aim High, Run Fast

We are working hard to create a workplace that is inclusive to everyone, no matter their background, or where they are in life. We believe that only a truly diverse place can create great products that serve a wide audience and improve the world. We believe in equality of opportunities and that's why we make sure that these ideas are reflected in our values, and that we really apply these in all aspects of our company culture. If you have a need for any adjustments during our interview process, let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Hiring process:

• Intro call (15 min)
• Skill set interview (30 min)
• Practical exercise (60 min): we'll hand you a real search of ours that has stalled, and ask what you'd do about it. No template, no expected format — we'll send the details 48 hours beforehand. We're interested in how you think, not in what you already know about our industry.
• Values Alignment call (60 min)
• On-site (half a day, can be remote)

If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you!