Candidate Engagement Manager in London

Build a brand-new candidate function within an established specialist recruitment business. We're creating something new at Pro Recruitment. We're looking for an experienced recruiter or search professional to build and lead a dedicated Candidate Engagement function - focused entirely on finding, engaging and developing the specialist candidate communities that sit at the heart of our business. This isn't a traditional 360 recruitment role. Instead, you'll take ownership of the candidate side of our business: proactively identifying great people, building long-term relationships, developing talent pipelines and ultimately building and leading a small team around you. And because this is a brand-new function, you won't be stepping into somebody else's model. You'll have genuine scope to help us shape how it works.

What will you be doing?

• Proactively sourcing and headhunting specialist candidates
• Building and developing long-term candidate communities and talent pipelines
• Engaging passive candidates who may not be looking to move today
• Managing candidate registrations, qualification and initial career conversations
• Searching and re-engaging our existing database
• Identifying and developing high-value candidate opportunities
• Following up candidates engaging with our events, marketing campaigns and automations
• Ensuring candidate information, notes and pipelines are accurately maintained within our CRM

As the function develops, you'll also lead and develop a small Candidate Engagement team, setting priorities, coaching team members and ensuring the function is focused on the areas that will make the biggest commercial impact.

Who are we looking for?

You'll know how to find people who aren't necessarily applying to adverts, engage them properly and build relationships that last beyond one vacancy. You're likely to be someone who:

• Has strong headhunting and candidate sourcing experience
• Is confident engaging experienced and senior professionals
• Enjoys building long-term relationships
• Understands the commercial value of a strong candidate network
• Is organised and comfortable managing multiple candidate pipelines and priorities
• Has high standards around CRM and data quality
• Can work collaboratively with consultants and senior stakeholders
• Has experience managing, mentoring or developing others
• Enjoys improving processes and finding better ways of working
• Wants ownership and the opportunity to build something rather than simply inherit it

Experience recruiting within Tax or Finance would be advantageous, but it isn't essential.

Why this role?

If you've built your career in recruitment or executive search but the part you really enjoy is finding people, understanding markets and developing candidate relationships, this could offer something quite different. You'll have the opportunity to:

• Build a new function from the ground up
• Shape how the team operates
• Build and lead your own team
• Focus on candidate generation without carrying a traditional new-business-development remit
• Develop genuine expertise across specialist professional markets
• Work closely with senior leaders across the business
• Combine traditional headhunting with data, technology, automation, events and marketing
• See the direct commercial impact your function has across the wider business

If you like the idea of creating something new and putting the candidate side of recruitment at the centre of what you do, we'd love to hear from you.

As an employer, we are committed to ensuring the representation of people from all backgrounds regardless of their gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, disability status, or any other aspect which makes them unique. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds to apply and would encourage you to let us know if there are steps, we can take to ensure that your recruitment process enables you to present yourself in a way that makes you comfortable.