Employer Brand & Attraction Lead in City of London

Hybrid – London, Coventry or Manchester SSC + Home (approx. 1 day a week in office and monthly team collaboration)

Why Join Us

This is your opportunity to step into a high-impact employer brand role at real scale. As our Employer Brand & Attraction Lead, you’ll join an established Centre of Expertise within our People team - a team that focuses on scaling impact, maturity, and consistency across the business. Everything we do is rooted in understanding and serving our customers better, guided by our purpose to make good food joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone.

In this role, you’ll help shape how we attract talent who share that commitment to customer closeness and delivering experiences that truly matter. Your work will be seen, felt and measured as you bring our employer brand to life across campaigns, content, social channels, careers experiences, advocacy programmes and events. This is a role with real ownership, responsible for how our employer brand shows up across candidate touchpoints and how we create engaging experiences that connect people with Sainsbury's.

What you'll do

At the heart of our Employer Brand & Attraction team, this role leads on the activation of our employer brand across the full talent landscape, from volume and professional hiring through to technology and early careers. Acting as a key partner to recruitment teams, you'll bring our employer value proposition to life through campaigns, content, social channels, digital experiences, events and advocacy, helping create meaningful connections with current and future talent.

You'll also support recruitment marketing activity where required, helping to ensure that attraction campaigns are aligned with our employer brand, audience needs, and hiring priorities. Employer brand activation is a core focus. From brief through to delivery and optimisation, you'll create and execute campaigns, content and experiences that strengthen awareness, engagement and consideration, ensuring our employer brand is consistently represented across all channels and audiences. Success comes from balancing creativity with commercial impact to deliver measurable results.

Operating in a fast-paced environment, you'll be comfortable managing multiple priorities, adapting quickly to changing business needs and responding confidently to last-minute shifts in hiring demand, timelines and campaign requirements. Taking ownership of our careers website experience, you'll work closely with partners to continually improve content, candidate journeys and employer-brand storytelling, ensuring our digital experiences remain engaging, relevant and accessible.

Alongside this, you'll lead our employee advocacy programme and support the ongoing development of our Employer Brand Clinic, creating content, frameworks, toolkits, and guidance that help colleagues, recruiters, and stakeholders consistently bring our employer brand to life across every touchpoint. As our employer value proposition continues to evolve, you'll play a leading role in bringing it to life. Through campaigns, content, social channels, advocacy, events and careers experiences, you'll translate our EVP into meaningful interactions that resonate with candidates and colleagues.

Working closely with stakeholders across the business and our external partners, you'll act as a trusted employer brand expert, providing guidance on activation, challenging where appropriate, and sharing insights and best practices to strengthen how our brand shows up across every touchpoint. Through this work, you'll influence how experienced and future talent connect with our brand, supporting both immediate hiring needs and longer-term employer brand growth.

Who you are

You have a strong understanding of employer brand and recruitment marketing, with experience translating employer value propositions into engaging campaigns, content, experiences and attraction activity. Retail is fast-paced and dynamic, so you’re comfortable working autonomously and at speed - taking ownership from idea through to execution. You bring a thoughtful, data-led approach to decision-making, using insight to improve performance and demonstrate impact.

Relationship-building comes naturally, and your clear, confident communication enables effective collaboration and influence across teams, stakeholder groups, and external partners. A genuine commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion informs your approach to employer brand and attraction, ensuring outcomes that maximise both impact and return on investment. You’re passionate about creating experiences that put customers at the heart of everything, and you model our valued behaviours in the everyday - Own it by taking responsibility, Make it better by driving improvements, and Be human by showing care and respect. You act with integrity, work inclusively, and stay curious, while inspiring others to do the same. Naturally inquisitive, you stay close to emerging trends, tools, and ideas - applying learning pragmatically to continually evolve how we attract and connect with talent.

Essential Criteria

• Evidenced experience in or a solid understanding of employer brand and recruitment marketing, able to translate strategy and problem statements into effective attraction activity
• Proven experience delivering employer brand activation activity, such as campaigns and content, with exposure to or experience supporting recruitment marketing campaigns where required.
• Evidenced strong project management skills, with the ability to plan, prioritise and deliver multiple workstreams simultaneously while managing stakeholders, deadlines, budgets and changing business requirements.
• Strong relationship-building skills and confident in partnering with internal stakeholders, external partners and suppliers, providing guidance on channels, paid media and attraction tools

Please note, this vacancy may close early if we receive a high volume of interest.

Responsibilities

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work–life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. We’re the first to say we do HR differently here. For a start, we work as business partners and specialists. Whether that’s making sure nearly 150,000 colleagues are paid on time, or shaping a strategy that helps us attract the right people, put them in the right place, and unlock their potential. This is a fast-moving business, and our policies and rewards evolve with it. That’s why we’re as flexible as we can be about where and when you work. We’re also flexible about your future. There’s always room to move up or across, if that’s what you want. We really value different perspectives, so there’s no one opinion, no single path, and yours matters.

Qualifications

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working.

When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you’ll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 10% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.