Employer Brand & Attraction Lead in London

Duration: 12-month Fixed Term Contract

Location: Hybrid role with base locations in London, Manchester, or Coventry, requiring approximately one day a week in the office.

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 has spent the last 18 months building strong foundations and is now focused 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, shaping attraction strategies for Professional & Tech talent. This is a role with real ownership: trusted as a subject matter expert, empowered to influence strategy, challenge thinking and elevate how our employer brand shows up in the market for one of the UK's biggest retailers.

What you'll do

At the heart of our Employer Brand & Attraction team, this role leads attraction activity for professional hiring and early careers, helping us connect with the talent that will shape our business today and tomorrow. Acting as a key partner to recruitment teams, you'll translate employer brand and attraction strategies into engaging, targeted campaigns that build awareness, consideration and high-quality talent pipelines. The role has ownership of corporate, commercial and technology hiring, early careers, social channels and events. From planning through to delivery and optimisation, attraction campaigns are a core focus. Using audience insight, market intelligence and performance data, you'll ensure activity reaches the right people in the right way. Whether promoting professional opportunities, attracting future talent or supporting critical hiring programmes, 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. Working closely with the Employer Brand & Attraction team, recruiters, stakeholders across the business and external partners, the role provides expert guidance on attraction channels, social media strategy, event activity and recruitment marketing best practice. A strong understanding of inclusive attraction approaches helps strengthen candidate quality, improve diversity outcomes and support evolving business priorities. The role also leads the planning and delivery of our events strategy, ensuring every activity is aligned to hiring needs, audience insights and employer brand objectives. Alongside external partners and agencies, responsibility sits with identifying innovative ways to engage talent communities, strengthen our market presence and build long-term relationships with future candidates. Success requires a flexible and proactive approach, with the ability to navigate changing priorities, evolving event requirements and short turnaround times while maintaining a high standard of delivery. Thriving in ambiguity and embracing change will be key, as business priorities, hiring demands and attraction plans can evolve quickly. The ability to remain adaptable, solutions-focused and resilient while delivering high-quality outcomes will be essential to success in this role. As our employer value proposition takes shape, this is a unique opportunity to help shape and activate our employer brand. You'll play a key role in translating the EVP into authentic experiences that resonate with candidates and colleagues, bringing it to life across campaigns, content, social channels and events. 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 effective 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 how you approach employer brand and attraction, ensuring outcomes 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. 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

• Demonstrable experience in employer brand, talent attraction and recruitment marketing, with evidence of translating business strategies and hiring challenges into effective attraction solutions.
• Proven capability in leading end-to-end recruitment marketing campaigns, from planning and delivery through to optimisation and measurable outcomes.
• Evidenced project management skills, with evidence of successfully prioritising and delivering multiple workstreams, and managing stakeholders, budgets and deadlines within a fast-paced environment.
• Effective stakeholder partnering and influencing skills, with experience collaborating across teams and building credibility with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.
• Well-developed relationship-building skills, with evidence of establishing and maintaining successful partnerships with agencies, suppliers and key business partners.
• Analytical and insight-led approach, with experience using data, market intelligence and performance measures to evaluate impact, inform decisions and improve outcomes.

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.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).