Talent Acquisition Manager - Early Careers in Reading

The Opportunity

Bristol, Reading or Oxford (preferred)

Due to an internal promotion, we are hiring a Talent Acquisition Manager – Early Careers for our UK business. This high-impact leadership role sits within a collaborative, growth-focused organisation with strong long-term ambitions and continued expansion plans in the UK. Working in an agile model (3 days in-office, 2 from home), you will lead a team of four and shape how graduate and apprentice talent is identified, engaged, and developed. This is an opportunity to continue to build a best-in-class Early Careers function that drives organisational impact, strengthens our employer brand, and supports the business in achieving its high growth ambitions.

Having delivered continuous growth over the past few years, we remain committed to sustaining and accelerating our UK expansion, while continuing to attract the best and brightest graduate and apprentice talent.

About The Role

Reporting to the Head of Talent Acquisition, you’ll lead the strategy, delivery, and performance of Early Careers recruitment across graduate and apprenticeship programmes. You’ll manage and develop a team of recruiters, fostering a high-performance culture focused on quality, inclusion, and candidate experience. As a senior partner to business leaders, you’ll help influence workforce planning and future skills strategy, ensuring early talent pipelines align with long-term needs. You’ll own the full recruitment lifecycle, driving process excellence, governance, and continuous improvement through data and insight, while ensuring hiring is consistent, scalable, and compliant.

Your Impact

You will continue to shape how future talent enters and develops within the organisation, across both graduate and apprenticeship programmes. By combining strategic insight with strong leadership, you will ensure early careers hiring becomes a key driver of sustainable growth.

About You

• Proven experience managing and leading Early Careers (Graduates/Apprentice) talent acquisition teams within large, complex organisations (1,000+ employees).
• Experience leading high performing recruiting teams, with the ability to coach and develop high-performing teams.
• Deep understanding of UK Early Careers markets, academic cycles, and apprenticeship frameworks.
• Experience partnering with senior stakeholders and influencing workforce planning.
• Track record of designing fair, structured, and scalable assessment processes.
• Experience building employer brand across universities, schools, and external partners.
• Data-driven, with the ability to translate insight into action.
• Comfortable managing complexity, competing priorities, and escalations.
• Strong commercial awareness with a focus on measurable impact.

Why Join Us

• We put people first: We’re proud of our friendly, inclusive and collaborative environment where everyone feels valued and driven to succeed.
• We are driven to achieve: Named in the top 50 companies to work by Glassdoor 2025.
• We do what is right: Industry leading training and development as well as paid for professional subscriptions.
• We are better together: A supportive and collaborative team environment and wider ERG network.
• Growth: We’re on an exciting growth journey across the UK - we want you to be part of it!
• Great Benefits: Competitive salary, bonus schemes, enhanced pension plan, annual leave with the option to buy/sell additional days, private medical insurance, group income protection & life assurance included as standard as well as discounted gym membership and lots more.
• Hybrid / Flexible working: Enjoy a healthy work-life balance with our hybrid approach to flexible working.

Note: We offer hybrid working options with the expectation of attending the office 3 days per week. For our Warrington office, it’s likely the successful candidate will need to be able to drive to the office due to the location.

Stantec provides equal employment opportunities to all qualified employees and applicants for future and current employment and prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. We prohibit discrimination in decisions concerning recruitment, hiring, referral, promotion, compensation, fringe benefits, job training, terminations or any other condition of employment.