Head of People & Talent Operations (standalone) in London

Package: £110,000 – £130,000 + up to 50% bonus

Location: 5 days a week in London (Mayfair)

The Business: Growth equity investment firm, 20 people growing to 30.

Success: Currently in Fund III, managing £1.5 billion in assets across US, Europe, Japan and Korea, huge decacorn track record and a 30% hit rate.

People Team Size: 0

Tech Stack: Revolut People, Notion, Granola, Claude, Rippling, Personio

Culture: Quality over quantity, detail orientated, iterative, feedback, research and debate-heavy.

Why this role now? The company is at an inflection point – the team is actively growing, the investment pipeline is expanding, and the firm runs a genuinely high-performance culture: formal review cycles, promotion decisions, and bonus outcomes that all require careful, consistent management. Until now, this has sat with the Partners, but as the team matures and the firm invests in developing people internally, the infrastructure to support that ambition needs to be built properly and given the dedicated attention it deserves. Their biggest competitive advantage is its people, and protecting that requires more than good intentions. That is no longer scalable sitting with a Partner and requires someone to own it from the ground up.

The Role – first 12 months:

• Working directly with a busy Partner, this role will work collaboratively with her.
• Build a hiring framework that ensures the firm can consistently hire and retain A-player talent – currently searches take too long, and the investment team is under capacity. You’ll diagnose why hiring is slow and implement solutions, and work with external recruiters, not replace them.
• Create foundational people mechanisms that support performance run cleanly, reliably, and with minimal friction, enabling the team to execute at its best. You’ll take ownership of ensuring the HRIS (Revolut People) is being utilised to its full advantage, as well as managing compliance, lifecycle changes, and L&D logistics.
• Redesign the employee handbook into an engaging, accessible Notion workspace that blends culture, policies, and practical guidance, replacing the existing legalistic PDF with a truly employee-centered resource.
• Redesign onboarding (standardised checklists, first-week plans, and Notion-based materials).
• Assist Founders with performance calibrations, and iterate on the performance management framework, owning performance cycles and people relations, ensuring performance review processes are reliable, consistent, and well documented. Bi-annual performance reviews were introduced for the first time last year, which have been successful but are relatively MVP level. They also have quarterly goals, and the system evaluates quality/speed of work, skills, and operating principles, and a performance-related bonus.
• Hands-on ownership of annual compensation reviews using clean market benchmarks and data preparation, partnering with leadership on decisions to enable consistent, transparent salary decisions.

The Role – 12 months and onwards: There are broader topics ongoing and if this person stabilises the core people systems (recruiting, performance review, ongoing ops) and has more capacity, the role will naturally get involved in the below topics (12 months onwards)

• Building a proactive outbound sourcing capability for junior investment team roles and a referral scheme for all roles. Addressing the firm’s employer brand gap to reduce dependence on inbound pipelines and external recruiters.
• Diagnosing and acting on engagement signals (including eNPS), designing team rituals that fit their unique culture, and helping leadership address workload and prioritisation at a systemic level.
• Building clear progression frameworks and a structured approach to developing junior hires into future partner-level talent, without creating heavy training overhead.
• Deepening the compensation function – including carry and long-term incentive transparency for junior team members, and an explicit link between performance and reward.
• As the firm grows, partnering with leadership to think through how the firm’s capabilities need to evolve – identifying gaps in the team’s skill set (e.g. data science, research), scoping new functions before they’re hired, and designing how new roles integrate with the existing team structure.

Why This Role?

• Opportunity to work directly with a high-performing Founding Partner.
• The opportunity to focus on quality over quantity work, not 80/20.
• The opportunity to build out the function completely from scratch.
• High level of engagement from the partner who really cares, and goes into detail with feedback.
• A highly collaborative, low-hierarchy, friendly and supportive team.
• Opportunity to expand into Portfolio Advisory or take on a broader Operational scope as the business grows.

What are we looking for?

• Must-haves:
• Experience in a high-bar, high standards environment – ideally Professional Services, Consulting, an Investment Firm, or a high-growth, successful VC backed organisation.
• Hands-on Talent/Recruiting experience, including ATS optimisation.
• Hands-on People Operations experience, including HRIS optimisation.
• Experience supporting performance and compensation reviews.
• Experience driving automations and efficiencies through AI.
• Strong academic background.
• Must be happy to work in a standalone capacity.
• Experience working with modern tools.
• High analytical capability – ability to analyse performance data trends and support salary review cycles.

• Nice-To Haves:
• Experience developing a strong employer brand, direct sourcing model and referral scheme.
• Understanding of funnel metrics.
• ATS implementation and optimisation experience.
• Experience working with Revolut People, Notion, Rippling, Personio.
• Experience developing Performance and Reward frameworks.
• Ability to analyse compensation benchmarking and translate into actionable improvements.

Approach:

• Comfortable with high visibility, high exposure, frequent check-ins, feedback and iteration; happy to earn trust and responsibility.
• Consulting mindset – high attention to detail, analytical, high standards, organised and able to track things reliably from beginning to end, backs up decisions with data.
• Proactive, adaptable and learns fast – a natural problem-solver who approaches complexity with first principles thinking rather than pattern-matching.
• Thinks commercially about people processes: are they fit for purpose, do they solve the right problems, and are they aligned with the culture.
• Emotional intelligence and understanding of what makes people tick.

This isn’t the role for you if:

• You want flexibility – everyone is in the office 5 days a week. There is of course flexibility to work from home for appointments, and to work the occasional Friday from home. With working hours, there is flex there too, some like to be in super early vs some come in later and stay later etc, but there is no flex on 5 days.

What’s the process like?

• Interview with Penny @ The Search (w/c 22nd June).
• Screening Interview → 30 min introductory call with Founding Partner (on Zoom, w/c 22nd & 29th June).
• Problem solve with stakeholder → 45 min (on Zoom, w/c 22nd & 29th June).
• Super day including case study, lunch and cultural interview → ideally all day in the office, though can be spread across more than one day (F2F, w/c 6th July).
• Final interview with the CEO → 45 mins in person (F2F, w/c 6th July).
• They are looking to make an offer by the 10th July.