Head of Candidate Supply

Location: London (Oval), United Kingdom

Type: Full-time. Office-based.

Why we exist

Education is the cornerstone of a thriving society. Schools do their utmost to provide children with positive experiences, but having the right staff is essential to fulfilling that promise. That’s where we come in. Whether it’s a year 1 teacher to greet her “good morning” or a Teaching Assistant to support them in the break times, Zen helps schools find the right educators faster without breaking the bank. Schools in the UK spend over £2bn a year on agency staff, and over £400m of that goes straight into the pockets of recruitment agencies. Zen is an all-in-one digital platform that gives schools full control over how they find, vet, and manage temporary educators. School leaders can search, book, and manage staff in real time, while gaining full visibility and control over their spend and compliance.

What we need now is to turn supply into a genuine commercial engine. That’s where you come in.

What we are looking for

• We’ve built strong foundations already:
• We are one of the largest suppliers of staff to UK schools and one of the fastest growing companies in the UK.
• A supply function that already brings a high volume of educators into the marketplace.
• A differentiated product that makes a genuine impact on the lives of educators, pupils, and the education system.

We’re now looking to level up even further. Right now our supply function focuses on the volume of educators we add into the marketplace. We’re looking for a strategic architect to transform it into a commercial engine that manages liquidity where the business needs it. That means:

• Shifting from reactive onboarding to predicting where we need educators ready to be booked by schools through the Zen app.
• Converting more educators through the funnel quickly, without ever compromising on quality.
• Designing how supply ramps to match new schools that start using Zen.

Some traits that usually correlate with success in this role:

• You’re a strategic operator who wants to build.
• You come from a structured environment, with a few years in top tier management consulting or leading strategic operations in high growth businesses, and you want to own outcomes that move the growth trajectory of a company.
• You’re a first principles thinker. You don’t just copy and paste an industry standard playbook. You ask why the process exists and then figure out how to automate it.
• You’re analytically rigorous and thrive in the data. You can build the models that prove why we should, or shouldn’t, invest in a strategy.
• You have a bias for action. You balance making decisions on good data with the knowledge that growing fast means executing and iterating quickly.

What you’ll own:

• End to end functional ownership. You own the full teacher acquisition funnel end to end, from diversifying the channels through which we find teachers and teaching assistants, through to building the frameworks that tell us where, when, and what kind of supply we need across the UK.
• Improving our unit economics. You’ll own the key strategic metrics: cost per verified educator, funnel conversion rates, and time from sign up to first day of work, without compromising on quality or safeguarding standards.
• Cross-functional strategy. You’ll be the primary feedback loop for our Product and Tech teams, and your insights will directly influence strategic product builds.
• Regional enablement. You’ll equip every region across the UK with the data, tooling, and playbooks to source educators locally so we always have the liquidity we need.
• Developing high performing teams. You’ll coach and mentor a broader team of around 20, mostly based in the London office.

Who you’ll work with

We’re a 400+ (and growing!) team operating across the UK, US, and Canada. We’re well funded, growing fast, and have tremendous unit economics. Simply put, we’re doing really well by doing good. As such, we’re a passionate group of missionaries rather than mercenaries, and we’re looking for someone who shares our passion for the mission of making education better.

Interested? Let’s go! If you’ve made it this far and you’re excited, then hit apply. If the timing isn’t right or you’re not sure it’s a fit, reach out anyway. We’re always open to talking to those who believe in our mission. Let’s build something that actually matters!