The role
As Recruitment Manager, you’ll provide day-to-day leadership to a team of Recruitment Consultants, creating a high-performance culture with clear expectations, strong coaching and accountability for results.
Working closely with senior leaders, Client Services and our NHS Trusts, you’ll understand current and future workforce requirements and translate these into effective recruitment and sourcing strategies.
You’ll continually assess demand against candidate supply, ensuring recruitment activity is focused in the right areas and that suitable candidates progress efficiently through recruitment and compliance.
Just as importantly, you’ll look for ways to make things better — improving productivity, reducing time to hire, strengthening candidate experience and ensuring we deliver a cost-effective, high-quality recruitment service.
What you’ll be doing
- Lead, coach and develop a team of Recruitment Consultants, creating a positive, accountable and high-performing team environment.
- Set clear individual and team objectives and manage performance against agreed KPIs, SLAs and productivity measures.
- Use performance data and management information to identify trends, challenge performance and drive measurable improvements.
- Work closely with Client Services and NHS Trust stakeholders to understand workforce requirements, recruitment priorities and future demand.
- Develop and implement recruitment and talent attraction strategies that create sustainable candidate pipelines aligned to client requirements.
- Continually assess candidate supply against demand and fulfilment forecasts, ensuring recruitment resources are focused where they will have the greatest impact.
- Drive best practice across sourcing, attraction, screening and placement activity.
- Ensure only appropriately qualified and suitable candidates progress through to Compliance, creating a strong “right first time” culture.
- Monitor team productivity and identify opportunities to improve efficiency, performance and cost to serve.
- Take ownership of performance or service recovery plans where delivery falls below agreed standards, ensuring clear actions and measurable improvement.
- Work collaboratively with Compliance and other operational teams to improve the end-to-end candidate journey and reduce delays.
- Ensure candidates receive regular, professional communication throughout their recruitment journey.
- Produce and present regular performance reporting, providing clear insight into recruitment activity, pipeline, productivity, risks and opportunities.
- Lead regular 1:1s, performance reviews and development conversations, supporting individuals to achieve their potential and progress their careers.
- Ensure recruitment activity meets NHS Employment Check Standards and all relevant statutory, mandatory and data protection requirements.
- Support recruitment events and campaigns, ensuring candidate information is captured effectively and followed through to maximise recruitment outcomes.
- Act as an escalation point for the team, resolving issues quickly and working collaboratively across the business to protect client and candidate experience.
What we’re looking for
We’re looking for an experienced recruitment professional who is equally comfortable leading people, managing performance and engaging with clients.
You’ll be someone who can turn data into action, challenge constructively and create an environment where people understand what is expected of them and are supported to deliver it.
Ideally, you’ll bring:
- Previous experience leading and developing a recruitment, resourcing or talent acquisition team.
- A strong track record of managing teams against KPIs, targets and service levels.
- Excellent coaching and people-management skills, with experience of managing performance and developing individuals.
- Strong recruitment knowledge, including candidate attraction, sourcing, screening, talent pipelining and placement.
- Confidence working with clients and senior stakeholders to understand requirements and develop recruitment solutions.
- Strong commercial and operational awareness, with the ability to balance service quality, productivity and cost.
- Experience using data and management information to understand performance and make informed decisions.
- Excellent communication, influencing and relationship-management skills.
- A continuous improvement mindset and the confidence to challenge existing ways of working.
- Strong organisation and the ability to manage competing priorities within a fast-paced environment.
Experience within healthcare recruitment would be beneficial, but strong recruitment leadership, people management and a track record of delivering results are equally important.
Why join NHS Professionals?
At NHS Professionals, recruitment has a direct impact on the ability of our NHS partners to access the skilled workforce they need.
This role offers the opportunity to lead an established recruitment team while having genuine influence over how we attract talent, improve performance and respond to changing client requirements.
You’ll have the opportunity to lead people, shape recruitment strategy, work directly with key stakeholders and deliver measurable results within an organisation supporting NHS services across the country.
If you’re a recruitment leader who enjoys developing people, improving performance and turning workforce challenges into recruitment solutions, we’d love to hear from you.