People Lead

As Xapien scales, our ability to hire, develop, reward, and retain high performing people depends on having strong systems behind our managers - not on any one person owning people decisions for them. The People & Talent Lead exists to design and implement those core systems. This is a builder's role: you'll create the practical frameworks, tools, and processes that give managers the structure and confidence to lead their teams well, without owning their people decisions.

Key Responsibilities

• Manager enablement
  • Build practical tools, templates, and guidance that help managers hire, develop, and lead effectively.
  • Design manager training covering feedback, performance conversations, role clarity, and decision making.
  • Support managers as a coach and partner, while ensuring accountability stays with the manager.
• Talent & hiring systems
  • Define and implement a structured, high quality hiring system, including role definition, interview frameworks, scorecards, and assessment criteria.
  • Establish a clear hiring bar and a consistent approach to evaluating candidates.
  • Manage and develop the Talent Partner, who continues to run hiring processes end to end.
  • Use hiring data and funnel insights to improve quality, speed, and consistency.
• Performance & progression
  • Design lightweight performance and progression frameworks.
  • Ensure roles have clear expectations, success measures, and progression paths.
  • Build the process, tools, and guidance needed for consistent performance conversations and decisions.
  • Support calibration and consistency across teams.
• Reward, benchmarking & fairness
  • Support the development of a compensation philosophy and benchmarking approach.
  • Build guidance for pay reviews, promotions, and reward decisions.
  • Ensure pay, progression, and performance frameworks are applied fairly and consistently.
  • Partner closely with Finance on affordability, planning, and trade offs.
• Onboarding & early employee experience
  • Design a consistent onboarding framework that helps new joiners become productive quickly.
  • Define manager responsibilities across the first 30, 60, and 90 days.
  • Improve the employee experience through the first 6-12 months, particularly around role clarity, expectations, and development.
• People communications & adoption
  • Own the communication and rollout of people frameworks, processes, and initiatives.
  • Ensure changes are clearly understood and adopted across teams.
  • Partner with existing operations/admin support on coordination and delivery.
• System design & implementation
  • Define how people and talent systems work end to end.
  • Keep frameworks simple, practical, and scalable.
  • Establish clear ownership for each people process so it is applied consistently across the organisation.
  • Support Xapien's evolution towards an AI enabled workforce, including defining the capabilities required and helping leaders adapt team structures.

What you'll bring

• Experience building people systems in scaling companies, ideally through comparable periods of fast growth.
• Strength across performance, progression, hiring systems, and reward frameworks.
• A practical, hands on approach - comfortable building from scratch rather than inheriting an established function.
• Strong judgement and a commercial mindset.
• The ability to influence managers and senior leaders through credibility rather than authority.
• Comfort with ambiguity, pace, and a deliberately low process environment.
• A systems minded outlook, balanced with a healthy dislike of bureaucracy.

Benefits

• Employee shares & equity programme.
• Private health insurance.
• Life insurance.
• Unlimited holidays.
• £1k professional development fund per year.