"Talent Strategist (Fixed Term)"

About us:

King’s College London is a world-leading university based in the heart of London with 40,000 students from over 150 countries studying in person and online, and over 12,000 employees. This is an exciting time to join King’s College London as we establish a new Talent team embedded within HR. The creation of the team reflects the renewed focus and strategic priority to enhance our talent management capabilities across both our academic and professional services workforce.

About the role:

One of the key pillars of King’s 2030 strategy is ‘Enabling our People to Excel’, and the talent, commitment, and creativity of our people are at the heart of King’s success. The Talent team is responsible for developing a new strategy and setting up active talent management, including assessing and identifying high potential, retaining and developing talent, enabling and embedding a high-performance culture, and the creation of new career pathways.

We are looking for someone to join us for c.10 months to help the strategic development of a Talent function to support university ambitions, working alongside HR colleagues, including the Organisational Development Team. There is an opportunity to make a real impact by bringing best practice and innovation into King’s.

For further information, or for an informal conversation please contact the Director of Talent rebecca.russell@kcl.ac.uk. To apply please submit a CV and supporting statement (1 page) setting out your relevant experience through the King’s job pages.

This is a full time role (35 hours per week) and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 01-Jan-2027 or until the return of the substantive post holder.

About you:

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. Evidence of designing and implementing career and talent management activities such as succession plans and developing methodologies to assess high potential.
2. Experience in designing and embedding career pathways across all layers of a large organisation.
3. Knowledge of best practice process improvement and the capability to leverage available technology, data and reporting to improve new and existing processes.
4. Experience of how to successfully roll out new initiatives in a large and complex organisation.
5. Excellent written, listening and communication skills.
6. Strategic thinker with operational delivery expertise.
7. Proven analytical and problem-solving capability, and the ability to work independently.
8. Comfortable with ambiguity, and able to flex to provide effective solutions to meet our stakeholders' evolving needs.

Desirable criteria

1. Experience of working in higher education, government or the public sector.
2. Educated to degree level, or equivalent.
3. Experience of working in a large and complex organisation.
4. Experience of leading centralised performance management initiatives, including the delivery and reporting of annual performance reviews.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the person specification section of the job description. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit’ pages.

Interviews are due to be held on 15th January 2026.

Grade and Salary: £53,947 - £63,350 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance
Job ID: 133146
Close Date: 04-Jan-2026
Contact Person: Rebecca Russell
Contact Details:Rebecca.russell@kcl.ac.uk