Head of Talent
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Job Location:
Monthly Salary:
Posted on:
30+ days ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
Were building the UKs next generation engineering powerhouse providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.
Rowden presents a unique opportunity for an ambitious talent leader. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Bristol we set out to prove that mission-critical systems at the edge could be engineered better deployed faster and designed around the end user.
Over the past year weve doubled our headcount and continue to grow quickly delivering operational capability to armed forces first responders and intelligence analysts operating in the most challenging environments. Our success has been driven by an exceptional team a strong culture and a set of values rooted in pace pragmatism and measurable impact.
Why This Role Exists
Rowden is entering an inflection point that requires deliberate long-term talent systems.
As we continue to scale we are:
As we continue to scale we are:
- Delivering larger more complex programmes that require cross-disciplinary engineering leadership.
- Building and shipping integrated hardware and software products internationally.
- Scaling commercial leadership across new and existing markets and technologies.
- Designing the organisational structure leadership team and incentives to support a much larger business.
We cannot meet this challenge by reacting to vacancies relying on job boards or hiring from a fixed pool of known candidates. Instead we need to proactively shape our workforce ensuring our talent strategy directly enables contract delivery product development and effective sales activity. This role exists to own that problem end-to-end.
The Role
As Head of Talent you will lead Rowdens talent strategy from first principles. You will be responsible for understanding the skills we have the capabilities we need and building a highly effective team around this over time. You will lead a high-impact internal talent function with the authority to shape the team tooling and partnerships required to deliver results.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first 12 months you will have:
What Success Looks Like
Within your first 12 months you will have:
- Developed a deep technical understanding of Rowdens workforce including current strengths capability gaps and future needs tied directly to product and contract delivery.
- Built close working relationships with engineering product and operational leaders and spent time with end users to accurately represent to candidates our mission culture and capabilities.
- Built a detailed understanding of the Southwest talent market while also expanding Rowdens reach across the UK and internationally.
- Designed clear talent pipelines for critical skills spanning university partnerships early-career programmes experienced hires and senior leadership roles.
- Personally closed senior leadership hires and provided critical inputs to compensation structures across the organisation.
- Identified opportunities where outsourcing or partnerships create leverage across talent access speed to hire or cost.
- Shaped Rowdens recruitment brand and market presence working with internal marketing and design teams.
The breadth of this role is deliberate and therefore requires focus. You will need to prioritise ruthlessly based on business impact sequence initiatives and build mechanisms that scale over time. Success will come from trade-offs and judgment not volume of activity.
About You
We are not looking for a conventional recruiter CV. We are looking for someone who can think from first principles diagnose problems with rigour and build systems that deliver results. You may have led engineering operations or another core function where hiring was mission-critical. You may have built high-performing teams under pressure and know what great looks like because you have run it yourself.
Experience from outside talent can be an advantage - it brings commercial judgement credibility with hiring managers and a sharper performance bar. What matters is drive analytical depth and a clear ambition to build a world-class organisation.
Experience from outside talent can be an advantage - it brings commercial judgement credibility with hiring managers and a sharper performance bar. What matters is drive analytical depth and a clear ambition to build a world-class organisation.
You will have:
- A proven track record of building or leading highperforming teams in highgrowth technology environments.
- A strong grasp of engineering and technical roles - software hardware and systems engineering.
- The analytical skills to combine instinct with data to inform decisionmaking.
- The ability to create scalable processes that reduce inefficiency and preserve pace.
- Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills to represent Rowden externally to candidates and other stakeholders.
- Confidence operating in fast-moving environments with ambiguity and complexity; problems often require definition and may change as you work through them.
Working at Rowden
We are committed to building a flexible inclusive and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills experience and backgrounds so please apply and come as you are!
We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible hybrid-working model with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.
Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.
Finally if you feel that you dont meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience wed still love to hear from you!
Required Experience:
Director
Key Skills
- Marketing & Promotions
- Attorney At Law
- Jni
- Airlines
- Art
About Company
Rowden designs and builds systems, infrastructure, and applications to deliver mission advantage to those working to protect the security of the UK and its allies. We are setting a new standard in government technology provision: hyper-efficient engineering, better customer relationsh ... View more
