Talent Acquisition Partner

Apolitical is a fast-growing, mission-driven platform backed by leading impact investors. We’re 80 people today and scaling quickly across geographies. Hiring is one of the most important levers we have for impact: the quality of the people we bring in will make or break our ability to help governments become smarter for people and the planet.

You’ll join a lean, ambitious People team that is focused on building an exceptional employee experience and enabling our teams to do their best work. This role will take ownership of talent acquisition, building the systems, processes, and pipelines we need to grow into the hundreds while holding ourselves to a high bar on candidate experience and hiring outcomes.

You will:

• Partner with business leaders to clarify hiring needs, define success profiles, and shape effective recruiting strategies that align with Apolitical’s growth priorities.
• Manage full lifecycle recruitment (sourcing, screening, assessment, offer, negotiation, closing) across mid to senior roles
• Build and own talent pipelines in key functional areas (tech and sales)
• Improve recruitment efficiency via metrics, process optimisation, tooling, and candidate experience improvements
• Design and run experimentations to increase diversity in pipelines
• Act as a coach/consultant to hiring managers: assist and train them on interview design, calibration, candidate evaluation
• Lead employer branding and candidate engagement initiatives (e.g. content, events, alumni networks)
• Be an owner for the end-to-end candidate journey. You’ll sweat the details, from first outreach to offer acceptance and onboarding handoff

Onboarding milestones

Within one month, you will…

• Get familiar with and critique our hiring processes, tools, and platforms.
• Partner with our People Lead to design a role profile and process.
• Lead outreach to candidates in at least one open search.
• Lead provisioning of and onboarding to a new ATS.

Within three months, you will…

• Deliver hires for several open roles across domains.
• Share first dashboards on funnel metrics and time-to-hire.
• Run a hiring manager training session on structured interviewing.

Within six months, you will…

• Own recruitment outcomes for 8–10 roles, meeting the quality bar.
• Build evergreen pipelines in at least 1–2 critical functions.
• Launch at least one new recruitment experiment (e.g. sourcing from an underrepresented group).
• Be rated “excellent” by hiring managers in partnership feedback.

About youThis is a great fit if you:

• Can or are interested in recruiting across functions (technical, non-technical)
• Influence and guide stakeholders effectively
• Think in terms of data and systems e.g. dashboards, funnel metrics
• Communicate with kindness and directness, advocating for candidates and the business alike
• Thrive in ambiguity, with a bias for action and iteration
• Care deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion and want to experiment with new ways to make hiring more equitable through skills-based approaches

This likely won’t be the right role if you:

• Prefer a predictable environment with clear roadmaps. We’re a scale-up, so ambiguity is the norm.
• See yourself mainly as a process executor. We’re looking for someone who can grow into leading and shaping recruitment as a domain.  

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application. These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.

Stages in our hiring process:

• Culture interview [45m on Google Meet]. We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for working at Apolitical. This call is about finding candidates who will add to our culture. It’s an opportunity to get to know you and for you to get to know us as an organisation, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about how we work.
• Team interview [45 in person]. We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for the role. It’s an opportunity to meet some of the people you might end up working with, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about the team and role.
• Executive interview [30m in person]. One or two of our senior leaders build on conversations you've had with other team members to learn about your motivations and drivers at work and within the Apolitical context.