Talent Ops Lead

This is not a traditional recruitment ops role. Talent Ops at Octopus is one of the most important parts of how we protect candidate love, keep our hiring machine moving globally, help our recruiters do brilliant work and make sure our systems, data, reporting and processes are genuinely useful with impact.

Talent Ops is the engine room of Talent. When it works well, candidates feel it, recruiters feel it, hiring managers feel it and the business moves faster and smarter.  We’re looking for someone to help improve how we work and help us build a global talent experience that feels fast, smart, human and full of Octopus magic.

This role is a 12 month FTC.

(some of…) What you’ll do

Champion candidate love

As a Talent team, we deal with the highest volume of inbound people reaching out or coming into Octopus after our Customer Ops teams, so response time and care really matter.

Candidate love is one of the most important things we protect. Every interaction tells people who Octopus really is, whether they get the job or not. We want candidates to feel that love and care.

Candidates usually reach us in 4 main ways: They email our Talent inbox, They reach out on social media, They email PR, They reach out directly to leadership.

However they come in, our job is to make sure no candidate disappears into the void. Talent inbox, LinkedIn, social messages and escalations should be actively handled and followed up properly.

Champion candidate love by making sure candidates get fast, kind, clear and human responses throughout the hiring process. You’ll help keep candidate experience visible by tracking response times, ghosting, feedback themes, Lever CX, Glassdoor and escalation trends, making sure issues are resolved properly and learnings are shared so we keep getting better.

Talent Ops should track all of these trends very closely. You will help make sure candidate love is not just something we talk about, but something we measure and improve weekly. 

Help improve our talent tech stack

You will help make sure our tools make Talent faster, smarter and more human. That includes Lever, LinkedIn Recruiter, Notion, Slack, Metaview, Glassdoor, job boards, reporting dashboards and any other tools we use across Talent.

You will look at how these tools work together and where they could be simpler, clearer or more useful. Tools are not the strategy. If a tool does not improve speed, quality, insight or candidate love, we should challenge it. If a new tool could have a huge impact, we should test it.

Build strong reporting and insight

Continue to report across all of our Talent tech stack, especially Lever and Lightdash.

You will help build and improve reporting that gives the Head of TA and business a clear view of what is happening, where things are blocked, and where we need to make better decisions. This includes things like, Candidate love and response times, Requisitions and headcount reporting, Lever CX and Glassdoor themes, Source quality (especially our 1.5 million candidates). 

The goal is not data theatre. The goal is useful insight that helps us make better hiring decisions, improve the experience and spot problems early! You will work closely with lots of different teams across octopus.

Constantly understand the user experience

You will constantly look at how people experience our hiring process and where we can improve it. That means speaking to people including candidates, watching where things slow down, reviewing feedback daily/weekly, spotting trends and being curious about how the process actually feels in real life.

Improve processes and AI across the workflow

You’ll look at the end to end hiring workflow and help make it better. We want to use AI and tech in a way that helps recruiters spend more time with humans and less time wrestling with admin. AI should help us move faster and improve quality, but it should never make the candidate experience colder, less fair or less Octopus

Keep Lever brilliant

Lever is our live candidate universe. It is not just an ATS. You will help make sure Lever is clean, useful and trusted. If the data is wrong, we need to fix the input, not just explain around it. Good Talent Ops means the team can trust what they see and act quickly. Lever is our core Talent system so we need to build reporting on how effectively Lever is helping us deliver against our needs.

Help the Talent team get better

This role is not just systems and dashboards. It is about helping the whole Talent team work better. You will work closely with our head of talent, recruiters, hiring managers, Talent leaders, Ops, Marketing, Finance and data teams to improve how hiring works across Octopus. You will help educate hiring managers on feedback quality, Lever use, candidate experience and simple hiring processes. You will help recruiters by removing friction, improving tools, creating clearer reporting and making the process easier to run well.

A deep care for candidates and candidate experience

Recruitment ops experience, ideally in a fast moving, high volume or global business

A brilliant understanding of ATS systems, especially Lever or talent tooling

Reporting and data skills. You can turn messy info into useful insight and clear action

A continuous improvement mindset. You notice friction, ask why, and make things better

A strong eye for detail. Talent Ops is in the detail and the detail really matters.

Curiosity about AI, automation and talent technology. You are excited by what tech can do, but you know the human experience comes first.

A simple communication style. You can explain complex workflows in a way people actually understand.

A “no functional shoulder pads” mindset. It is not your team versus another team. It is all of us working together to change the energy system globally.

You get stuck in, make progress and do not wait for perfect.

A belief that simplicity beats complexity. If something is too hard to teach or explain clearly, it is probably too complex.

A real care for the Octopus way of doing things: fast, human, kind and never corporate sludge