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Head of Talent & Development

Salary - £58,365 per annum

Job Type - Full-Time, Permanent

Hours - 35 hours per week (plus 5 hours paid lunch break)

Location - Home-based, with 2 days per week at our Birmingham Office.

Want to play a leading role in building a sustainable workforce for an organisation that makes a real impact in people’s lives every single day?

We’re looking for someone with exceptional leadership qualities, and experience of developing and aligning resourcing and learning & development capabilities to strengthen attraction and retention.

About Nacro:

Nacro works with some of the most marginalised people in society, in desperate need of a second chance: young people who are not in education or employment; adults and families facing housing insecurity and homelessness, often because of complex needs such as mental ill-health, addiction/substance misuse, a background of abuse, trauma or relationship breakdown; and people who have been in contact with the criminal justice system.

Our workforce is highly dispersed, supporting people in communities across England and Wales. We are working to make Nacro an ever more inclusive space for our diverse – and diversifying – workforce, because we know that diverse organisations perform better. Our people combine compassion with person-centred support skills and incredible resilience. They work in a high-challenge arena, and we are aiming to match this with a high-support environment.

Our People and Culture strategic transformation:

The People and Organisation Development team – led by an established new Director of People and Culture – are at a key moment in our transformational agenda. We have just agreed our new People & Culture strategy with the Board, in support of our next three-year organisational strategy.

It‘s our people that personally support the people we help every single day. We aim to position them – and our organisation and unique culture – rightly at the centre of our charity, and of our image of how we create even greater impact in society. In recent years, we have experienced challenges in recruiting staff, and maintaining acceptable levels of retention. Our analysis indicates that this isn’t primarily because of the more-common drivers of attraction and retention issues associated with a poor employee experience. Our new strategy is aimed at systemic resolution of those challenges, to create a more sustainable organisation.

As well as continuing work to improve the people experience (because there are things we can and need to improve), we aim to build a more scalable, sustainable, and value-added workforce model. This means being much more intentional about the routes into working for Nacro – in a voluntary or employed capacity – and how working for us fits into different talent pools’ career aspirations and pathways so that we are delivering something of value for people over a longer period working for us in addition to a good employment experience and truly meaningful work. Achieving this will enable us to resource more fully with limited available, mostly public, funding, and to bring more relevant skills and expertise to bear on service user outcomes.

And, by being intentional about this, we can also dovetail initiatives to ensure greater participation of ex-service users and students within our workforce and more generally of lived experience and social mobility.

The difference you’ll make:

The primary purpose of this role is to develop effective strategies to bring the right people into Nacro, on in their personal and professional development, and through into new roles in Nacro or in their future career in the wider social justice ecosystem we work in.

If any of the following spark your interest, we’d love to hear from you: ‘lived experience’ and social mobility strategies; apprenticeships, internships, placements and work experience; volunteering; employer brand and persona-based talent attraction; volume as well as vacancy-led recruitment; values- and behaviour-based selection; expanding a curriculum of personal and professional development solutions, with clear links to competency, and strong evaluation; career pathways and support for career planning conversations.

Please note: Interviews for this role will be held in January 2025.

Please apply online