About us
At Halfords, we’re on a mission to keep the nation moving. From our Retail stores to our Garages, our colleagues are at the heart of everything we do, helping millions of customers every year with trusted expertise, advice, and service.
Behind every great customer experience is a great team. That’s where you come in.
Our People team plays a vital role in bringing the right people into Halfords, helping us deliver on our ambitions and creating an environment where colleagues can thrive. We’re passionate about making talent acquisition more than just filling vacancies. It’s about connecting people with opportunities, building brilliant teams and creating an experience that reflects who we are as an employer.
We’re looking for an inspiring Talent Acquisition Manager to lead our volume recruitment operation, bringing together great people, smart technology, and innovative attraction strategies to help shape the future of our Retail and Garaging teams.
About the role
Over the last 18 months, we’ve made significant strides in transforming our Talent Acquisition function, strengthening our approach to attraction, improving performance and creating a more effective, data-driven service. We’re now looking for an inspiring leader to further build on this progress and shape the next chapter of volume TA at Halfords, driving further improvements in how we engage, attract, assess, and hire colleagues across our Retail and Garaging businesses.
You’ll lead a team, including three Talent Acquisition Team Leaders, creating a high-performing, collaborative, and commercially focused function. You’ll set the direction for delivery, ensuring we have the right people, in the right places, at the right time, particularly during our busiest trading periods.
Working closely with operational leadership and our wider People team, you’ll plan and deliver effective recruitment strategies, using data, market insight, and strong stakeholder partnerships to anticipate hiring needs rather than simply react to them.
You’ll champion a consistent, engaging candidate experience that brings our employer brand to life at every stage of the journey. You’ll also push the boundaries of how we recruit, embracing AI, automation, and emerging technologies to make our processes smarter, faster and more effective.
As a key member of the Talent Acquisition management team, you’ll bring Retail and Garaging recruitment closer together, creating consistency, sharing best practice and ensuring a seamless experience for candidates, hiring managers and operational teams alike.
This role is about more than delivering vacancies. It’s about building capability, driving continuous improvement, and making Talent Acquisition a trusted, strategic partner to the business.
Key responsibilities
- Lead and develop three Talent Acquisition Team Leaders and a wider team, building a culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous learning, and high performance.
- Set clear objectives, KPIs and service-level agreements (SLAs), using regular performance reviews, coaching and development to drive individual and team success.
- Create a joined-up approach across Retail and Garaging recruitment, sharing expertise and ensuring consistent, high-quality delivery.
- Own and deliver our volume sourcing and attraction strategy, optimising recruitment channels to improve application volumes, conversion rates, time to hire and quality of hire.
- Build proactive talent pipelines and sustainable talent pools for high-volume and business-critical roles, reducing reliance on reactive recruitment.
- Use talent market intelligence, competitor analysis, and industry best practice to identify new opportunities and keep Halfords competitive in attracting great people.
- Work with our employer brand, marketing, and media partners to bring the Halfords employee proposition to life and position us as an employer of choice.
- Own the end-to-end candidate journey, ensuring every interaction is engaging, inclusive, consistent, and reflective of our brand.
- Continuously improve assessment and selection approaches, championing structured interviews, skills-based hiring, and fair, robust decision-making.
- Lead effective offer management, equipping the team to have confident, engaging conversations that improve offer acceptance and reduce candidate drop-out.
- Build trusted relationships with operational leaders, providing expert advice, constructive challenge, and practical recruitment solutions.
- Own recruitment reporting and performance insights, establishing clear visibility of KPIs, SLAs, time to hire, cost of hire and quality of hire.
- Translate data into meaningful insights, identifying bottlenecks, improving productivity, and helping leaders make informed workforce decisions.
- Align recruitment capacity and resource allocation with business demand, flexing delivery to meet operational priorities and seasonal peaks.
- Track the effectiveness of attraction channels and sourcing strategies, ensuring investment delivers measurable value.
- Drive the adoption of AI-enabled tools, automation and recruitment technology to streamline processes, improve productivity and enhance the experience for candidates and hiring managers.
- Partner with our ATS provider and strategic recruitment suppliers to maximise technology, improve processes and deliver better outcomes.
- Challenge existing ways of working, identifying opportunities to simplify, standardise and scale recruitment best practice across the business.
- Work closely with People Operations to maintain robust governance, ensuring compliance with UK employment legislation, right-to-work requirements, data protection and recruitment policies.
About you
You’re a confident, commercially minded Talent Acquisition leader who can balance operational delivery with strategic thinking. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, are comfortable navigating complexity and enjoy turning challenges into opportunities for improvement. With a strong focus on people, performance, and continuous improvement, you use data and insight to make informed decisions, drive meaningful change and deliver tangible business impact.
You’ll bring:
- A track record of building, developing and leading high-performing Talent Acquisition teams within a fast-paced, high-volume recruitment environment.
- Strong experience delivering complex, high-volume hiring requirements, managing competing priorities and flexing resources to meet changing business demands.
- A deep understanding of sourcing channels, talent pipelines, recruitment marketing and employer brand, with the ability to turn insight into effective attraction strategies.
- Confidence using recruitment metrics, dashboards and analytics to understand performance, identify opportunities and influence decisions.
- Experience of, or a strong interest in, AI, automation and emerging recruitment technologies, with the ability to turn new ideas into practical improvements.
- An understanding of recruitment costs, direct sourcing, agency management and how to deliver an efficient, high-quality service that represents value for money.
- The ability to build trusted relationships with senior leaders, influence workforce planning and challenge constructively to achieve the right outcomes.
- A genuine commitment to creating fair, inclusive and engaging recruitment experiences, alongside a strong understanding of assessment and selection best practice.
- Sound knowledge of UK employment and recruitment legislation, data protection and the importance of consistent, robust recruitment processes.
- The ability to interpret complex information, develop clear recommendations and present insights confidently, supported by strong Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint skills.
Reward & benefits
- A fair and competitive salary evaluated against market data, car allowance, annual discretionary bonus scheme, pension, life assurance, 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays and enhanced family leave.
- Commitment and dedication to your ongoing personal and professional development. We help you to own and grow your potential so you can be at your best in your current role and to support your future career aspirations.
- We offer hybrid working in our Support Centre, you will be based at our Support Centre 3 days a week with an optional 2 days working from home.
- You will have access to a wealth of employee discounts across the Halfords suite of products and services.
- Wellbeing and inclusion are at the heart of our colleague experience. We offer resources and ongoing support to enhance your wellbeing at work and active Colleague Networks supporting inclusion initiatives across Halfords.
Not sure you meet all the criteria? We'd encourage you to take the wheel and apply anyway! At Halfords we are committed to creating an inclusive workplace for our colleagues. We're an equal opportunities employer and proud to welcome applications from all backgrounds and embrace diversity within our one Halfords Family.
At Halfords, we operate a hybrid working policy with 3 days on site at our Support Centre in Redditch.
