Senior Talent & Performance Manager

About the job

Job Title: Senior Talent & Performance Manager
Location: Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Northampton or London (Hybrid Working)
Salary: Competitive + Benefits
Contract Type: Full-time, Permanent

About the Role

We’re recruiting for a Senior Talent & Performance Manager to join the People team of a leading UK law firm. This is a senior, hands-on role responsible for shaping and delivering the organisation’s talent, performance and leadership development agenda.

Working closely with senior business leaders, HR Business Partners and the wider People function, you’ll help build a high-performing, future-ready workforce by strengthening talent pipelines, improving succession planning, supporting career progression and embedding a culture of meaningful performance conversations.

This role combines strategic thinking with practical delivery, so you’ll be expected to move confidently between designing frameworks, influencing senior stakeholders and implementing solutions that support both current business priorities and future workforce needs.

Key Responsibilities

Performance & High-Performance Culture

• Lead the ongoing development of the organisation’s performance framework and annual performance processes.
• Drive a culture of continuous feedback, accountability and high-quality performance conversations.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of performance initiatives using feedback, data and insight.
• Identify opportunities to improve both employee experience and business impact.

Talent Management & Succession Planning

• Lead talent identification, talent review and succession planning activity.
• Partner with senior leaders and HR Business Partners to build strong pipelines for critical roles.
• Analyse talent trends and identify organisational capability risks.
• Develop practical actions to strengthen future leadership and succession readiness.

Talent, Leadership & Career Development

• Design and deliver talent, leadership and career development programmes.
• Identify capability priorities with business leaders and HR teams.
• Develop targeted interventions to support progression, growth and succession.
• Evaluate programme effectiveness and continuously improve content and outcomes.

Promotions & Career Progression

• Support and enhance promotion processes, including senior and Partner-level promotions.
• Ensure promotion processes remain fair, transparent, inclusive and commercially aligned.
• Provide insight and recommendations to support effective promotion and talent decisions.
• Help strengthen career pathways and progression opportunities across the organisation.

Future Skills & Organisational Capability

• Identify emerging skills and capability requirements linked to future business strategy.
• Partner with HR, Emerging Talent and business leaders to develop future-focused interventions.
• Support talent strategies for key populations and emerging talent pathways.
• Help ensure the workforce is prepared for changing capability and skills requirements.

Workforce Planning & Talent Insight

• Support workforce planning activity alongside Finance, HR and senior business stakeholders.
• Contribute talent and capability insight to future workforce decisions.
• Develop dashboards, metrics and reporting to identify talent trends and risks.
• Translate people data into clear, practical recommendations for senior stakeholders.

DE&I, Change & Continuous Improvement

• Ensure talent, performance, succession and promotion approaches support inclusion objectives.
• Work with DE&I colleagues to improve representation and progression outcomes.
• Support communication, engagement and change management around new talent initiatives.
• Develop guidance, resources and toolkits to support adoption.
• Bring external best practice and innovation into the talent and performance agenda.

Candidate Profile

• Significant experience within Talent Management, Performance Management or Leadership Development.
• Proven experience designing and delivering talent, succession or career development programmes.
• Strong experience partnering with senior leaders and influencing talent decisions.
• Excellent stakeholder management and change management capability.
• Strong ability to use people data and insight to drive decision-making.
• Experience working within a complex, fast-paced organisation.
• Strategic and commercially minded, with the ability to translate business priorities into practical talent solutions.
• Confident operating at senior stakeholder level.
• Collaborative, curious and solutions-focused.

Desirable Experience

• Experience supporting workforce planning or strategic capability initiatives.
• Background within legal, professional services, consulting, financial services or another partnership-led environment.
• Experience supporting senior or Partner promotion processes.
• Experience developing talent dashboards, metrics and workforce insight reporting.

What Our Client Offers

• Hybrid working across multiple UK office locations.
• Opportunity to shape a high-profile talent and performance agenda.
• Direct exposure to senior leadership and key business stakeholders.
• Broad remit across talent, succession, performance, leadership development and future skills.
• Supportive and collaborative People function.
• Comprehensive benefits package.
• Excellent long-term career development opportunities.

How to Apply

If you’re an experienced Talent or Performance professional looking for a senior role where you can combine strategic thinking with hands-on delivery, we’d love to hear from you.

About Us

We are a recruitment agency specialising in HR, Talent, Learning & Development and professional services appointments across the UK. We partner with leading organisations to connect experienced professionals with opportunities that offer genuine influence, career progression and the chance to shape organisational capability.