Public Appointments Senior Talent and Events Lead

Job summary

Can you communicate complex information clearly and confidently to a wide range of audiences, using your influencing and relationship-building skills to achieve positive outcomes?

Have you successfully led or coordinated work involving multiple stakeholders, building strong networks and collaborating across teams to deliver shared objectives?

Do you thrive in a fast-paced environment, working autonomously while encouraging others, identifying improvements, and finding creative solutions to enhance processes and ways of working?

If so, we’d love to hear from you!

This is an exciting opportunity to take on a unique role in the Department for Transport’s Public Appointments Team, where you will playa key role in attracting and engaging diverse talent for high-profile public appointments. As Senior Talent and Events Lead, you will drive outreach and engagement activities and lead the next phase of our diversity in public appointments strategy and events programme, building strong relationships with current and prospective candidates, diversity networks, industry groups, and senior stakeholders across government. Working closely with Ministers’ Private Offices, Board Members, Chairs, sponsorship teams, No.10 and other Government Departments, you will help shape appointment campaigns and provide expert advice to Ministers. Partnering with the Grade 7 lead, you will champion inclusion, enhance candidate experiences, and support the department’s commitment to strengthening diversity and excellence in public appointments, helping attract exceptional talent to influential leadership roles.

Joining our department comes with many benefits, including:

• Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary. Read more about Civil Service Pensions here
• 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays a privilege day for the King’s birthday
• Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.

Read more in the Benefits section below!

Find out more about what it's like working at DFT.

Job description

Working with the Grade 7, we are looking for this role to independently manage our diversity in public appointments strategy and Public Appointments Diversity Engagement Group (PADEG), run outreach events and webinars, and lead our management information.

Your responsibilities will include, but aren’t limited to:

• Manage a considerable and varied workload with autonomy, providing a quality service dealing with both day-to-day and ad-hoc tasks.
• Proactively build and maintain strong relationships with a variety of senior and important stakeholders across government, public bodies, and external
  organisations.
• Lead on diversity in Public Appointments, including the next phase of our strategy,. and succession planning for the leadership and membership of our PADEG ; organising the next set of group meetings, providing secretariat to the group, driving forward group actions, and supporting the Diversity in Public Appointments Champion who chairs the meetings.
• Lead and coordinate large regional outreach events, with Ministerial and senior stakeholder attendance, for potential public appointment candidates.
• Lead the organisation of our next regional outreach event in Bristol; this will require travel to Bristol for the event and managing and coordinating a team of volunteers to support you with event delivery in the run up to the event and on the day.
• Prepare high-quality and timely written advice for senior stakeholders and Ministers, including advice, briefings, and agendas.
• Lead recruitment campaign management for 1-2 DfT public bodies/committees; being the main point of contact and managing the forward look of appointments for those bodies/committees.
• Lead the team’s management information forward look and Power BI dashboard, ensuring it is kept up to date for reporting to senior officials.
• Oversight of the public appointment’s team candidate pool and leading on engagement and communications for that pool and potential candidates; including online presence, social media and monthly newsletters in collaboration with an HEO campaign manager in the team.
• Lead the organisation and delivery of outreach webinars for public appointment vacancies, working with various shareholder/sponsor teams to understand individual requirements and suggest creative approaches to attract and inform potential candidates.
• Lead on and be the main contact point for Direct Ministerial Appointments (DMAs) and other ad-hoc appointments, keeping trackers up to date.
• Work collaboratively with colleagues in the Public Bodies Engagement and Standards team on engagement opportunities for new and existing public appointees, such as induction and development.
• Lead task management of others in the team working to you and provide cover for other SEO roles in the team when campaign work peaks or to cover absence.

Flexible resourcing

Colleagues are expected to work with a degree of flexibility, meaning responsibilities may change to support priority delivery.

For further information on the role, please read the role profile. Please note that the role profile is for information purposes only - whilst all elements are relevant to the role, they may not all be assessed during the recruitment process. This job advert will detail exactly what will be assessed during the recruitment process.

Person specification

You will be required to provide evidence that you hold any essential qualifications/licenses at some point during the recruitment process. If you cannot provide evidence, your application will be withdrawn.

Required experience:

To be successful in this role you will need to have the following experience:

• Experience of leading or being involved with running high profile events that have had senior stakeholder involvement and/or attendance.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with a wide variety of audiences, including with senior stakeholders
• Strong stakeholder management, including managing upwards and task managing others.
• Strong networking skills, with the ability to proactively identify opportunities to connect and build trusted relationships with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders of all levels.

Additional Information

Working hours, office attendance and travel requirements

Full time roles consist of 37 hours per week.

Whilst we welcome applications from those looking to work with us on a part time basis, there is a business requirement for the successful candidate to be able to work at least 30 hours per week.

This role is suitable for hybrid working, which is a non-contractual arrangement where a combination of workplace and home-based working can be accommodated subject to business requirements.

The expectation at present is a minimum of 60% of your working time a month will be spent at either your designated workplace (one of the locations cited in the advert) or, when required for business reasons, in another office/work location/visiting stakeholders. Your designated workplace will be your contractual place of work. There may be occasions where you are required to attend above the minimum expectation.

Occasional travel to other offices will be required, which may involve