Social enterprise · Founded 2014
We built this because early talent recruitment was broken. We could see why. And we knew how to fix it.
A decade of operating on all three sides of the early talent market. 1.1 million candidates. 110,000 employers. One connected system built from the ground up.
Founded 2014
Where we started
The Talent People started in 2014. The founding team came from operational roles in early talent recruitment at some of the world’s most recognisable organisations. What they kept seeing was the same problem, repeated across every employer they worked with.
Candidates applied in large numbers for roles that did not match what they had imagined. They arrived without a genuine understanding of the work. Without that understanding, the motivation that should have been there was not. Managers saw young people who appeared disengaged. The diagnosis was always the candidates. The actual problem was the system nobody had bothered to redesign.
The system had never been built to help young people understand what roles actually involved, or to help employers identify the candidates who were genuinely interested rather than speculatively applying. It had been built to process volume. Volume is not the same thing as quality, and at scale it actively obscures it.
GetMyFirstJob was the first expression of the answer to that problem: help people find work they genuinely want to do, with the motivation and capacity to succeed in it. The Talent People is what that idea has grown into over a decade.
The platform
What we built
Six products. One connected system. Each one built to solve a specific problem in the early talent journey — and each one designed to pass data, brand consistency and candidate understanding to the next stage.
Schools Engagement puts employers in front of young people before career decisions are made. Immersive Work Experience gives candidates a genuine encounter with the organisation before they apply. Talent Connect manages candidate engagement across campaigns that run for months. The Talent Portal finds motivated, eligible candidates proactively. The Video Interview Platform screens for authentic communication, not practised performance. Talent Assess converts months of demonstrated engagement into ranked, defensible selection evidence.
Every product works standalone. Every product also connects. That is not an accident of integration. It is how the system was designed.
Our structure
Why we are structured the way we are
The Talent People is a certified social enterprise. We charge for what we do. We reinvest what we make into the platform, the data infrastructure and the programmes that serve candidates who might not otherwise have access to them.
That structure matters for two reasons.
First, it means the commercial incentive and the social mission point in the same direction. A better system for finding and developing early talent serves both employers and candidates. The more it is used, the more the network effect compounds — for everyone in it.
Second, it means our investor base is mission-aligned. Nesta — the UK’s largest independent innovation foundation — is our largest shareholder and an active board participant. The backing is not venture capital seeking a short-term exit. It is a long-term commitment to improving social mobility and access to opportunity. That shapes every decision we make about what to build next.
What a decade of operating looks like
Community
The Roundtable
Five years ago, we started a peer community for early careers professionals. It is now the largest of its kind in the UK, with over 1,250 members from more than 565 organisations.
It is not a marketing channel. It is a forum where people share what is actually happening in their programmes: what is working, what is not, and why. The conversations that happen there directly shape what we build next. That is the point.
Members encounter The Talent People as a thinking partner before they encounter us as a vendor. Most of our best client relationships started in the Roundtable, not in a sales process.
What makes us different
The Talent People is the only organisation that combines early talent-specific software across the full candidate journey, from schools engagement through immersive work experience, interest-led matching, structured video screening and evidence-based selection, with expert practitioners spanning attraction, development and assessment, and a decade of cross-market data from all three sides of the early talent market.
Most of our competitors operate in one segment. They are good at what they do. What they cannot do is act as connective tissue between segments, passing data, brand consistency and candidate understanding from one stage to the next.
We can. And we have been doing it since 2014.
Verification
Independently verified
ISO 27001
Information Security Management
The international standard for how personal data is handled, stored and protected. Relevant to every employer collecting candidate data through our platform, and increasingly required by procurement teams at larger organisations.
ISO 9001
Quality Management
Consistent, documented processes across the full client delivery cycle. The same standards applied to a FTSE 100 employer apply to every engagement.
Cyber Essentials Plus
Government-endorsed
The highest tier of the UK government’s cyber security framework, independently verified. Not self-assessed.
Social Enterprise UK certified
Independently verified social enterprise status
Not a badge. A governance commitment.
Industry recognition
ISE recognised partnerships in 2024 and 2025.
If you think the problem we are describing sounds familiar, we would like to talk.
Not a product demo. A conversation about what you are trying to do and whether we are the right people to help. Most of our best relationships started that way.
Get in touch