Marketing and Recruitment Business Partner

The Marketing and Recruitment Business Partner (MRBP) is a key role designed to coordinate the development and delivery of a faculty marketing and recruitment strategy that aligns central and faculty strategy for domestic and international activity.

The MRBP will report into the central External Relations directorate, in terms of line management (including professional discipline and development; integration with university marketing and recruitment teams), with a dotted line into the Head of Faculty Operations to ensure plans and activities align with overall faculty strategy. External Relations has four divisions designed to enhance reputation and income generation. A principal role of the directorate is to deliver against the University’s priorities in relation to attracting the best possible students from UK and overseas markets. Responsibilities for achieving this span two of the directorate’s divisions: Marketing, Recruitment, Admissions and Outreach (MRAO), and International Student Recruitment, Partnerships and Mobility (IRPM).

MRAO is responsible for strategic and operational plans to support domestic recruitment and access and participation. MRAO manages a shared services model to deliver data-enabled marketing and admissions services that support domestic and international recruitment strategic aims. They are responsible for all matters of fair admissions and OFS, UCAS and CMA compliance matters pertaining to recruitment and marketing.

IRPM operates as our international salesforce team to support international recruitment activity (including working with overseas staff to build brand, engagement and applications in key priority markets), international strategic partnerships and alliances, inbound and outbound mobility and study abroad, international short courses, and the delivery of international strategic plans in support of the University strategy.

The University has grown significantly and is particularly focused on delivering significant diversity to our student population. This has meant that the complexity of the work required has exponentially expanded. In particular we have recognised the need to expand the range of bespoke services to support the needs of our recently strengthened three faculties – Arts & Humanities, Sciences and Social Sciences.

To answer that requirement, and part of our wider organisational change programme – Professional Services Delivery – we are establishing a new hub and spoke model of strategy and operational delivery to support student recruitment that will require a Marketing and Recruitment Business Partner for each faculty in order to support the delivery of stretching student recruitment targets.

Role

The Marketing and Recruitment Business Partner will work closely and collaboratively with the central ‘hubs’ within External Relations – principally the MRAO team and the IRPM team, but also in coordination with the Communications team and the Office for Philanthropic Partnerships and Alumni. The roles will be embedded in each faculty to facilitate close collaboration with Faculty Executive teams, and work as part of the faculty Dean Support Group (DSG).

The hub teams will be responsible for the overall recruitment and marketing strategies in-line with the University’s ten-year strategy and growth plans. The hubs are also the drivers of institutional marketing campaign planning, international recruitment activity, identifying markets to grow in, developing international partnership strategies including articulation and progression agreements, setting widening participation (WP) goals and monitoring, evaluating and refining the effectiveness of all activity designed to deliver against overall number targets and ensuring optimisation of budget deployment.

The appointment to this role is the first step in the process of developing a ‘spoke’ team that is dedicated to support individual Faculty marketing and recruitment targets and requirements. The development of hub and spoke models of operations is part of a wider and significant professional service delivery organisational change programme.

The role holder will therefore play a key role in supporting the implementation of appropriately sized, skilled and resourced faculty ‘spoke’ teams and the operational delivery of a market-led data-driven UK and international faculty recruitment and marketing strategy.

Skills, Experience & Qualification needed



•    You will possess a Master’s degree and/or additional professional certification in marketing (such as CIM, IDM etc.) and an understanding of relevant regulations, legislation and national codes of practice relating to marketing within an Higher Education environment.

•    You will be an experienced recruitment marketeer, able to work with a range of colleagues to develop and deliver innovative overseas and home marketing, recruitment and conversion plans across departments, faculties and central teams.

•    You should also have significant experience of understanding and promoting academic portfolios and programmes, and the ability to commission, interpret and implement customer insights to deliver recruitment and income generation targets.

•    You should have extensive experience of utilising and understanding data to inform marketing and recruitment strategies and have a strong sense of business acumen