Strategic Accounts Manager (Employer Partnerships)

• Standard working hours are 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM (with 1 hour unpaid lunch break)
  We offer flexibility to employees to balance their commitments, including medical appointments, parental or caregiving responsibilities, and personal goals.
  

• Experience selling CSR, ESG, sponsorship or social value propositions, or recruitment, training and workforce solutions.
• Experience in a startup, scale-up or other environment where you built something from scratch.
• An existing network of employers, especially in Liverpool or the North West.

Attributes that will make you successful

• Mission-driven. You care deeply about helping people facing barriers to employment into good careers. You want your work to mean something, and that conviction is what makes employers say yes.
• Driven. You are motivated by targets and by winning. You set yourself activity goals and hit them without being chased.
• Resilient. Rejection does not slow you down. You can hear "no" ten times in a morning and still make the eleventh call with energy.
• Persistent and resourceful. You find a way in when the obvious route is closed, and you follow up until you get an answer.
• Commercial. You understand what an employer gains from hiring our graduates and can make that case in their terms: social value commitments, diversity, retention and time to hire.
• Credible with senior people. HR directors and operations leaders trust you and want to work with you.
• Methodical. You structure your week across prospecting, live deals and account management, and you protect your prospecting time.
  

In your first year, success means a healthy, self-generated pipeline and signed partners who actually hire. Your bonus is tied to these measures.

Measure of success:

• New employer partners signed
• Employer-embedded cohort deals signed (employer commits to hire ≥50% of cohort)
• Graduates placed into jobs through your partners
• Income from social value packages
• Repeat commitment from existing partners
• Secured new employers in Liverpool 

By the end of your first 90 days, we would expect you to have built a pipeline of qualified employer conversations,  held multiple first meetings, and have employers lined up to hired from planned cohorts running in Liverpool and nationally.

• Own your pipeline end to end: research, prospect, cold call, email and network your way to new employers across England, with a focus on Liverpool.
• Run full sales cycles yourself, from first contact through discovery, proposal, negotiation and signed agreement.
• Sell social value packages, making the case in terms of each employer's ESG, CSR and social value commitments, including those tied to public-sector contracts.
• Hit monthly and quarterly activity and income targets, and know your numbers at any point.
• Secure enough vacancies to place every bootcamp cohort at course completion, for both direct and co-delivered bootcamps.
• Build a network of channel partners (e.g. apprenticeship providers, recruitment agencies, local authorities, CSR groups) who can open doors and refer employers.
• Organise and run events, meetings and presentations that turn interest into signed partners.

• Identify employers with enough hiring volume to commit to a cohort, and sell the case to senior decision-makers (HR, talent, operations and finance).
• Negotiate the partnership, including the employer's commitment to hire at least 50% of graduates and any social value package attached to the cohort.
• Work with the employer and our programme team to shape the cohort around the employer's roles, timelines and selection criteria.
• Keep the employer engaged through the cohort so the hiring commitment is honoured, and step in early when it is at risk.
• Help shape how we package, price and deliver this model as we learn what works.

• Handle all agreements and commercials for new partners, including social value package contracts and invoices.
• Make sure employers understand Generation's process, terms and timings.
• Keep the CRM accurate and up to date with every employer, contact and deal stage.

• Make sure every partner has a robust interview and feedback process when cohorts graduate.
• Be the point of escalation for employer issues, or learner issues with interviews and placements.
• Run engagement activities that keep employers committed before, during and after placements.
• Gather employer feedback, case studies and impact data, so partners can report their social value and we can win the next partner.
• Turn one-off hirers into repeat, embedded-cohort and social value package partners, and renew packages year on year.

• Improve how we source, onboard and manage employers, include collaborating with delivery partners on growing employer networks 
• Feed what you learn about employers' needs back to our programme and learner teams.
• Contribute to ROI frameworks and data collection that show employers the value of hiring our graduates and the social impact of their investment.

• A genuine commitment to our mission. You want to work for a charity, and you can show it, through volunteering, previous roles, your own experience or the causes you support. You will be selling something you believe in.
• A proven record of winning new business.
• You’ve won B2B business from scratch, finding your own opportunities, running the sales process, and closing deals yourself. We’d love to hear about the targets you’ve worked towards, how you’ve tracked against them, and a deal you’re especially proud of.
• Real prospecting experience. You have built pipeline from a cold start through calls, emails, LinkedIn and events, not only from inbound leads or inherited accounts.
• Complex, consultative selling. You have sold to senior stakeholders, managed several decision-makers in one deal, and negotiated commercial terms.
• Organised pipeline management. You use a CRM properly and can forecast your own numbers.

• You want to use your sales skills at a charity, where every deal you close changes someone's life.
• You get a buzz from opening a conversation with someone who has never heard of you.
• You like having a clear number to hit and being judged on results.

• You prefer managing existing accounts to finding new ones.
• Your sales experience has mainly come from inbound leads or a well-known brand doing the work.
• You would rather plan and research than pick up the phone.
  

We want to see you sell, not just hear you talk about it.
Our process has three stages:

1. Application: CV submission & answer questions specific to the role & your interest in Generation
2. Screening call
3. A live role play exercise/ Interview/ Meet the team  (in person)

Every role at Generation is open to applications from all sections of society. We believe in the potential of everyone; regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other aspect that makes you, well, you.

We believe that the more diverse we are the better we become. More than just encouraging your application, we're committed to conscious inclusion that (we hope) cultivates an ethos of belonging, connection and shared purpose. We go further together. It’s this philosophy that drives us towards our mission. We open our doors to those who share this mindset.

We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates from marginalised groups. We will assess applications on a rolling basis and close this posting as soon as we have found the right candidate. We look forward to hearing from you.

Here’s a recruitment support resource that explains our application process and offers tips to help you put forward your best possible application.
Applicant support resource_ Oct 2025