Strategic Accounts Manager

Role: Strategic Accounts Manager

Location: Hybrid working within our Liverpool office at least once a month, plus regular travel across England to meet employers and run events.

• Expect to be out meeting people most weeks.

Salary: £35,700 to £36,771 p.a., depending on experience, plus up to 10% performance bonus tied to income, new partner and placement targets

Contract: Permanent, Full time (40 hours per week)

• 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.

Team: Partnerships, reporting to Head of Strategic Accounts

For Informal enquiries for this position can be sent to Jess Barber, Head of Strategic Accounts,

at View email address on uk.workus.org

Closing date: 2 November 2026

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a new business role. Your job is to win employers who will hire Generation graduates and invest in our work, and to keep winning them. Most of your time will go on finding, pitching and closing new partners; the rest on making sure those partners hire and come back.

Employers hire our graduates free of charge. We generate income through social value packages, and you will sell these alongside our hiring partnerships:

• Social value packages (how we generate income). Employers invest in a package that funds training for people from disadvantaged backgrounds and gives them measurable, reportable social impact, supporting their ESG, CSR and procurement commitments.
• Hiring partnerships. Employers recruit graduates from our bootcamps into open roles, at no cost to them. As well as working with direct employers, this can involve working with delivery partners, and channel partners.
• Employer-embedded cohorts. A single employer partners with us on a whole cohort, shapes it around their roles, and commits to hiring at least 50% of the graduates. These are bigger, more complex deals with longer sales cycles, several decision-makers and real commitment from the employer. You will help us build this model as you sell it.

You will work nationally across England, with a particular focus on building our employer base in Liverpool, a new region for us.

We will be honest: this role involves a lot of outreach and a lot of "no". It suits someone who is energised by targets, picks up the phone without being asked, and believes in what Generation does enough to make other people believe in it too.

What success looks like

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.

ABOUT GENERATION

Talent is everywhere; opportunity is not. Generation UK is a charity that supports people facing barriers to employment into life-changing careers they could not otherwise reach.

We run free, full-time, profession-specific bootcamps lasting one to three months in growing sectors such as tech, healthcare and the green economy. Some we deliver directly; others we co-deliver with partner organisations. Learners get wraparound one-to-one support throughout, and we keep supporting them in their job search for six months after they graduate. Many have been unemployed for a long time, are disabled, or come from low-income backgrounds.

Since launching in 2019, we have supported more than 4,000 people in the UK. We are part of a global Generation network that has supported over 100,000 people.

None of this works without employers. Every graduate needs an employer ready to give them a chance, and every bootcamp needs partners who invest in our work. Finding those employers starts with you.

By joining Generation UK&I, you will become part of an organisation committed to social impact and determined to play its part in changing the system in this context. The work is fast-paced, exciting, and innovative.

Find out more at

And you can hear more about our impact from our learners and beneficiaries themselves

And you can also learn more about our culture, directly from our incredible people on our website:

Generation acknowledges the duty of care to safeguard, protect, and promote the welfare of staff and learners and is committed to ensuring safeguarding practice reflects statutory responsibilities, and government guidance and complies with best practice. We carry out employment and right-to-work checks, and request a declaration of any criminal convictions from all staff as part of our recruitment process.

RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Win new business (the core of the role)

• 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.

2. Sell and launch employer-embedded cohorts

• 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.

3. Onboard employers

• 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.

4. Grow accounts

• 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.

5. Help Generation grow

• 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.

Requirements

ABOUT YOU - What you bring

Essential

• 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.

A bonus, but not essential

• 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.

Is this role for you? You will probably love this role if:

• 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.

This role is probably not for you if:

• 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.

Our hiring process

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)

Benefits

At Generation, we're changing the lives of many individuals, and that in itself gets us out of bed! Here are a few other benefits you'll experience working with the UK team:

• Purpose and social impact in the heart of your work
• Opportunity to make your mark - you'll have a lot of autonomy to bring the Generation blueprint to life in a way that makes sense for your region
• Opportunity to get involved with a range of activities and varied projects - we're a small team, so there are lots of opportunities to get involved in projects across the whole organisation
• We offer flexible and remote working to accommodate everyone's preferred working pattern/preferences and unique needs
• WFH set up offer of support of £300 to help you make your working-from-home setup comfortable and efficient
• Professional Development is a priority for Generation and employees and you can access to up to £1,000 towards your learning & development per year. This support is accompanied by up to 5 days of training days/ study leave per year to enable your development activities.

A fair chance

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.

Support with your application

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