Helen Eleftheriou is a Talent Strategy and Early Careers specialist with over 20 years’ experience leading graduate, apprenticeship and intern programmes for global businesses across APAC, EMEA and North America.
Before founding Emerging Talent Partnership, she spent nearly six years at Rolls-Royce as Global Head of Early Careers Resourcing, leading a team delivering around 1,300 graduate, intern and apprentice hires annually across three global regions. Her earlier career spans financial services, utilities and energy.
She works on a project and advisory basis embedded where needed, advisory where that’s more useful. Where a project needs additional specialist resource, she brings in trusted partners.
The approach is direct and collaborative. She’ll tell you what she thinks, get on with it, and leave things in better shape than she found them.
Why I built this business
My parents were both immigrants. My dad came to the UK at 21 with very little and worked every hour available to build a life for his family. He retired at 80, because he had to. My Mum came here as a little girl and dedicated her life to her children. Between them, they gave us everything they possibly could.
What they couldn’t give us was the network, the connections, the knowledge of how professional life works, how you get into it, how you navigate it, how you make it work for you. Not because they didn’t care but because it was an environment to which they’d never been exposed to.
I was fortunate, through hard work and surrounding myself with good people, I found my way.
Now I’ve spent twenty years watching young people who are just as capable, just as driven, just as full of potential not find theirs.
Because nobody opened the door.
I grew up in a household where a strong work ethic was everything.
That’s why I set up Emerging Talent Partnership.
When I was working in corporate talent acquisition, we did everything we were supposed to do. We reviewed our processes, looked at the data, worked with universities and schools to widen our reach. And it still wasn’t enough. The young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, the ones without the guidance or the networks or the confidence to navigate a hiring process designed by and for people who already knew the rules, they were still falling through the gaps.
So when I left, I started working on both sides.
What I’ve seen over the past few years has made me incredibly sad. And angry in equal measure.
Schools where unemployment runs through generations, where kids are fighting not just the job market but everything their family has ever known. Rural schools where transport is scarce and the nearest employer feels like another world entirely. Students sold the dream that a degree guarantees opportunity, who leave with debt, apply for hundreds of jobs, hear nothing back and start to believe the problem is them.
It isn’t them.
A careers lead told me that some of her students are encouraged by their parents to turn down apprenticeships because if the child starts earning, the family loses benefits. Think about that for a moment. A young person with an offer on the table, a real opportunity, and the system makes it financially irrational to say yes.
Teachers who understand the importance of careers provision but have never worked outside education and don’t have the time to bridge that gap even if they wanted to. Schools teaching children how to pass exams rather than how to enter the world of work. University students who arrive not knowing what they want, leave with debt and a degree, and still can’t get through the door.
We are sleepwalking into a crisis
There is a generation of talented, capable young people who are being failed by systems, by processes, by assumptions and by businesses that haven’t yet understood the cost of not investing in them.
That’s the other side of what I do
With employers, I work on the strategy, the processes and the pipelines that bring early talent in and develop it properly. Not because it’s the right thing to do - though it is - but because it’s the smart thing to do. Businesses that don’t build these pipelines now will be paying the price in five years when the experienced people retire and there’s nobody ready to step up.
With schools and universities, I work on the programmes that give students from every background a genuine shot, the practical skills, the employer connections, the knowledge of how the system works that some of them simply don’t have at home.
I do both because I believe both matter. And because I’ve seen what happens when they work together.
Get in touch
If your talent strategy needs to work harder for your business, let’s talk.