OUR
STORY
Meet our Founder, Jessica
Belong was created in response to an industry that had become increasingly transactional and impersonal.
After working both agency-side and in-house as Head of Talent Acquisition for one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech start-ups – where she scaled the business from 20 to 200+ employees across the UK, Europe, the USA and Asia – Jessica saw first-hand that the recruitment model was broken.
Too often, agency recruiters treated clients and candidates as transactions. Many lacked real-life experience of what it means to work within a start-up or early-stage business – at the coalface of building not just a company, but a culture. There was little understanding of how to truly partner with founders and leadership teams, how to advise strategically rather than simply push CVs, or how to design and embed talent acquisition, employer branding and employee engagement frameworks that actually scale. Most importantly, relationships with candidates rarely extended beyond a start date.
Jessica founded Belong to do things differently.
Her vision was to provide the expertise, consultative approach and white-glove service that you would expect from an executive search firm, but with the real-life insight, growth mindset and agility that start-ups and SMEs required.
Our mission is simple: to help businesses succeed and individuals find where they truly belong.
Since opening our doors in 2019, Belong has supported companies and individuals through some of their most defining moments – from building first-ever C-suites to helping organisations scale from Seed through to Series D+. Just as importantly, we’ve helped individuals move forward in careers they once believed were out of reach, leave environments that no longer served them and rediscover confidence, purpose and momentum through meaningful career change.
Belong is passionate about delivering an experience - both for clients and candidates - that feels refreshingly human, deeply considered and genuinely different from anything else in the recruitment industry.
And we’re only just getting started.
Prioritising Diversity
Promising Disruption
Our Founder and CEO, Jessica, left school at 16 with no A Levels and no university degree.
She understands what it means to build a career - and a business - without a traditional path and to sit in boardrooms as a minority. She knows the resilience it takes to be heard, to be taken seriously and to succeed in environments not designed with you in mind.
That lived experience sits at the very heart of Belong.
Belong exists to give a voice to those who have been overlooked - whether due to gender, age, education, sexual orientation, ethics, neurodiversity or parenthood - and to ensure that exceptional individuals are seen, valued and placed where they can make the greatest impact.