All Case Studies
Enterprise Partner
The UK’s largest mobile operator, newly combined
0
hires
0
month partnership
0
talent partners embedded at project peak
locations:
- UK
Overview
The UK’s largest mobile operator, newly combined
In May 2025, Vodafone UK and Three UK completed their merger to form VodafoneThree, now the UK’s largest mobile operator. The combined business committed £11 billion to its UK network over the next decade. In July 2026, Vodafone took full ownership by buying out CK Hutchison’s 49% stake, well ahead of the three-year option set out when the merger was agreed.
Bringing two businesses together meant a combined workforce of around 14,000 people and an organisational design programme running through every division. Roles were reshaped, teams resized and colleagues assessed for positions in the new structure, while day-to-day hiring for growth carried on alongside it. By early 2026 the open vacancy load had passed 600 roles. The in-house talent team had capacity for around 380.
VodafoneThree partnered with Bond in March 2026 to cover the gap of roughly 220 roles.
Nine Talent Partners, two heritages
Bond embedded a team of nine Talent Partners, mirroring how the business was still organised: five on the heritage Three side and four on heritage Vodafone. Each heritage came with its own interview process and its own systems, SAP SuccessFactors and Eightfold on one side, Oracle and SmartRecruiters on the other.
The original brief was three months. Repeated extensions took the partnership to the end of November 2026, with the team growing to 11 at its peak.
Hiring through a restructure
Bond’s Talent Partners ran two streams of hiring side by side. Organisational design roles in the new structure were mostly filled internally, through reapplication and assessment, while around 200 business-as-usual roles kept growth hiring moving. The work ranged from technical specialists to senior appointments.
Hires landed across Networks, Consumer, Business, IT, Consumer Operations and VBSE.
Bond also made strong progress on gender balance:
- Finance, Business, Consumer and Corporate: One Talent Partner’s hires were close to achieving a 50/50 gender split, with 27 women and 30 men.
- Senior procurement: in Three’s procurement team, the 4 senior hires were split evenly, 2 women and 2 men.
- Successfully secured a senior female hire for a Senior Commercial Manager role within Vodafone Business Security Enhanced, a function traditionally operating in a male-dominated sector.
Capacity for the new VodafoneThree
- 202 hires, 127 internal and 75 external since March 2026
- A 3 month brief extended to a 9 month partnership
- At the end of October 2026, both heritgages merged systems and now VodafoneThree use SuccessFactors and Eightfold.
