Meet the Studio team: Rachel Grewal

Our portfolio companies get exclusive access to our full-stack Studio team. No agency waste. No marketing waffle. Just practical advice and expert execution through best-practice blueprints, proven technology and industry expertise.

Whether it's marketing and brand, talent and people or product design and engineering our Studio team are ready, sleeves rolled, to tackle any problem with our founders. In this blog series, we introduce the faces in our Studio, industry specialists who are helping founders beat the odds.

Meet Rachel, our Head of Talent. 

What were you doing before joining Forward?

I was Head of Talent for a fast growing fintech and before that I was Global Head of Talent Acquisition for the Financial Times.

What made you join Forward and why are you excited to work here?

I'm lucky enough to call this my dream role. I've worked in talent for over 10 years. I've taken a tech consultancy scale-up from 60 to 600 people, and I've worked for the Financial Times on larger scale strategic, talent initiatives. Building talent capabilities from scratch and world class teams around them has been my bread and butter and what I love to do. I have learnt so much along the way. How to build scalable tech recruitment processes from scratch. How to hire inclusively. Implementing best in class pre and on-boarding strategies, culture development and how to retain talent. 

My role as Head of Talent in the Studio team at Forward is allowing me to bring all of this knowledge and experience together and apply it to scale-up environments, ensuring our founders have the opportunity to evolve their talent capabilities based on best practice recruitment principles in collaboration with us. 

This is what sets Forward apart. The Studio team exists simply to add value to our portfolio. So portfolio companies get access to high-value capabilities that early stage start-ups wouldn't typically be able to access. 

Two of the main challenges founders face are talent and capital. I'm lucky enough to be part of the team helping founders with some of their most pressing challenges. 

What's your Studio superpower (specialism) at Forward?

Building scalable, efficient, but rigorous and inclusive recruitment processes. The market has never been so hot; so many roles and so many candidates. Attracting a diverse talent pool and providing a red carpet candidate experience has never been more significant. I love building process and strategies around this. 

What has been your favourite Studio project to date?

I'm only in my first few weeks but I'm really loving getting to know the portfolio companies. I’ve started building relationships and understanding whether they have urgent hiring needs or talent strategy support - such as on their onboarding process or benchmarking.

I've also been working on community events to invite our portfolio companies to where they can learn more about hot topics in talent right now.

Want to learn more about what our Studio can do? Find out more here.