add-victor Wrapped 2025: Our Growth in High-Performance Talent

In 2025, our platform grew 42%, with faster-adapting, more diverse hires proving that high-pressure experience is a mainstream predictor of workplace success (Harvard Business Review, 2022). Our 2025 Wrapped shows exactly how we set the market benchmark.

 

From Alternative Pathway to Strategic Talent Source

add-victor has long connected athletes and veterans with career opportunities.

• Over the year, more than 3,500 athletes and military veterans joined add-victor, a 42% increase on 2024, expanding the total talent pool to over 11,500 candidates

These figures are not merely growth metrics, they reflect the platform’s effectiveness in engaging high-performance talent and command recognition from candidates and employers alike. Candidates join because peers have successfully converted performance into meaningful careers; employers return because add-victor hires reach productivity faster, require less onboarding support and demonstrate earlier ownership.

Much like how organisations such as Amazon and Deloitte have embedded non-traditional assessment of leadership potential into their hiring models (2022 Harvard Business Review), add-victor’s growth reflects a broader market shift: performance-backed potential is now commercially recognised.

 

What High Performance Really Looks Like on a CV

At add-victor, we move beyond traditional measures of potential, such as job title or institution and focus instead on demonstrated ability. This year our talent pool spanned:

• 95+ sports
• 110+ nationalities
• 1,600+ team captains and formal leaders
• 270+ Olympians and Paralympians
• 230+ Veterans across all three services, nearly 70% with 5-15 years of service

These candidates have operated for years in environments where standards are explicit, feedback is constant and outcomes are measurable. Many have led teams, balanced competing demands and delivered results in high-stakes environments long before entering the workplace. For employers, this reduces hiring risk by anchoring decisions in proven performance, where past behaviour reliably predicts future impact [see The Cost of a Bad Hire].

One persistent misconception add-victor continued to dismantle in 2025 is that high-performance comes at the expense of academic achievement. The data from this year’s Wrapped tells a different story. Among candidates joining in 2025:

• 65.4% hold an undergraduate degree
• 20.1% hold a postgraduate qualification

These qualifications span disciplines from leading UK universities, with candidates represented across the country. The result is a talent pool that mirrors the profile many employers seek but rarely find at entry level.

 

Diversity That Strengthens the Talent Pool

A key sign of add-victor’s development in 2025 was that diversity grew in step with overall platform expansion. Between December 2024 and December 2025:

• Ethnic Minority candidate representation grew by 57.3%
• Female candidate representation grew by 46.8%
• 15.7% of new candidates identify as LGBTQ+ (versus 3.7% of the UK population)
• Overall, 21.4% of the platform now identifies as an ethnic minority, with 27.3% of new talent in the past year from minority backgrounds

These figures demonstrate that when you recruit for real performance, diversity shows up naturally and performs. Research from McKinsey’s Diversity Wins indicates that ethnically diverse executive teams are 36% more likely to outperform peers on profitability, while Boston Consulting Group finds that diverse teams generate 19% higher innovation revenue (McKinsey, 2020; BCG, 2018). At add-victor, diversity is a byproduct of accessing high-performance environments: it scales naturally when hiring for behaviour, adaptability and execution, while directly enhancing commercial outcomes.

 

Building Infrastructure, Not Just Access

It is true however, that high-performance talent is only as valuable as the pathways that connect it to opportunity. This year, add-victor focused on building infrastructure that converts potential into measurable impact, with:

• 94 university sports clubs, sponsored across 29 universities and 39 sports, supporting 1,170 student-athletes
• 82 targeted workshops delivered at 35 universities, reaching 1,500+ individuals

Through 25 Oxford University Micro-Internships across consultancy, data & analytics and marketing, add-victor also expanded access to real commercial experience for high-potential students.

Building on this approach, add-victor further advanced its mission in 2025 through a Partnership with BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport), the UK’s national university sport body for 100,000+ Student-Athletes.

Through the partnership, student-athletes gained free access to add-victor's platform; including direct links to employers seeking proven performers, exclusive online workshops and bespoke career resources designed to translate sporting experience into commercial value. This was complemented by a five-part fortnightly workshop series last March, equipping participants with the practical tools to navigate professional transitions with the same discipline and intent applied to sport.

Will Roberts, BUCS CEO, highlighted the impact:

“We’re delighted to begin our collaboration with add-victor. Our student-athletes develop incredible skills through sport, and this partnership ensures those skills are recognised and converted into real-world career success.”

The BUCS Partnership shows what we’ve always believed at add-victor: high-performance talent isn’t niche, it’s a pipeline of people ready to step up.

 

add-victor: Looking Back and Forward

So looking back at 2025, one conclusion stands out. add-victor is no longer just advocating for high-performance talent, but is proving its commercial relevance. Our 2025 Wrapped shows we have delivered:

• Scalable growth without dilution
• Increased diversity alongside performance
• Employers accessing talent with lower risk and higher upside
• Candidates converting discipline into opportunity

As businesses navigate continued uncertainty and competition for early-career talent intensifies, the challenge isn’t finding high-performance individuals, it’s connecting them to opportunity at scale. At add-victor, we have built that bridge, setting the standard the market will now have to follow. The next chapter is about scaling even higher.

 

Agatha Crowther