Alison Humphries

A Choice, Not an Accident

Leaving university, Alison knew three things she wanted from work: sales, people and variety. She did not know that recruitment existed. Her first move was a sales role in the IT sector, and she disliked the environment quickly and clearly enough to look elsewhere. The opportunity she took was with Hays PLC, then nothing like the global player it is now.

She moved fast there. "I was storming ahead very quickly," she says of those early years, and she is careful to add that the era was a different one, with different tools and different assumptions, yet the lessons still hold. What followed was a long run of building rather than inheriting: businesses grown and run from scratch, new markets entered, and service offerings such as RPO and statement of works designed as well as delivered. That distinction matters to her. Plenty of people can sell a model. Fewer have sat with the blank page in front of them and worked out what the model should be.

The Leaders Who Never Stopped Learning

Asked who shaped her, Alison names no one, deliberately, and instead describes a type. At Hays she reported to a couple of people she found genuinely inspiring, and what they gave her was not encouragement so much as calibration: a hard, useful separation between what was actually real and what was simply her own mindset at the time.

Her relationship with the wider genre of inspiration is more complicated, and she is unusually candid about it. Through the 1980s and 1990s she was a devoted reader of self help and business books, the sort that crowd every station platform shelf, and that reading made her a sought after keynote speaker at conferences. It was, she says, great at the time. Then the doubts arrived. Recycled quotes and inspirational passages, she came to believe, have limited value, because changing how someone actually behaves usually requires a great deal more than a stirring line. Evidence and a better argument are what persuade if you intend to be a true consultant rather than a performer. Many of the books she had swallowed wholesale turned out, particularly as the digital age arrived, to be little more than guesses about what made a business, a strategy or a leader successful.

What survived the reappraisal was the trait she now looks for above all others. The leaders who marked her most, and the colleagues she still values, were the ones who carried a massive enthusiasm for learning into every room. She has tried to keep that going since becoming a leader herself, organising her own practice around three standing questions: how can we be better, how can we do better, and how is what customers want changing right now.

Full Circle on Automation and AI

Alison is dry about the volume of commentary on artificial intelligence, and then makes a point most of that commentary misses. In her reading, the industry has come full circle. Before automation, the work ran on personal relationships, real face to face meetings and networks built over years. Automation arrived and allowed recruiters to reach enormous numbers of people very quickly, which sounds like progress until you check the scoreboard. Per fee earner productivity across the industry, she notes, has not shifted in 25 years. What automation actually delivered was volume in the hope of getting lucky with one or two contacts.

AI, she believes, has far greater potential precisely because it can be targeted rather than broadcast. She already sees it reactivating databases, historically a chronic weak point, finding opportunities for candidates and candidates for opportunities, saving significant time and producing genuinely useful business intelligence. There is an art to using it well, and she is not among those who claim any fool can.

The strategic conclusion she draws is the opposite of the one many owners expect. If the tools are commoditised, the differentiator becomes the calibre of the people holding them, which makes hiring quality inside a staffing business more important than it has ever been. Anyone who sees the role as equivalent to an SDR in a SaaS company, she suggests, is probably in the wrong business, and is certainly underestimating the complexity of what they are selling.

Beyond the Keyword Match

Her sharpest challenge to the industry concerns selection itself. For far too long, she argues, the profession has leaned on CVs and resumes and on a process that amounts to not much more than keyword matching. Scanning a document and confirming that someone has Ruby on Rails experience is not assessment. It is retrieval.

The deeper problem is temporal. Nobody has experience of a world that does not exist yet, so recruiting for the next two years by auditing the last five is structurally doomed. What Alison wants measured instead is transferable competency and skill, and above all fluid intelligence: the capacity to keep learning, to adapt, to see new patterns as they form. That is where the craft lives, and it is the part no tool can hand over for free.

Advice for 2026: Build Plan B, C and D

For talent leaders heading into the new year, her counsel is compact. Be adaptive. This has been, globally and regionally, the most volatile and unpredictable environment she can remember across a career that started in 1985, economically and politically alike.

She takes direct aim at an orthodoxy she once watched everyone accept without argument, the belief that every business needs a five year strategic plan. Have multiple plans, she says. Have a plan B, a plan C and a plan D, and keep taking soundings so you know which one the market is asking for. It is advice with her whole method inside it: less certainty, more evidence, and the discipline to keep choosing rather than drifting.