Annah Rae

From Cover Role to Career

What began as covering someone else's desk quickly became something more deliberate. At Addison Lee, Rae started taking on projects beyond the requisition list, looking specifically at internal recruitment and how the organisation could grow its own teams from within. That was the moment the work stopped being administration and started being strategy. "That really started to kind of ignite my interest in the talent side," she says.

The through line from that first opportunity to her current remit is unusually clean. Rae has spent her career in organisations at inflection points, in transport, in market research, in property development, and now in digital asset infrastructure, and in each one the question has been the same: who does this business need, and how do we build a process good enough to find them.

The People Who Built Her

Rae is precise about the people who shaped her, and she names them. Claire Bishop, her first HR director at Addison Lee, was the one who gave her the shot. Bishop came from a recruitment background herself and was one of the only female leads in the business at that time, someone who had progressed quickly and who worked collaboratively rather than hierarchically, constantly generating ideas and, just as importantly, feeding back on the ideas Rae brought her. "She was probably the person that made me realize I really wanted a career in HR," Rae says. Bishop gave her a template for what an HR leader could look like, and an ambition to match.

At Kantar, HR director Abigail McDonald taught her systems and process. Rae ran the graduate programmes there, hiring 50 graduates a year at real scale, and McDonald mentored her through the discipline of early careers: understanding why hiring key talent into entry level positions matters, and working shoulder to shoulder with learning and development so that graduates walked in the door with a robust plan for a thriving career already behind them.

At Mount Anvil, the influence came from the top. Managing director Darryl Harley was not the first MD Rae worked with, but he had the biggest impact, because he genuinely believed that hiring the right people was the business's core competitive act. Together they designed an interview structure and methodology, and Harley made the rollout personal, ensuring the full executive and leadership teams embedded it and believed in it rather than tolerating it. Having a managing director that passionate about people and about hiring, Rae says, was transformative.

Most recently at Copper.co, she describes working with chief people officer Steven Robson as an absolute joy. Robson has taken her under his wing and pushed her knowledge well past talent acquisition into learning and development, day to day HR, and workforce planning, while the two of them embed foundational projects across the business: the culture and values work currently being implemented, workforce planning, and a new levelling framework.

All For It, But Cautious

Rae's position on artificial intelligence is neither evangelism nor resistance. She has, by her own description, a huge appetite for AI in the talent space, tempered by a clear view that implementation is where organisations succeed or fail. "There's an opportunity and there's also a challenge with AI," she says. "I'm all for it, but cautious at times."

The wins are real. Copper implemented AI note takers at the end of last year, and the effect on interviews was immediate, if initially disorienting. Rae and a colleague with 15 years of recruiting experience found themselves joking about how hard it was to stop typing mid conversation, so conditioned were they to multitasking through an interview. Now, she says, being able to relax and simply have the conversation is a genuine gain.

CV sifting is where she draws a harder line. The tools are good but not there yet, and she has identified a distortion that few people talk about openly: candidates are now writing CVs optimised for what AI screening tools will extract, which means a document that reads oddly to a human may be perfectly engineered for a machine. Recruiters who avoid the tools risk missing strong people; recruiters who rely on them risk reading documents that were never written for them. "They're now made for a tool, not for another human reading them," she says. Balancing that is, in her view, one of the central challenges of the current moment.

Underneath all of it sits a non negotiable. Rae prides herself on candidate experience and on Copper.co being a place where candidates feel genuinely cared about. She is unwilling to let efficiency erode that. Whatever the stack does, the human touch stays in, at all times.

Advice for What Comes Next

For people entering recruitment, talent acquisition and HR now, Rae offers three things. First, stay in touch with how the field is developing, because AI is actively paving the landscape of what recruitment will look like and trailing behind is not a survivable position. Second, find your voice and make it heard. Candidates care more than ever about the people factor, about who you are and who the company is, precisely because they sense systems moving to the forefront. Cutting through as a real individual is now a competitive advantage.

Third, and most interesting, use the time back. If automation is saving hours, Rae argues, the question becomes what a team does with them. Deeper candidate experience. Training hiring managers properly. More creative output on social channels. "How can you be more creative as a team?" she asks. "What can you utilize that other time on?" It is a characteristically practical framing from someone who has spent her career turning an unexpected opportunity into an expanding one.