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.

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.