Ashley Hever

The Maternity Cover That Changed Everything

Hever always suspected recruiting would find him. "I always thought I was going to end up being a recruitment consultant or something similar to that," he says of his early ambitions. Instead he joined Enterprise Mobility's management trainee program and worked his way into a branch manager role, running an operation rather than staffing one.

The opening came from a friend. His best friend at work was the company's regional talent acquisition manager, and when she went on maternity leave, Hever applied for her job and got it. That temporary assignment, roughly twenty years ago now, was the first real taste. When she returned, he moved back into operations, but the conviction had already set in. He loved meeting new people. He loved finding great talent for the business, at entry level and internally alike.

So when a role opened at the corporate head office just outside London, he applied for that too, and eventually found his way back into talent acquisition for good. He has been there ever since, a trajectory that has taken him from a regional recruiting seat in the UK to a leadership role at the company's headquarters in St. Louis. "I didn't ever think at some point in my career that one day I would be making a move from London to St. Louis," he says.

AI, and the Discipline of Asking Why

Hever's read on artificial intelligence in hiring is notably even-handed, and it starts on the candidate's side of the table. Applicants now use AI to work out whether a company is worth applying to in the first place, a shift he sees as a genuine rebalancing of information. On the employer side, the tools range from bots that answer questions on a careers site to systems that record and analyze interviews.

The pace is what he keeps returning to. "The trajectory of it is so steep and things are just changing all the time," he says, and with that comes a proliferation of partners and platforms, some genuinely useful, some not right for a given business. His counsel to other talent leaders is to resist adopting technology as a signal of sophistication. The questions that matter are narrower and harder: does this actually help you bring the right people into the right roles at the right time, and does it enhance both the recruitment process and the candidate experience?

There is an ethical floor beneath the efficiency argument, and Hever puts it plainly. Whatever the tool, the obligation is to make sure it does not harm the people passing through the process. Efficiency that costs candidates their fair shot is not, in his accounting, efficiency at all.

The Mentors Who Paid It Forward

Asked about the people who shaped him, Hever answers with the same instinct he brings to hiring: he wants to give credit widely, internally and externally, because he believes strongly in having mentors on both sides of your own company's walls.

The first name is Marie Artim, Vice President of Talent Acquisition globally at Enterprise Mobility and now his manager. She has been a constant since his earliest days as a recruiter covering maternity leave, staying connected even during the stretches when he moved out of recruitment entirely. What distinguishes her, in his telling, is that she pays it forward. She made sure he had access to the right networks, connected him to the right people, and coached him toward being, as he puts it, the best of the best he can be.

The second is Helen Elkin, whom he first met when she was heading up recruitment at Marks and Spencer in the UK, and who has since worked at British Airways and BDO, where she is today. The two effectively started their careers on parallel tracks and grew up in the industry together. She has been his benchmark: the person he calls to test an idea, seek advice, or compare notes, and the person who opened doors for him when he was new to the field.

The third is Dan Black, formerly of EY, a leader Hever has looked up to from a distance and studied closely. Black, he says, has shown real leadership and helped shape and drive change across recruitment and talent acquisition over the past couple of decades, particularly in early careers.

He also singles out Helen Brown at Vector Marketing for similar reasons: sustained leadership in early careers over two decades, and a relentless focus on candidate experience and on giving something back to the people who apply.

Leadership as Inheritance

The through line across all three mentors is not technique. It is generosity. Each of them stayed connected, made introductions, and invested in someone who had not yet proven he would stay in the profession. Hever has been explicit about what he does with that inheritance. "I've always taken their leadership approach and their leadership style and tried to bring it into my approach," he says, and then adds the part that matters most to him: give back as well.

It is a fitting philosophy for someone whose own break came from a colleague's trust and a manager's willingness to bet on an operator with no recruiting title. Twenty-five years into one company and fifteen into the discipline, Hever's ambition is refreshingly unglamorous. He wants someone, one day, to tell that story about him.