Ben Carrington

A Decade In Sales, Then A Different Kind Of Deal

Ben is candid about the entry point. Like many people in staffing, this was not a planned destination, and there was no degree program pointing the way. After roughly ten years selling in other categories, an agency reached out, and the reasoning was simple: why not explore it. Sales skills transferred cleanly, and the curiosity did the rest.

The first stop was Michael Page, where Ben spent about a year getting a feel for the mechanics of recruiting. That year was foundational rather than final. It established the vocabulary, the rhythm of a desk, and the difference between selling a service and selling an opportunity that will reshape someone's working life. Adecco came next, and the tenure there has now stretched past three years.

The move also required a genuine shift in discipline. Ben came up on the permanent placement side of recruiting, where the cadence, the client conversation, and the economics all look one way. Temporary staffing operates on a different clock entirely. Learning to work in both was one of the earliest and most useful adjustments of the Adecco years.

The Directors Who Taught The Ropes

Ben credits that transition largely to people rather than process. One leader in particular, who started as a first mentor and first director at the company, took on the job of explaining how the temp side actually works. Not the theory of it, but the ropes: the operational realities, the client expectations, the moments where a decision has downstream consequences. Ben describes that relationship as formative and says it has continued well past the original reporting line.

A current director rounds out the picture. Between the two of them, Ben points to a set of relationships that have shaped how the role gets performed day to day, and describes being thankful to have worked alongside strong individuals in an industry where the learning is mostly transmitted person to person rather than through a manual.

The mentorship theme extends outward as well. Over three-plus years at Adecco, Ben has built strong connections both internally and externally, and a number of them stopped being purely professional some time ago. Some of those colleagues have since left the business, and a few have left the industry entirely. Ben is still close with them today, which says something about how the relationships were built in the first place.

Leverage, Not Us Versus AI

On artificial intelligence, Ben is unambiguously a user, and frames the question in operational terms rather than existential ones. The value, as Ben defines it, is identifying what is purely administrative and getting it off the plate. That is also how Adecco reads the moment, and Ben notes that the recruiter's seat has changed considerably over the last ten years, along with the broader landscape around it.

The framing matters. Ben rejects the us-versus-AI construction outright and replaces it with a different question: how do we leverage it. AI is a known presence, in this reading, and it is not going anywhere. If anything, it will continue to grow and to enhance the business, which makes the useful question one about adaptation rather than resistance.

That thinking is aimed at the team as much as at Ben personally. The goal is to get people using AI to clear administrative work so that human interaction shows up where it should: in conversations with customers, with clients, and with colleagues. Time given back is the whole point. Ben treats AI as one of the elements capable of returning that time, and treats the returned time as something to spend on people.

There is a practical wrinkle worth noting. Adecco is currently building its own proprietary AI, and teams have been asked to stay off external tools while that work is underway, a protection measure that shapes what Ben and the team can adopt in the near term.

Advice For The Next Stretch

Asked what to carry into 2027, Ben starts with two words: keep an open mind. The observation underneath it is that most people's first experiments with AI stall at the entry level, using it to clean up an email or fix the grammar in a draft. Useful, but modest.

So Ben issues a challenge to future leaders and to the people on the team: level that up. Take it to the next step. Be strategic about where AI is applied, because it can do a great deal, and the discipline is in identifying where it will make the biggest impact on a business and on a personal workload. There is a fine line, in Ben's view, between what should be delegated to the tool and what a leader needs to decide organically. Knowing which side of that line a task falls on is the actual skill.

The stakes are competitive rather than philosophical. Technology is here, the industry has spent the last few years absorbing that fact, and those who do not adapt fall behind the mark and lose their competitive advantage. Ben's prescription is consistent from start to finish: keep an open mind, stay strategic about how AI is used, and make sure the human parts of the job get the time they deserve.