Billy Gavin

From Property Viewings to the Boiler Room

Gavin's route in began with estate agency work straight out of university. It was sales, it was money-motivated, and it was relentless: long hours, Saturdays, Sundays spent walking strangers through other people's houses. Meanwhile he watched friends working agency-side in recruitment who, as he puts it, were working just as hard "but were playing a lot harder." The environment they described was almost boiler-room in its intensity. He was young. He was hungry. He wanted in.

What drew him was not the commission structure so much as a self-knowledge he had carried since childhood. "I always knew growing up that it would be my voice that made me successful," he says, meaning the charisma, the ability to hold a room, the instinct for persuasion. When he landed agency-side, it was exactly what he had expected it to be. The move that mattered more came later, when he crossed from agency into internal talent acquisition and discovered that the skills which had made him formidable in one world were only half of what the other required.

The Mentor Who Held Up the Mirror

The person Gavin credits with reshaping him professionally is David Bremmer, now a TA director at Chapter Two and a well-known, vocal presence on the speaking circuit. When Gavin arrived in-house, he was, by his own frank assessment, still rough around the edges: too salesy, and "not consultative at all." Bremmer, he says, "really helped put a mirror in front of me" and showed him precisely where the sharpening needed to happen.

The lesson was deceptively simple. Use the two ears rather than the one mouth. Take the time to listen. Put genuine attention into the work rather than charming a way through a project, and deliver it the way the client actually needs it delivered, not the way instinct insists. For a freelancer who moves between organisations often, that lesson compounds. Bremmer set the foundations for how Gavin now walks into a business: not full steam ahead on confidence and incorrect assumptions, but a deliberate step back to understand what this particular company wants and how it prefers to work. As Gavin notes, first impressions stick.

His other formative influences came from outside the office entirely. Football, swimming and boxing have been constants since childhood, and it is boxing that shaped him most. In a boxing gym, "a lot of the work is done on your own when no one's looking." Every gym worth attending, he argues, has a coach who understands that arrogance and confidence are two entirely different things, and who has no patience for the former. Gavin is candid that he could have gone the other way. "I could have easily gone down the arrogant route. Very easily," he says, and he is grateful he did not: "I wouldn't have the network around me that I have now." The desire to win survived. The need to announce it did not. Let the success do the talking.

Delivery-Led, Human-First

Today Gavin works as a freelance talent partner, currently embedded at Carwow, and his brief is deliberately broad. He typically joins a business in the middle of a scale-up or a new hub build, hiring anything from exec level down to entry level. He describes himself as delivery-led, and the discipline behind that phrase is what makes him effective: he is not there to write frameworks, he is there to land people.

On artificial intelligence he places himself "somewhere in the middle of the fence," which is a more useful position than either evangelism or fear. He attends the conferences, including RecFest in the UK, and notes that every one features a handful of speakers promising AI will transform recruitment. His counter-argument is not nostalgic, it is structural. What makes recruitment good when it works well is the human connection, so the correct use of the technology is to buy back time for exactly that. Clunky applicant tracking systems have consumed a decade of recruiters' attention. Chat assistants that transcribe a conversation mean he no longer has to take notes while only half present. "What AI does for me is allow me to actually spend more time being human to the candidate," he says, rather than generating emails and grinding through process.

His sharpest warning is about the arms race the industry is quietly building. He sees a near future in which an AI-led ATS filters out AI-built CVs, a loop that closes on itself. "You're going to get AI rejecting AI," he says, "which means actually you've got no product at the end of it." Underneath that is a cultural drift he finds more troubling than any tool: nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore, and nobody answers a number they do not recognise. His prescription is pragmatic rather than purist. Use AI to set up the interaction, then have the conversation. He cheerfully calls himself "kind of old school" on how recruitment should be done, while being entirely specific about what AI should be enhancing. He also concedes the stakes: if the technology ever gets genuinely good, the industry is in jeopardy. He simply does not believe it is close.

Advice for 2027: The Toolkit Keeps Growing

Asked what he would tell talent professionals entering the industry next year, Gavin's answer is one word: open-minded. His reasoning is a clear-eyed read of how much the job has expanded since he started. Recruitment, he argues, has fractured into perhaps four different disciplines at once. Recruiters are marketeers now. They are part of people and people operations teams. They are sales teams. They are the public face of their companies on LinkedIn, the first human anyone speaks to.

"It's not just about putting bums on seats," he says. It is understanding the EVP piece, understanding D&I, understanding how great people actually drive a company forward, and then making sure the business is equipped across the board. The expectations placed on a talent function are widening every year, and the toolkit required is "getting bigger and bigger and bigger." His advice, therefore, is to keep levelling up and stay alert to where your company is heading, because the recruiter who stops learning is measuring themselves against a job description that no longer exists.

He extends the same generosity he received. Asked to name someone else worth recognising, he immediately pointed to Steph McGinty, his former boss at Kingfisher and now head of recruitment for B&Q and Screwfix, praising the near-global scope of her remit, the initiatives and new tools she has introduced, and the speaking work she does alongside it. "A really great talent, Steph," he says. "Really good at what she does." It is a small gesture, and a telling one from a man whose coaches taught him to let the success do the talking.