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.

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.