Callum Buxton

An Accident That Turned Into a Craft

Buxton entered talent acquisition in 2014, a stretch he counts as twelve years in the profession, and he entered it the way a great many people of his generation did. By accident. He believed he was applying for a job as an accountant. He was, in fact, applying to become a recruiter of accountants. He went through the hiring process, joined the agency, and ended up specialising in something else entirely: recruiting HR and talent people himself.

Those first years were spent in regional markets, learning the trade at close range. From there he moved into executive search, working globally across life sciences and still focused on HR and talent mandates. The pattern across the arc is consistency of subject and escalation of stakes: the same population of people leaders, placed at progressively higher altitude, in an industry where the science matters. The move in house to Sophia Genetics brought both halves together, pairing sector fluency with the operational reality of building a company from within rather than serving it from outside.

The People Who Shaped the Approach

Ask Buxton who made him, and the first name is Louise Sowell, the recruitment manager who ran his first agency team. She taught him two things that have outlasted every process he has since built. First, that recruitment is a partnership rather than a transaction. Second, and more durably, how you treat people and how you talk to them. From her he developed what he describes as empathetic level matching, the habit of meeting a person exactly where they want to be met. "If I speak to a CEO or an SVP, I kind of adopt a matching tone," he says, "and I do the same if I speak to an office manager or receptionist." The tone flexes. The respect does not. He traces the instinct back to something simpler than technique: treating people like people, then meeting them where they want to be met.

A second leader, Fran, moved him from individual performance to something wider. Where Sowell taught him how to handle a conversation, Fran pushed him to work with the people around him, to pay attention to how a group functions together rather than how one person performs alone. That, in Buxton's telling, was the lesson in what it actually means to lead, and it arrived at the point in his career when he needed it.

More recently, Grant Neermann of Private Health Management has served as an external mentor and sounding board, the person Buxton turns to with an idea, a frustration or a challenge he wants tested by someone outside his own organisation. Neermann is deeply tenured and has sat in the same space Buxton now occupies, which means the counsel comes from someone who understands both the operational problems and the person wrestling with them. "He's been someone that's been pretty good at helping me think about how do I grow and develop as myself," Buxton says, describing him as an inspirational TA leader in his own right.

AI as Enablement, Not Replacement

Buxton has an unsentimental read on the technology reshaping his profession. He has not seen AI replace people, and he is candid about why that was never quite the right question for his team. Sophia Genetics already runs lean, with a small number of recruiters relative to the size of the business. There was no slack to remove. There was only capacity to unlock.

So he frames AI as enablement rather than revolution. His test for every workflow is narrow and practical: how do I gain back five or ten percent from this activity through automation or generative AI? A note taking tool here. A summarising tool there. Scheduling. None of it is dramatic in isolation. Compounded, he estimates it returns twenty to twenty five percent of his time, which he reinvests in the value add programmes and projects he previously had no room to attempt. "Before, I was already at that capacity and still had work to do," he says. He currently runs MetaView as a note taker with its sourcing agent layered on top, a product he notes has had deeper penetration in Europe than in the US.

It helps that he works inside an AI company that is genuinely AI first. Sophia Genetics has sponsored an organisation wide Claude Enterprise account and actively encourages employees to find ways to leverage it. Buxton has a CPO and a head above him both saying the same thing: find ways we can leverage this technology, find ways it can make the work better. He also sees a clear inflection point in the wider industry conversation. At RecFest and IHR events in the UK last year, he says, everything he heard about AI was hypothetical, blue sky sketches of what might one day be possible. That has changed. "This is live, this is the time, this is how you can suddenly build these awesome resources, and today is the day to start doing it."

The Metric That Actually Matters

For all his enthusiasm about tooling, Buxton's advice to other talent leaders is a warning against letting the machinery eat the point. What has made him effective, he argues, is the ability to connect with people, engage with people and treat people like people, and that is precisely the thing most at risk as processes get automated. "It's really important that as we start to leverage technology, we don't lose that element," he says. "That we still treat people like the people they are."

He is equally direct about the scoreboard. Speed of fill is not the measure. Volume of candidates submitted is not the measure. What matters is the relationship he holds with his partners, hiring managers and candidates alike, and the satisfaction those people carry away from working with him. That, he insists, is the line between a good recruiter and an exceptional one, "beyond any other numbered SLA or metric."