Chris Shaw

“Recruitment is much easier when you live in reality.”

Chris Shaw once oversaw resourcing for more than 300 Boots UK stores and 6,000 people. Today Chris works inside businesses that have never had a dedicated talent acquisition leader, building the hiring machinery they did not know they were missing.

That shift is the founding logic of Rec-Revolution, the London firm Chris co-founded in 2020 with longtime business partner Alex Foxell. The company helps SME owners and in-house HR teams hire directly and cut their recruitment costs. It replaces the familiar vacancy-for-a-fee transaction with something closer to an embedded capability. The premise is quietly contrarian: for a large part of the market, the most valuable thing a recruitment expert can do is help a company handle its own hiring well.

Chris started out in the leisure industry and arrived in recruitment almost by accident. A visit to a recruitment company about an entirely different matter turned into an invitation to take a closer look at the business itself. The move worked out very well, and it set the course for everything that followed.

On the agency side, Chris rose to Managing Consultant at Switch Consulting. The next chapter was in-house at Boots UK, the chemist brand found on high streets across the country, where Chris served as Divisional Resourcing Manager. Having worked both agency and in-house gave Chris a clear view of both sides of the client relationship.

The practical experience is backed by formal credentials. Chris is CIPD accredited and holds an MA from Warwick Business School. Along the way, Chris and the future co-founder of Rec-Revolution worked together in a couple of earlier businesses, a long partnership that eventually became the foundation for the firm.

Rec-Revolution grew out of a hard look at where recruitment actually adds value. Chris is quick to say the industry has many great recruiters. Even so, a recurring pattern stood out at the mid-level: much of the work came down to posting an advert, seeing who applied and forwarding the results, with relatively little genuine network involved. Chris and Alex concluded there had to be a better way to serve employers, and that many companies could do the job directly if someone gave them the right foundations.

The firm focuses mainly on organisations with between 100 and 1,000 employees. Depending on the nature of the business, these companies are often too small to justify a senior, dedicated talent acquisition hire. Hiring usually falls to HR teams that are improvising and have never treated talent acquisition as a discipline in its own right.

Rec-Revolution steps into that gap. "We act as that fractional resource, which gives them all of the structure, process and ongoing management in the background to allow them to function, at a rate that works for them," Chris explains.

Chris believes every recruiter ultimately has to plough a personal furrow, finding an individual approach rather than copying someone else's. Two names still stand out as formative. Liam Humphreys and Martin Wells, both exceptional recruiters in Chris's view, provided much of the direction and focus that shaped an early career. Martin founded Switch Consulting, where Chris served as Managing Consultant, and now runs Evolving Futures. Liam, too, went on to lead a business of his own. Chris describes them simply as genuinely good people.

Chris takes a measured view of artificial intelligence. Earlier tools added some value by reading CVs and similar tasks. In Chris's assessment, however, AI has only reached a level of real, honest value in roughly the last 12 to 18 months, as conversational capability and AI-led screening interviews have matured. Rec-Revolution now recommends these tools to some clients for first-stage screening.

The enthusiasm comes with conditions. "AI is a massive value add, no question at all, but it has to be used in the right way," Chris says. A business that leans on it too heavily risks losing ownership of each candidate in the process, and the people involved stop feeling real buy-in. Chris sees many companies rushing towards AI because it is the buzzword of the moment, without a clear sense of what they want from it. The questions Chris puts to clients are simple: "What do you really want from it? How does it add value?"

That thinking also shapes how the firm chooses technology. Rather than carrying a fixed toolkit, Rec-Revolution looks for solutions that fit each client's specific problem. That is a deliberate choice in a market where tools move in and out of date quickly.

Chris's advice for talent leaders is to stay anchored in what is true. Being external lets Rec-Revolution tell clients plainly when their message does not match reality. In-house recruiters, by contrast, can get absorbed into the company story, selling the wonderful package and the culture without looking beneath the surface. Chris notes that promoting the employer is part of the job, but believes recruiters need the confidence to step back and push upward.

That means telling leadership when candidates arrive and do not find what was promised. "What's the reality of this process? What's the reality of working here?" are the questions Chris encourages every recruiter to ask. The goal is to operate in the real world rather than an aspirational version wrapped in corporate gloss. As Chris puts it: "Recruitment is much easier when you live in reality."