Dani Unsworth
Semaloop
“While I have automated elements of my job, I still think you have to keep the core human connection.”
Dani Unsworth has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Dani's story.
The email was a routine agency pitch: would a fast-growing London fintech be interested in working with her recruitment firm? Checkout.com wrote back to say it did not work with agencies, but it liked the look of the person who had sent the note, and would she come in and interview instead? The company was privately held at the time and had taken no outside funding. Dani Unsworth took the meeting, took the job, and spent the next three years learning the difference between filling roles and genuinely partnering with a business. Roughly a decade later, she is Chief of Staff at Semaloop, a pre-seed startup of five people, and one of the more persuasive voices arguing that the future of hiring is not less human but more.
That argument carries weight because Unsworth is not a technology skeptic. She works inside a tech startup, lives in the tooling, and has spent eight or nine years hiring almost exclusively for engineering teams. Her position is more specific than optimism or alarm: automate the process, protect the relationship.
She Chose This Industry, Which Almost Nobody Does
Most people in talent describe their entry as an accident. Unsworth describes hers as a decision. During her placement year at university she joined the enterprise team, helping students raise money for startups they were building while still studying, and worked alongside the careers team as part of the same associated department. She was asked to stay on part-time through her final year.
Something clicked in that work: watching people prepare for the real world and helping them get there. So rather than drift into recruitment, she went looking for it, joining a tech recruitment agency straight out of university. She spent just over a year on what the firm called the .net desk, placing engineers into companies across London and the Home Counties. That desk produced the outbound email to Checkout.com, and Checkout.com produced her entry into tech. Since then she has worked across a wide range of industries and tech startups, but the starting point was never chance. As she puts it, she is one of the rogue ones.
Two Managers, Two Very Different Lessons
The first person who shaped her was the dean she reported to at the university business school. When he found out she was heading into recruitment, he was openly disappointed. He told her she was made for more than that, that he wanted her to go and do something great with her career. He passed away the year she entered the working world, so he never saw what followed. Looking back on the past ten years, Unsworth believes he would be proud, and she credits that early challenge with giving her the grit and determination to make something of herself.
She also uses his reaction to make a broader point. Recruitment still carries a reputation as a transactional job, and that reputation understates the people you meet and the opportunities available, particularly in tech, which she describes as one of the fastest-paced environments anyone can work in.
The second influence was the head of talent at Checkout.com, her first real manager in tech. He took her under his wing, brought her into every meeting, and taught her the tricks of the trade. More importantly, he taught her what it actually means to be a partner rather than a recruiter, the distinction that still organizes how she works. Three years under his leadership, she says, made her the recruiter she is today, and she remains grateful for the access he gave her.
Automate the Admin, Not the Conversation
Unsworth is fully immersed in the modern talent stack and happy to name favorites: Ashby for the applicant tracking layer, Juicebox for sourcing, Granola for note-taking. But she draws a deliberate line around where those tools operate. She uses AI for process improvement and optimization rather than to reshape the candidate experience or decide who gets hired.
The reasoning is straightforward. The core of talent, in her view, is human relationship, and the industry is not yet at a point where screening people out should be handed to a model. She knows this makes her somewhat unusual, even among recruiters in London. She is still the person who goes for coffee, goes for lunch, and keeps in touch with people long after a process closes. The automation exists so that the relationship-building has room to happen, not so it can be skipped.
Bringing the Executive Search Playbook In-House
Her sharpest thinking concerns what startups and scaleups should borrow from executive search firms. Standing out as an employer, she argues, now requires the kind of customized, high-touch process that exec firms and VC talent partners run as standard, and there is no good reason it cannot be brought in-house.
In practice that means processes designed to flex rather than run on rails, with more informal stages built in. Coffee. Lunch. Something genuinely tailored to the individual. The point is to make a candidate feel like the most important person in the room. She is not arguing against structure: a five-stage interview process is perfectly fine to have. What matters are the touchpoints around it, and those touchpoints are what will separate companies and recruiters over the long term. It is an approach she has been adopting herself this year, informed by conversations with VC talent partners who already work that way.
Advice for Talent Leaders
Going into 2027, Unsworth's counsel is to stop treating the process as the product. Length is the quiet killer of good hiring: a five, six, or seven-stage process that stretches across ten weeks gives a candidate's life plenty of time to change before an offer ever lands. Customize, add the informal moments, and make the experience feel personal rather than procedural.
She is applying the same discipline to her own team. Semaloop is five people with one open role, keeping things lean and hiring within network for now. When the company raises and starts to scale, she expects to review the sourcing and automation tools that can carry the volume. The sequence is telling: build the relationships first, then bring in the machinery to support them.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Dani. We are honored to welcome Dani Unsworth to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Dani. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.