Emma Storey

A Career Change That Stuck

Storey came to recruitment about ten years ago, after roughly eight years in a completely different job and a decision that she wanted a genuine career change. She did not know much about the industry she was walking into. "I didn't really know what recruiting was, but I thought it looked like a job that I could do," she says. That was enough to make her put herself forward, and it landed her at an agency working a risk and compliance desk within insurance, about as far from tech as a starting point gets.

She moved into tech recruitment in that same first stretch of her career and went on to work across three different agencies before founding her own. That trajectory, from insurance compliance to product and engineering leadership searches for fast-growing tech companies, gave her something more useful than a specialism. It gave her a comparative view of how recruitment firms actually operate, and a clear sense of which parts of the standard playbook she wanted no part of.

The Founders Who Handed Her the Reins

Storey spent the majority of her recruiting career at ISL Talent, run by two founders she still credits for the shape of her career: Alan and Henry. What made the company unusual, she says, was that it was highly autonomous and not KPI driven, a genuine departure from how most agencies are run. That freedom is what allowed her to develop a method of her own rather than inheriting one.

"That autonomy really helped me to flourish in this role and start to be quite creative with it, and start to recruit in my own way," she says, "rather than just a specific way that I'd kind of been taught previously." Recruitment, she notes, is notoriously money driven, organized around how quickly an invoice can be paid. "I was never really about that. It was much more about doing a more thorough and a better job for the candidates and the clients at the same time." Being given the space to work that way is what she appreciated most from those founders, and it is the operating principle she carried into Hera.

AI, and the Shrinking Middle

Storey is candid that AI has shaken up the industry, and that the evidence shows up first in her own job flow. Across the junior and mid end of the market, she has watched teams get smaller. Not eliminated, she is careful to say, but leaner, and the expectations placed on new hires have shifted with them. "The expectation of people coming in and the speed at which they're expected to work is definitely different now with the use of AI."

She and Morse have chosen to embrace the tools rather than resist them, for practical reasons as much as philosophical ones. Both are working mothers running a business. "There aren't many hours in the day, and we're trying to get as much done as we can," she says. So anything that can be built into their workflows to make the work quicker, easier, better and "more credible" goes in. Beyond automation, she uses AI as a thinking partner, on a daily basis.

The Case for Being Very Human

Asked what advice she would offer other recruiting leaders heading into 2027, Storey does not reach for a tactic. She reaches for the ethos Hera was founded on. "We treat people how we expect to be treated," she says. The whole brand, and the whole reason the business exists, is candidate and client experience: "Treating people not as CVs and LinkedIn profiles, but as people, as humans, as parents, as caregivers." Whatever makes a person's story and job search unique matters to Hera, and Storey makes sure it matters to her clients too.

In practice that means touch points, documentation and support through the whole hiring process, which is the part candidates single out most often and the reason they reach for words like personal agent rather than recruiter. On the client side it means refusing to define success as speed. "It's not about just filling a role as quickly as we can," she says. "It's about understanding what the challenges are for the business, creating a strategy with them." Then finding the right person, but specifically the right person who will stay, followed by work on retention so that new hires are thriving once they are inside. "There's a whole piece that we can do as recruiters rather than just the recruitment itself." The commercial logic is not lost on her either: being human and caring for people, she notes, tends to pay off in repeat business.

The People She Points To

Storey is quick to move the credit elsewhere. Morse, her co-founder and the person she built Hera with, she describes simply as "absolutely amazing." Outside the business she names Chris White of Kodu, who recruits in product design for physical products and hosts a podcast, and whose community work she singles out above the rest of it. "He's fab," she says. It is a telling choice of peer: someone whose contribution is measured less by placements than by what he gives back to the people around him.