Emma Storey
Hera
“Treating people not as CVs and LinkedIn profiles, but as people, as humans, as parents, as caregivers.”
Emma Storey 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 Emma's story.
The compliment Emma Storey hears most often from candidates is not really a compliment about recruiting at all. "I don't even know if I can call you recruiters," people tell her. "It's like you're our personal agent." For the co-founder of Hera, the tech talent partner she launched nearly three years ago, that reaction is the entire product.
Storey has spent a decade in recruitment, the last three building a business designed around a simple conviction: that the fastest invoice is rarely the best outcome. Hera works with tech startups and scaleups, building close relationships with founders and helping them build diverse teams, with a particular focus on women in tech and on diversity in tech more broadly. The mandates run from mid-level to C-level. Hera does little at the junior end, and the work is predominantly product, engineering and leadership, though marketing, testing and sales all come through too. Inside a startup, as Storey puts it, a role "could be anything."
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.
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 her co-founder 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 Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Emma. We are honored to welcome Emma Storey to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Emma. 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.
