Euan McNair

The Seed Planted in 2008

McNair came into recruitment in 2008, fresh from university with a degree in psychology. He had always been interested in human behaviour, and the overlap was obvious to him: psychology, he believes, runs through a great deal of talent acquisition. His first role was agency side, at Hays, specialising in social care and healthcare. It was an unusually good classroom. Filling those jobs was never an abstraction on a requisition list. It changed the daily lives of the people receiving care and the people delivering it.

That early exposure planted what he calls a seed, one that grew into a career-long conviction about candidate care, candidate experience and the real purpose of the profession. Talent acquisition can be an underappreciated line of work, he says, but seeing first hand the impact of genuinely filling jobs energized him to stay in the sector. At the end of 2011 he moved out of agency and into in-house hiring, and he has been building talent functions ever since.

When AI Meets AI

McNair believes every leader in the space should be talking about artificial intelligence and, more importantly, should be well informed about it. His central concern is specific: AI fighting AI. Candidates are using it to generate applications at volume. Organisations are increasingly using it to screen those applications at volume. When AI meets AI, he argues, the profession strips out the very thing that makes it good, which is people.

His answer is not prohibition but education. His team has rolled out guidance for candidates on how to use AI well rather than simply lifting a template or a generated cover letter. The logic is blunt: if everybody uses AI, every CV and every cover letter starts to look the same, and the result is what he calls "mass averageism." Part of the job, then, is helping people hold on to the things that make them unique.

The same discipline shapes his own function. Instead of deploying automation across the board, he insists on identifying the true moments that matter to humans and protecting them: the verbal offer, the conversation in the middle of a process, the organising of an interview. Tools are used to streamline ways of working elsewhere. He also wants the profession to retire a familiar vanity metric. Application volume, he argues, was always the wrong scoreboard, and talent leaders should be looking instead at how many people they reject. "We're not in the business of hiring people. We're in the business of rejecting other humans," he says, reframing the job in a way that lands uncomfortably and usefully. Millions of people are turned down globally every year. How that is done, and how humanely, is a question with consequences for wider society.

Metrics, Story and the Human on the Spreadsheet

His advice to other talent leaders begins somewhere unexpected: be kind to yourself. The role is hard and at times it is lonely. From there he offers a sequence. Understand the organisational context you operate within, a discipline his current leader was very clear about when they were devising strategy together. Understand the external context too, what the talent marketplace is doing and what candidates now expect. Get those two right and you are already in a strong position.

Then underpin it with metrics that genuinely add value and are clearly defined and clearly understood. He is impatient with sloppiness here. Time to offer is his favourite example: he has asked many talent leaders how they define it, when the clock starts and when it stops, and found little agreement. Talent leaders, he says, need to be better at defining and refining these measures. Once they exist, measure them, then tell the story and tell it passionately. It is fine for a metric to be red one month, amber the next and green after that. What matters is uniting a team behind a shared vision of what success looks like, being audacious about the stretch goal and grounding it firmly in reality.

Underneath all of it sits the conviction that has travelled with him since the healthcare desk. In an age of AI, technology and automation, the numbers on the spreadsheet are human beings. Get that mix right, he argues, and the profession delivers elevated propositions for recruiters, candidates and hiring managers alike.

McNair says he has always thought about talent acquisition through three lenses, and the first two say a great deal about how he works. One is psychology: the job is fundamentally about changing behaviour, and it does not stop at the moment someone is hired. It continues into positively reinforcing that the person made the right decision. The other is marketing, whose techniques he borrows to do exactly that. Well over a decade and a half after that first agency role, the psychology graduate is still running the same experiment, simply at far greater scale.