Hannah Kerridge

The Placement That Changed the Plan

The original plan was HR. Like many UK degree programmes, hers included a year in industry between the second and final years, and Kerridge went looking for something people facing. What she landed was a placement scheme with Hays, the FTSE 250 staffing group, recruiting into HR rather than working inside it. She admits she did not fully understand what the job would involve when she accepted it. What she understood was the logo: a FTSE 250 business was going to look good.

Twelve months later the calculation had changed completely. She was good at it, she enjoyed it, and she had found something she had not gone looking for: a competitive commercial world that was still, at its core, a people-focused role. So she graduated and went back, staying a couple more years before the itch to represent one business rather than a new client every day set in.

The pivot arrived with neat timing. Kerridge was already thinking about leaving when an internal recruitment role at Hays opened up, and she reasoned that if she loved the job herself, she could probably sell it to other people too. That move became the foundation of everything since. She was then headhunted into a business opening locations in the US, joining when headcount was in the early 20s and leaving three years later with the company at roughly 100. Her own summary of the decade is characteristically brisk: she fell into recruitment, and then realised she did not want to leave it.

The Rollercoaster Test

Artificial intelligence, in Kerridge's description, feels like the moment before the rollercoaster leaves the platform: enormous excitement layered with a flicker of nerves. Is it going to take my job, or is it going to help me do it? She thinks both instincts are honest, and she refuses to pretend the second one does not exist.

Her own position is firmly pro-AI, and she makes the obvious point: her company specialises in emerging technology, so being afraid of it would make this the wrong place to work. It is what the business sells and what everyone raves about daily. In her own workflow, AI has been most valuable at freeing up time on administrative tasks. The team uses note-takers, though Kerridge remains a type-as-you-go person, unwilling to rely solely on a tool in case it fails once and leaves her with a half-hour conversation and nothing to show for it.

It earns its keep in the harder craft of hiring. When a hiring manager knows exactly what they want but the qualities are not tangible, when they describe a trait and leave the recruiter wondering what to ask in order to see it in someone's working life, AI becomes a thinking partner for phrasing and questioning. She applies the same logic outside work. After buying a new car recently, she listened to the garage owner explain things she did not follow, then had AI translate it into the simplest possible terms so she could negotiate as an equal.

On one point she holds firm. Kerridge would not personally use AI to screen candidates, particularly when hiring graduates, because the things that determine fit are rarely on the CV. It is the reading between the lines, the characteristics and traits, the sports and the extracurriculars, and she suspects the technology has not yet developed the maturity for the emotional dimension of that judgement. Her caveat comes with no hedging on the bigger picture: everyone will have to learn to embrace it, or risk being left behind.

Stop Hiring Mirrors

Heading into 2027, Kerridge's counsel to other talent leaders is aimed squarely at businesses planning to expand: widen the aperture on who gets through the door. The temptation, she says, is to hire a mirror of yourself or a copy of whoever has been successful before, and it is a habit she has had to push back on continuously across her years in recruitment. She has heard the objection countless times, that a candidate reminds someone of a person who did not work out, and her response is unsentimental. They are not the same person. They do not know each other. There is no correlation between those two things.

The case she makes is commercial rather than decorative. Open-mindedness and a genuinely diversified talent pool are, in her view, where exciting new ideas come from, and therefore where competitive advantage lives for any business trying to keep pace with the top firms and consultancies. One hundred copies of the same person will not get anyone there. One hundred very different people might.

Fitting advice from someone who learned the trade by absorbing a series of managers who bore little resemblance to one another.