Hannah Vincent

A History Degree, A Crash, And An Inbox Full Of Recruiters

The plan was law. Hannah read history at university with a legal career firmly in mind, then graduated in 2011 into a market where the intakes had all but vanished in the wake of the financial crash. The only people responding to the CV she had posted on Monster were recruiters.

Her first attempt at the industry lasted a week, in a high street accounting firm, in an environment that did not match her values. She walked back out and told herself she would never take a recruiter's call again. Then an executive search firm rang with a different pitch: we work differently, come and talk to us. Against her instincts, she took the meeting, and the fit was immediate. The firm had a genuine training programme and invested in her as a person rather than a headcount, and the acceleration was steep. It was there that she fell for technology as a market, for the craft of talking to candidates and for the puzzle of understanding what a client actually needs. She assumed she would never do anything else.

The People Who Set The Bar

Hannah traces her standards to a client rather than a boss. Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines was one of her earliest accounts, a business that staffs racing teams and exists to win. That culture came through in the way they recruited, and it gave her the cleanest example she has ever seen of what an A player is worth to an organisation.

Her first managing director shaped the rest. He invested in the training and, just as importantly, in the exposure, bringing her to meetings she had no operational reason to attend. She was given a seat at the table before she had earned it on paper, and she has never forgotten what that access did for her judgement. That education deepened at BGL Group, the group of businesses behind Compare the Market, where she sat in board meetings as an observer while senior leaders worked through real commercial problems. Watching a business diagnose its own challenges, then translate them into hires, gave her a visibility she still describes as astonishing.

Two founders bookend the story. Chris brought her into Zeren as a startup, where the two of them built an executive search sub brand from nothing. James Mitra, who founded JBM, has been in the same ecosystem as Hannah for eight years, since her Zeren days, which makes the current partnership less a new job than a long conversation finally taking commercial form. Asked who else in the market deserves recognition, she named Tamina Becker at Blue Light Card without hesitation.

From The Whiteboard To Sixty People

The Zeren years are the ones she talks about with the most obvious affection. It began with a brand that had not yet identified its place to play, a whiteboard, and the first mandate written on it. It ended with a business that peaked at sixty people, with Hannah moving from recruiter to operations director and building the workflows that held teams together across the United States and Europe. Building something rather than simply filling roles made her feel like she was on the client side again.

When the market contracted after 2022 and 2023 and venture funding tightened, she went out on her own, deliberately narrowing her focus to the clients and mandates that mattered to her. She built a climate tech and tech for good practice, and she enjoyed the freedom to be a little maverick on fees and commercials so that earlier stage startups, the kind that could not realistically transact with a traditional agency, could work with her anyway. It was, in her words, super motivating.

Fully AI Stacked, And Honest About The Slop

Hannah recently texted Chris to ask where they would be now with Claude, given how much of her old operations role was spent hand building reports. The answer, she says, is that it has changed everything. At JBM, the team of ten is completely AI stacked, and not in the shallow sense of switching on whatever features arrive inside an applicant tracking system or Google. They have built their own workflows in Claude, their own artifacts, their own automations, and connected the pieces together. MetaView handles a large share of the sourcing and note taking layer. The result, as she puts it, is a firm that can move at the pace and the scale of a business probably three times its size.

She is equally direct about the cost. Candidate outreach now arrives via improvised CRMs and generated email systems, sometimes with the prompt still sitting visibly at the top of the message. There is more noise in the market than there has ever been. Hannah long considered LinkedIn's easy apply button the worst product feature ever launched; generative tools, she says, have multiplied that slop by a hundred. Her conclusion is not anti technology but behavioural: good habits get amplified and bad ones get amplified faster, and an amplified bad habit is a poor experience for everyone on the receiving end.

The Case For Protected Time

Her advice to other talent leaders comes with an admission attached. It took a holiday, and the space that came with it, before she could properly work out what good looked like for herself, her team and their output. The lesson she drew is procedural rather than inspirational: block time in the week that is not recruiting activity, not hiring manager updates, not business updates. Stop the busy work. Use the gap to be purposeful about which automations and processes will actually move the business forward, because that work does not happen without deliberate thought.

She is sympathetic to leaders who feel behind. Everyone is being sold to heavily on new tools, and the sensation of standing still while the rest of the market leaps forward is a difficult one to sit with. Her counter is that the diagnostics still have to be done. Pause, work out what genuinely fits your business, then implement, and by 2027 the impact is amplified rather than merely busy.