Holly Lithgow

A Stopgap That Became A Decade

The entry point was a friend of a friend. Holly was moving back to Edinburgh, where she is still based, and an introduction led her to the person who would become her first boss in executive search. She assumed she would do the work for a while and then go and find something more permanent.

She never left. The appeal was the sheer variety of people the job put in front of her, which remains, by her own description, a huge chunk of what she does. Search turned out to suit someone who genuinely enjoys the company of interesting people and is curious about what they do with their working lives.

The UK team she joined was tiny, a handful of people operating in something close to startup mode. That meant proximity to every part of the business rather than a narrow slot inside it, and it set a pattern that has held: Holly has spent her career close to the work and close to the people doing it.

The Boutique That Kept Its Values

Holly joined Society in 2023, a boutique firm Simon Lucas founded 16 years ago on a small seed investment and a clear premise. It was built to champion equality and diversity and to work with socially conscious clients: education providers, charities, not-for-profits. As it grew, Holly says, it stayed unusually faithful to that founding vision, which is not the standard trajectory for a search business scaling over a decade and a half.

Earlier this year Society was acquired by Norman Broadbent, the firm led by chief executive Kevin Davidson. Holly and her colleagues now form the civil society team inside a much larger business, a change she describes not as a dilution but as a chance to refocus on the same sectors with more behind them. The mission stayed put. The platform got bigger.

She is now Associate Director in the Civil Society, Education and Public Sector Practice, still working out of Edinburgh, still pointed at the client base she has spent years learning.

The Mentors Who Set The Standard

Holly is precise about what she learned and from whom. Her first boss in executive search mentored her through the early years and, as she puts it, shepherded her along while the business grew around them both. The professional lessons mattered. The personal example mattered more. As a younger woman at the start of her career, Holly found it genuinely instructive to watch someone more senior forge a path that balanced serious professional ambition with family life, and to see that the two were not mutually exclusive. The two remain in touch.

Simon Lucas, her current manager and now also part of Norman Broadbent, taught a different lesson: that a firm can grow without trading away the reason it was founded. Holly describes him as passionate about search and about the sectors the team serves, deeply networked, and reliably in possession of an interesting story. Working alongside him, she says, has been as much an education in conviction as in method.

Making AI Work For The Work

On artificial intelligence, Holly is unbothered by the panic and impatient with the paralysis. A good deal of the alarm, she believes, is unnecessary. AI is already changing how search firms operate, and that does not have to be a negative, but it does require deliberate attention rather than either dread or denial. The question she prefers is how the profession makes the technology work for it, not whether it will take the work away.

In practice, that means tools already embedded in the day: AI note takers, scanners that check adverts for bias, and a set of research processes the team is examining for AI implementation. That last piece has not been actioned yet, though Holly expects it will be at some point.

She is candid about the cost side of the ledger too. Over the past year the team has seen an explosion of AI-generated applications, a significant uptick in volume paired with what she reads as a downtrend in quality. The result is more time spent working through submissions to surface the genuinely interesting people. Her conclusion is a matter of balance: implement it creatively and responsibly, because ignoring it is not an option. It is not going anywhere.

Advice For The New Year

For talent leaders heading into the new year, Holly does not reach for a tactic. She names instead a trend that has genuinely saddened her: a stepping back from, in some cases an abandonment of, the equality and diversity principles the sector was leaning into only a few years ago.

Her advice follows directly from that. Do not abandon your principles because of current political trends or the prevailing social commentary. Remain true to your values. Think hard about the clients you choose to work with and whether they reflect those values. Then look for the small, daily changes that add up.

The reasoning is grounded rather than abstract. Recruiting is the business of people, and Holly is clear-eyed about how much weight that carries. The profession can make a considerable impact on individual lives, in either direction. Her position is that practitioners should be honest about that power and use it deliberately, aiming at the micro changes that help the industry trend, as she puts it, in a positive direction as a society.