Ian Stammers

An Academy Day in Westminster

Nobody, as Stammers puts it, leaves school announcing they want to work in TA. His own entry point was an academy day at Capita in Westminster, London, in 1999. Thirty candidates in a room; roughly ten of them, the company said, would come through as recruiters. Stammers was one. A six week training course followed, designed to embed every element of recruitment, and it laid the foundation for a career that has since spanned agency and in house work, the Middle East and Europe, and hiring across the world.

The technology has changed beyond recognition, and he is glad of it. What has not changed is the relationship building. Over 25 years he has built what he describes as dozens and dozens and dozens of relationships across the profession, from CTOs to CFOs, and it is the accumulation of those relationships, rather than any single placement, that he counts as the real asset of a long career in this field.

Automation at Scale, Judgment Left Human

Serco had put real money behind its conviction about technology, rolling out an AI driven CRM system sourced from the United States across a global TA function of roughly 150 to 160 people, some 60 to 70 of them in the US. From where Stammers sat, the results were striking. The platform automates scheduling, automates sourcing, and scores candidates. His team still oversaw the output, but the administrative floor of the job had largely dropped away.

What matters to him is what fills the space that opens up. Freed from transactional work, his recruiters spent their time with hiring managers, lifting net promoter scores inside the business and deepening relationships with customers. In a business to government organisation selling into space agencies, that commercial fluency compounds. A recruiter who understands the contract understands the hire.

He is clear eyed about the trade off. The state of LinkedIn today occasionally unsettles him, and he is blunt about the limits of automation in a people business. "No one likes talking to bots anymore," he says. "So we've got to keep that human touch." Technology earns its place by removing friction, never by removing the person.

The Heart of the Business

Stammers had also been building the connective tissue between TA and the wider organisation. He recently rolled out a TA playbook, effectively a cheat sheet for hiring managers, to create consistency across the group in how assessment happens and how processes are followed. It is global governance in usable form: one standard, available to everyone who hires.

His advice to other talent leaders heading further into 2026 starts with a warning and ends with an instruction. The warning is simple. If you do not move with technology you will be left behind, in this industry as in any other. The instruction is about ambition. Too much of TA remains transactional, fixed on filling the vacancy in front of it, when the leader's job is to understand the business as deeply as the stakeholders do: what the organisation wants to achieve this year, which direction it is heading, and how the team gets it there.

That understanding, he insists, has to be volunteered rather than requested. "Don't wait for your stakeholders to come to you and say, how can you help? They're not going to do that." Go to them instead. Bring the attrition problem, the sourcing idea, the process improvement, and bring a recommendation with it.

He is also candid that recognition rarely follows. When the year's wins are celebrated, the credit tends to land with the bid team and the sales team. But someone found the people who delivered that work, often sourced out of competitors in a space sector he describes as fiercely competitive, and that someone was TA. "You're never going to be in the spotlight," he says, "but if you understand how important you are to the business, then that's key." In his own reckoning, the function he has spent 25 years in is not a support service at all. It is the heart of the business.