James Kennedy

A Conversation After Graduation

Kennedy first heard the words "recruitment consultant" at university, from a friend a year or two ahead of him who had graduated into the agency world. The pitch was simple: if you are not sure what path you want when you leave, this is worth a look. It stuck. On graduating in 2008, Kennedy got in touch with a rec-to-rec firm in London, was sent packing to a run of interviews across a range of agencies, and came away with offers from several of them.

He chose a large agency specialising predominantly in contract and interim hiring, and started a couple of weeks after graduating. That first foray lasted a number of years and set the shape of everything that followed: agency first, then the RPO arena, and for the past several years the in-house talent acquisition world. It is a route that has given him an unusually complete view of the market, having sat on the supplier side, the outsourced-partner side and the client side of the same transaction.

The RPO chapter was the longest single stretch of his career. Kennedy spent just under eight years with a global RPO business, and it was there that he moved from practitioner to leader, taking on progressively larger teams and wider remits. His in-house work has since taken him inside some of the most demanding hiring environments in technology, including AWS, and now Palo Alto Networks, where he leads recruiters through a period of both platform change and genuine technological upheaval.

Three Leaders, Three Lessons

Kennedy is emphatic that he has been fortunate in his managers, and equally emphatic that narrowing the list to three does an injustice to about thirty-nine others. The three he does name, he names precisely.

Ross Crook, his boss for roughly six of his eight years in the RPO business, was the first person to promote him into a management position. Crook has spent well over a couple of decades in the talent acquisition space, and it was his coaching, mentoring and steady willingness to hand over responsibility that took Kennedy from individual contributor to leader of significant teams. The lesson there was about opportunity: someone has to bet on you before you have the track record.

Cath Possamai, now a senior talent acquisition leader at Amazon, has been in Kennedy's orbit twice. He first encountered her as his skip-level manager while working in-house in 2011, and describes her even then as hugely influential and productively disruptive. She went on to serve as chief recruiting officer for the British Army before joining Amazon, where she runs an enormous international talent acquisition organisation. In recent years she has given Kennedy mentorship and perspective, widening his view of global talent challenges at a scale few practitioners ever see. "She's one of the most authentic, down to earth, clear leaders that I've ever met," he says. "An industry heavyweight."

The third is Nicole, a Director of Talent Acquisition at AWS and a former manager of his over a number of years. Kennedy joined AWS in large part because of her. What impressed him was the range: a leader who could be in the trenches interrogating data points and specifics one minute and lift the conversation to global, future-facing strategy the next. Her career has run through organisations including Salesforce before AWS, with her scope expanding, by his account, almost every single year. "I've never really met such a senior leader with such a great eye for detail," he says, pairing that meticulousness with what he calls a real strategic mindset and a gift for building and developing teams.

He adds a fourth name as an industry peer rather than a boss: Mike Clements of Nvidia, with whom he worked in the RPO world. Clements has led international recruitment functions on both the RPO and in-house sides, and Kennedy rates him as practical, analytical, hard-working and, by consistent report from those who have worked for him, a genuinely good leader to have.

From Micro Gains to Macro Impact

Kennedy's view of AI in talent acquisition is neither evangelical nor dismissive. He accepts that it is a buzzword topic, surfacing in virtually every round table and external conversation he has, and he speaks about it often. What has changed in the past twelve months, in his experience, is that practical application has started to catch up with rhetoric.

The micro benefits, he argues, have been available for years: using a tool to help write a project plan, build employer brand collateral, or shave time off low-level tasks across a week. Useful, but largely invisible on a company's top or bottom line. His own team has pushed that layer as far as it will go, building notebooks so that recruiters can self-serve answers on the current ATS implementation rather than hunting through a hundred different documents or waiting on a colleague. The knowledge exists; the notebook makes it interrogable.

The macro shift is what interests him now. Palo Alto Networks recently implemented HiredScore, and Kennedy is candid that adoption is at an early stage while also clear about the direction of travel. It is already saving recruiters time day to day by helping them zone in on the candidates best suited to a role. That produces a better candidate experience, gets the business to the right talent faster, and means that those who are not taken forward receive a quicker outcome too. Multiply that across a global business making thousands of hires a year, he notes, and micro transactions become macro gains: better experience, right talent, faster.

Learn by Doing

His advice to other talent leaders is unglamorous and hard-won. Do not simply hand your team a new tool and instruct them to use it. Use it yourself first. Kennedy is upfront that he is no expert in AI; what he claims instead is a learner mindset, something he credits to his years at Amazon and AWS, where curiosity and being willing to be bad at something for a while are treated as professional virtues rather than weaknesses.

So when he asks recruiters on his team to experiment with a product touching the sourcing stage of the life cycle, an area he sees as unusually ripe for transformation, he has been in the tool himself. "Learn by doing," he says. "Experiment, run pilots, run A/B tests, figure out what suits your business." He pairs that with a critical lens, noting bluntly that there are a lot of good sales pitches in the market, and that a product excellent for an enterprise may be wrong for a scale-up or a startup. Get your hands dirty, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and keep re-testing, because the tooling that disappointed you a month ago is not the tooling you would evaluate today.

It is a philosophy that echoes his own entry into the profession: no grand plan, a willingness to take the conversation, and then the discipline to make something durable out of it. Seventeen years on from that first agency job a fortnight after graduation, Kennedy is one of the practitioners the industry now asks what is actually working.