James Lambert
Engage to Succeed
“If you can't answer the why are we doing it question, there's no point doing it to start with, because it will fail.”
James Lambert has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is James's story.
A damaged ankle put James Lambert in a WHSmith with time to kill. It was the early 2000s, he was a sales rep who could no longer drive, and the magazine in his hands carried an advert from Michael Page promising career development, good money and a great working environment. He applied. He got it. That was 2003, and it made him one of the rare people who chose recruitment deliberately rather than stumbling into it. What followed was a career built on scale and autonomy: in-house teams stood up from scratch, a Global Director of Talent Acquisition role at Capita where the function hired roughly 27,000 people in a single year, and now Engage to Succeed, the talent wellbeing and engagement platform he founded and leads.
Lambert is candid that the ride has been choppy, as most long careers are. He is equally clear about what anchored it. The grounding and training he received at Michael Page taught him how to recruit properly, and he still credits that early apprenticeship with shaping how he reads a role, a market and a candidate more than twenty years on.
Autonomy as the Real Development Plan
The two leaders who left the deepest mark on Lambert did the same thing: they handed him the keys. The first was a talent leader he had known since his early agency days. After a redundancy, he called her simply to offer help with her own hiring. The conversation turned into his first in-house role, leading recruitment for BBA Aviation and ASIG after the business won the contract for Heathrow Terminal 2. The brief was enormous. Around 600 agents, customer service staff and baggage handlers had to be hired for a single go-live date, with the memory of British Airways' troubled Terminal 5 opening hanging over everyone involved.
He had never done anything like it. She trusted him anyway, giving him complete control over who he hired while the wider leadership team worked through union negotiations, policies and processes. He used that freedom to take chances on people whose profiles looked unconventional, and some of those hires are still in touch with him roughly sixteen years later. The second leader was his last boss in talent acquisition, at Capita, where Lambert was promoted within six weeks of joining, the fastest promotion of his career. The two moved up a level at the same time, and the working relationship that followed produced a completely restructured talent function, new technology, a refreshed EVP and that 27,000 hire year. What both leaders shared, in his telling, was a willingness to see him as a genuine expert and then get out of the way.
Betting on the Unpolished CV
One hire from the airport years has stayed with him as proof of the point. The CV was, by Lambert's own assessment, terrible, and he sat with the question of whether he could justify the decision at all. He made the hire. The man turned out to be outstanding.
Over the following twelve years or so, Lambert kept an eye out for openings in the businesses he joined and repeatedly created chances for him to step up, without ever asking him to simply follow along. That career has climbed steadily, and he is now a group head of talent at Endstar. Watching it unfold, Lambert says, has been phenomenal. It is a useful counterweight to an industry increasingly comfortable letting documents do the deciding.
From Screening Bots to Virtual Assessment
Lambert was automating parts of hiring before the language caught up with it. In 2019, working on the graduate programme at Vertiv, he implemented a chatbot to screen high volumes of applications against criteria such as location, skills and degree. It was not AI as anyone would define it now, but it was his first real insight that technology could drive the front end of hiring decisions. At Capita around 2022 he went further, implementing a full end to end virtual assessment process where candidates logged in and completed screening, situational questions and video elements without a scheduling bottleneck.
The current wave, he argues, has exploded in a genuinely useful direction. He points to the arithmetic that makes the case: a team wanting 100 hires in 100 days with a single recruiter simply cannot get there manually, because hiring the recruiters to hire the 100 people would consume the 100 days. But he is deliberate about the limits. Bias and training remain live risks, the right approach depends entirely on the job profile and its level, and no process should run end to end without people in it. Assessing cultural fit with an organisation still requires human interaction, and that conviction is exactly what led him to build a talent wellbeing and engagement platform after leaving Capita. Engage to Succeed uses AI itself, now running with support from his wife while Lambert explores a return to large scale corporate talent acquisition.
The Process Nobody Stress Tests
For all the technological change, Lambert believes the profession's biggest failure is unchanged: candidates ghosted, candidates given no feedback, candidates given nothing at all. His answer has always been operational rather than sentimental. Own the end to end process, then stress test it deliberately to find where people fall out of view.
The moment somebody gets left out is the moment a complaint arrives, and the brand damage that follows is disproportionate to the effort saved. It is a discipline he applied at scale, and one that becomes more important, not less, as more of the process is automated.
Advice for Talent Leaders
Heading into 2027, Lambert's counsel is to scale back before scaling up. The talent landscape, from recruitment to internal mobility to leadership development, is now saturated with tools that can perform almost any task, and the temptation to adopt the newest thing is strong. His discipline is to ask why first. Why are we doing this, what are we trying to solve, and what outcome do we expect? He has watched organisations drop shiny technology into a process without an answer, and those projects fail. Worse, without a stated why there is nothing to return to when the project drifts and everyone starts adding requirements.
The second question is commercial. What is the return on investment, and what return should be expected before the money is spent? It was a habit he built at Capita and one he considers non negotiable now. Leaders who cannot answer the why and the ROI together should expect to be challenged by the board or the CFO, and rightly so. His summary is blunt: do not jump on the bandwagon, go through the weeds, and find the tool that actually answers the question you started with.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than James. We are honored to welcome James Lambert to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, James. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.
