Jen Hulme

Thirteen Years, and the Reason She Stayed

Hulme is refreshingly unromantic about how she began. Agency recruitment, she points out, pays quickly and pays well, and at 21 that was reason enough to try it while she worked out what she wanted to do with her life. Thirteen years later she is still here, which tells you the plan changed.

What changed it was the people. "I like people. I like hearing people's stories," she says, and then names the part of the work that turned a job into a vocation: the satisfaction and pride that comes from changing somebody's life. She frames it in practical terms rather than sentimental ones. Someone in the wrong career, on the wrong path, does not usually need reinvention. They need a bit of guidance and the knowledge that a particular role exists. "Sometimes a bit of guidance, finding out about a role, can really change how somebody sees their life." That conviction, that a single well-placed conversation can reset a person's trajectory, is the through line of everything she has built since.

The People Around You Are the Job

Ask Hulme who has shaped her and she resists the single-mentor narrative. Her answer is structural: it matters enormously who you surround yourself with, and she has been deliberate about it. Over the years she has assembled a network of peers across the talent acquisition space that functions as a sounding board, a pressure valve and, increasingly, a friendship group. Ideas get tested there. Frustrations get aired there. Several of those relationships have outlasted the jobs that created them.

She is equally deliberate about managers, and genuinely puzzled that most candidates are not. Outside of talent acquisition, she observes, people routinely accept offers without ever asking the most consequential question available to them. "People don't ask, 'Who's my boss? What's my boss like?' When that's such a big shape of your life." Hulme has been fortunate in her own reporting lines, and she treats that fortune as evidence rather than luck: choosing the right boss is a skill, and it is one candidates should be exercising in every interview process.

She is generous about her contemporaries too, singling out talent professionals she rates highly, among them Dom Joyce, talent acquisition lead at Weir Group, and Mark Kunaseelan, head of resourcing at UAL.

The Market Has Not Just Got Harder. It Has Got Meaner.

Hulme's read on AI in hiring is more nuanced than the usual binary. She has no objection to candidates using the technology. She objects to how it is being used. There is a right way and a wrong way, and the wrong way, in her assessment, is spraying an untailored CV across hundreds of postings and losing all ability to keep track of where it went. The candidate gets no tailoring, no real chance at the role, and an avalanche of rejections. The recruiter, already overwhelmed and overworked, gets a queue that no human can process fairly.

The second-order effect is what troubles her most. The relationship between the two sides has curdled. "It's almost becoming, like, recruiter versus candidate," she says. "They're annoyed. We're overworked." And because recruiters are, in her experience, largely empathetic people, the stress does not stay on one side of the table. If candidates are stressed, recruiters absorb it. The result is not merely a tough job market but a negative one, with burnout on both sides and a public perception of the profession that has deteriorated sharply in the space of a year or two.

Hulme does not shrug at this. She names it as the defining problem of the moment, and she has organised her own practice around answering it rather than complaining about it.

Advice Worth Following: Lead for Social Impact

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders, Hulme notes that her answer would have been entirely different two years ago. It is different now because the stakes are.

Her counsel is that seniority in talent acquisition is a position of genuine social responsibility. Leaders sit at the intersection of two vulnerable populations, the candidates trying to find work in a market stacked against them and the teams processing the resulting volume, and both are being worn down. On the candidate side, she argues for flooding the zone with good information. Bad advice and outright negativity travel fast on social platforms, and she believes practitioners have an obligation to help drown it out, which is precisely why her own CV and interview guidance is given away rather than sold.

On the team side, the obligation is closer to home. "If our team are suffering, if our team are getting burnt out because of this environment, how can we best help them?" she asks. Her prescription is unglamorous and hard to fake: put well-being and social impact at the centre of how the function is run, and treat both as leadership deliverables rather than afterthoughts.

It is a long way from the 21-year-old who took a recruitment job for the money while she figured out her life. Thirteen years on, Hulme has arrived somewhere more interesting: a practitioner who understands the commercial machinery of hiring completely, and who has decided that understanding it confers a duty to make it kinder.