Jon Townley

Crossing the Fence

Agency work, and then the business he built himself, taught Townley how recruitment looks from the supplier's chair. A requirement arrives. A person is found. The transaction closes. What he began to notice was the ceiling on it. Providing a recruitment service meant providing the individual, one at a time, always at arm's length from the organisation that would live with the result. Working in-house offered something else entirely: the ability to support the business itself and to work for it rather than merely for its vacancies. Once he had seen that distinction clearly, he did not go back.

From there his career compounded. He worked for a number of organisations in the private and public sector, building experience as his role evolved and widened, and taking on key projects and key clients along the way. A stretch of contracting placed him alongside major government programmes, supporting internal teams almost as an embedded service. That vantage point, part practitioner and part partner, is unusual, and it shows in how he talks about the work. He rarely describes a single hire. He describes a process, a journey, an experience that runs from first application to onboarding and beyond.

His current chapter carries an additional discipline. Ofgem is a government organisation, and public sector life brings real care about how things are done and how they are communicated, everything checked against policy rather than assumed. Townley treats that as a feature of the job rather than a brake on it. Fairness, consistency and an open process are not abstractions in that environment. They are the deliverable.

AI on Both Sides of the Table

Townley splits the AI question in two, and the split is instructive. There is the candidate side, covering applications, experience and the journey a person travels through a hiring process. And there is the side facing inward, covering how talent teams use the technology to run their own work. Most commentary collapses the two. He refuses to.

On the candidate side his position is measured rather than anxious. Applicants have powerful tools now, and organisations do too, and the shared risk is dependence. "We have to be careful and manage how we use those tools moving forward and we don't become too reliant on those tools," he says. They exist to help everyone reach a point. What happens after that point is human. When a candidate finally sits down with a hiring team, he wants the individual themselves, their real skills and their real passions, coming through in the conversation rather than a polished proxy standing in for them.

Facing inward, he is a pragmatist and an enthusiast at once. The repetitive elements of talent acquisition, diary organisation and the administrative churn that consumes hours without producing insight, are precisely what automation should be absorbing. Sifting is the more demanding frontier, and here his questions are exact: how do we see the best candidates, and how do we make sure the assessment stays consistent across everyone who applies? As AI and the wider software market keep progressing, he sees genuine gains available on both counts, a more competitive and more engaging experience for candidates alongside a process that is demonstrably fair and open. For a leader inside a public body, those two goals are the same goal.

The Long View

What emerges across Townley's career is a consistent refusal to treat hiring as a series of discrete events. Every formative lesson he cites, from one leader's strategic reframing to his first managing director mapping out a business in front of him, points in the same direction: away from the single vacancy and toward the system that surrounds it. Roughly two decades on, with five of those years spent building talent capability inside a growing government organisation, that instinct has hardened into method.

His counsel to talent leaders heading further into 2026 follows naturally from it. Use the tools, and use them hard on the parts of the job that never deserved human attention in the first place. Then guard the parts that do. Keep the process consistent, keep it open, keep it fair, and protect the space where a person's skills and passions can actually be seen. Technology can carry the process. It cannot carry the judgement, and it cannot replace the partnership.