Josh Procter

“If you want to play in the big leagues and work in global companies, you need to be able to tell the story, present and use data.”

On his first day at HSBC, Josh Procter was introduced to the head of HR for the bank's digital team, a six-foot-six South African in his fifties, who dropped to his knees as if in prayer and announced that, at last, they had somebody. Within a few months that same leader would hand down a far tougher verdict, and the lesson Josh drew from the distance between those two moments now shapes how he leads hiring for Amazon Web Services across Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China from his base in Singapore.

At the end of 2025, Josh was promoted from International Talent Acquisition Leader to APJC Head of Talent Acquisition. The role draws on the instinct for relationships that carried him through seven years of agency recruitment and into rooms full of managing directors and senior VPs at Barclays. It also draws on a discipline he learned the hard way at HSBC: back every argument with data, because at global scale, nothing else brings decision-makers to the table.

Josh never went to university. After his A-levels he weighed a career in law and completed work experience at a law firm, but the math gave him pause: roughly eight years of serious debt before he would earn anything. He headed instead to Canary Wharf with plans to become a trader, joining a trading company for his first job.

About nine months in, the firm was shut down by the FSA, the UK's financial regulator, and every employee was let go. It had been his first role, and he had no point of comparison. The association made other employers keep their distance for about six months, an early lesson in how much reputation and context matter in a career.

The turn came from a recruitment firm founder who had spotted his CV and checked in every month for roughly nine months before Josh agreed to meet him. The two hit it off, and the pitch was simple: this was not trading, but it drew on the same soft skills. Instead of financial derivatives, Josh would be matching people with opportunities, and if it did not suit him, there would be no hard feelings. He gave it a go, started to succeed, and stayed for seven years. Because the founder ran his own business, he handled everything from client engagement to running the desk to billing, and Josh learned a great deal from seeing the whole operation up close.

The move in-house took Josh to Barclays, where he helped build out the bank's digital banking platform. Instead of rotating across 10 to 15 clients and seeing only a slice of each one's hiring, he finally had the open book: the full end-to-end remit, with managing directors and senior VPs as his stakeholders. Working with bankers who had 20-plus years of experience taught him how to present and represent himself at that level, though the job still leaned mostly on the core skills he already had.

HSBC raised the stakes, putting Josh in the same role on a global basis as the bank built out its entire global banking platform. That first-day welcome soon met a sharper test. A few months in, he put forward a proposal without the depth of data and detail that senior HR leaders at a global bank expected, and the leader who had greeted him so warmly made his displeasure clear. Josh sums it up as going from hero to zero in about three months.

He spent the next three to six months working closely with that same leader on the global rollout and came away with a principle that has guided him since. Delivering and communicating well will carry you only so far. To win people over beyond a company of a couple of thousand, you have to tell a data-driven story that brings decision-makers to the table and helps them see the pitfalls. Amazon, he says, supercharged that lesson.

Josh is firm that AI will not replace recruiters. He does not foresee a world where people facing a life-changing decision deal only with a chatbot. The heart of the work is trust: knowing what a candidate or stakeholder is looking for, matching requirements, navigating ambiguity and handling the emotion that comes with big decisions.

His message to teams and customers is to use AI to give themselves time back. Hand off the mundane work, free up capacity, and spend it looking around corners at the technology and the market, and with candidates and customers. He describes this as keeping a human in the loop, with a person making the decision at every gate. Recruiters, he notes, mostly want to speak with candidates and close offers, and AI can clear the way for exactly that.

He also sees AI making those conversations smarter: a shortlist already assembled, interview notes pulled together, and guidance on how to sell against Google or Microsoft. The result is a recruiter who is more informed and data-driven while still spending time with people. Amazon has built its own in-house recruiting tool, and Josh believes the only way forward is to lean in, because without people using the technology across a variety of use cases, it will never get better.

Josh's counsel for talent leaders is to keep piloting and keep thinking big. The leap in what AI can do in just six months has been striking, and he expects that pace to continue. Companies sit at different stages of maturity and risk appetite with technology, so his advice applies broadly: start small, but dream big.

In practice, that means aiming far higher than automating a single email. Josh wants leaders to ask how technology could free up half of their day, or even half of their month, so they can finally spend time on the exciting work they never got round to.