Julia Days

A First-Generation In-House Leader

Days is candid that almost nobody of her professional vintage set out to build a career in recruitment. "I don't think anybody of my kind of age made an intentional decision to end up in recruitment," she says. Her own entry point was a good one: she had a positive experience as a candidate with a recruitment agent, and that encounter pulled her into agency work. What moved her out of it was something more particular. Like many of her contemporaries, she wanted a deeper sense of belonging and worth inside an organisation rather than alongside it.

The transition came through a client of her own, in the early years of what she calls first generation in-house recruitment. She has stayed on that side of the table ever since. It is an unglamorous origin story that turns out to explain a great deal about how she operates: she has seen the discipline evolve from a cost line item into a strategic capability, and she has been in the room for every argument along the way.

Reading the AI Landscape Without Being Dazzled

Ask Days how the recruiting landscape has shifted with the arrival of AI and she rejects the premise of gradualism. This is not an evolution, she argues, it is a constant shift, moving daily. On any given day, TA leaders do not reliably know what products exist, what value those products can actually deliver, or which vendors can be trusted.

Her diagnosis of why that is so destabilising is unusually clear-eyed about her own profession. Talent acquisition is, without question or debate in her view, the most technically advanced support function in most organisations. TA has always pushed for substantial systems and for the evolution of those systems. But being an early adopter is not the same as being a technical expert, and she holds her hands up on that point rather than posturing. Leaders are now being asked questions about something that is not yet within their grasp, or within most people's grasp.

The consequence is an asymmetry she describes in stark terms. In large enterprise, TA knows it is going into battle with AI on the candidate side of the process, yet it is not armed for that war: procurement, infosec and general red tape make it impossible to execute solutions at pace. Meanwhile the vendor market behaves, in her memorable image, like a giant game of Pac-Man, with larger organisations swallowing up the small startups that cannot financially survive the lengthy and intrusive procurement processes of the big buyers. Her prediction is blunt. The big guys are going to win. They will buy the capability of AI and attach it to their products. Whether that delivers best in market, and whether it keeps TA leading in the AI space, she genuinely does not know. She finds it a compelling story to watch unfold and, at times, a distressing one, given how many ambitious startups enter a market that is not yet ready or able to support them on cash flow.

Advice: Start With the Problem, Then Look at Who You Are Buying From

Days declines the guru label. What she offers instead is discipline. Keep abreast of the tech and the solutions it claims to offer, yes, but keep your problem statements front of mind. "There's a lot of very impressive pieces of technology out there that aren't necessarily solving a problem that we need solving," she says. Honour the problem as you go out into the market, or the proof of concept will fall on its backside. It is very easy to be dazzled.

Her second warning is about counterparty risk, a phrase most talent leaders have never had to think about. If you are moving away from your core tech stack to add AI native products, understand not just what you are buying but who you are buying it from. A leading edge product purchased from a small startup is a very different proposition a few months after that startup has been acquired by a larger player who might mothball it or rewrite its roadmap to suit a different strategy. Leaders are being asked to make decisions on what is in front of them while knowing the likelihood is that it will change. "We're having to take quite a lot of risks," she says, which from Days reads less as a complaint than as an honest accounting of the job.

Paying It Forward

Asked to point the spotlight elsewhere, Days named three peers she admires deeply within the talent acquisition community, each of whom exemplifies a different dimension of what excellent TA leadership can look like. It is a small gesture that says something larger about how Days has built a career. The collective that saved her in the hard years is the same collective she keeps feeding. In a discipline still figuring out what it will become in the age of AI, she treats generosity as infrastructure.

It is a small gesture that says something larger about how Days has built a career. The collective that saved her bacon in the hard years is the same collective she keeps feeding. In a discipline still figuring out what it will become in the age of AI, she treats generosity as infrastructure.