Kanwar Kohli

The Poach That Started It

"I definitely didn't grow up as a kid dreaming about being a recruiter, a sourcer or a talent leader," he says, "but it's something I've grown to love." He had left Canada for the UK on a plan that was supposed to last a year. The year turned into a career.

The sequence was almost casual. A graduate scheme. A call center. A hand raised to help with hiring. Then the recruiters on the other side of the table making him an offer of their own. "It was just by chance that I enjoyed doing the work, and the work seemed to come naturally to me," he says. He left the call center for agency recruiting, then moved into recruitment process outsourcing, the stretch of his career he still returns to when he thinks about who taught him what.

The formative chapter was at Allegis Group, where an RPO operation was being built in the UK from scratch. He was hired into it by a leader whose lesson has outlasted every job title he has held since.

The Three Teachers

That leader was Jade Clifford, and in one of the pleasing symmetries of a long career she is now a colleague again at Booking.com, having joined at roughly the same time he did. Their paths have crossed several times. What she gave him has stayed for more than a decade. "Being right isn't the only important thing about leading," Kohli says. What matters is staying open to different perspectives, understanding what clients and teams actually need, and remembering why anyone chooses this field in the first place. "We work in talent acquisition because we like people and we like working with people." Clifford, he says, kept him grounded in exactly that: the people they were working with and the people they were working for. Everything else was secondary.

Then there is Jason Devlin, a former peer at Booking.com who now leads executive sourcing at Deloitte, and whom Kohli calls one of the strongest technically minded sourcing leaders he has ever met. Devlin is a player coach by choice, hands on the tools as much as he is in the strategy work, and watching him operate reframed what seniority is supposed to look like. "All that strategy means nothing if you still can't have a conversation with a recruiter or a sourcer on how to implement a sourcing strategy, how to go find a candidate, how to engage with a candidate," Kohli says. That, he adds, is the work, and the rewarding part of it. Leaders who lose the ability to do it become dangerously disconnected from the reality their own teams live in.

His third answer is the one most talent leaders never give. Rather than name another recruiter, Kohli credits the business leaders he has worked with, particularly at Booking.com, who understand without being told that talent acquisition is hard and underappreciated. "It's not a simple numbers game. It's not transactional," he says. Most executives do not see that. The handful who do, who grasp the nuance of attracting the right people, keeping the bar high and assessing the right skills, and who appreciate the volume of work behind a single hire, have shaped how he looks at the function as much as any recruiting mentor. Business leaders at Booking.com, he says, have been excellent in that respect.

AI as Amplifier, Not Silver Bullet

The last year and a half has been a roller coaster in every industry, Kohli says, as AI moved fast and organizations everywhere raced to fold it into their workflows. His own team is no exception, and he has been quietly stress testing what it can actually do. He is refreshingly unwilling to oversell the results. The genuine wins so far have been unglamorous: interview scheduling, transcription and summarization, automated notes that free recruiters from relying on whatever they managed to scribble down. Each of those returns time to the part of the job humans do best, which is engaging with candidates, understanding hiring needs, matching people to roles and having real conversations. "When you're spending a lot of time on manual admin," he says, "you have less time to do the really valuable stuff."

The louder promises get a more skeptical hearing. Automated outreach, auto generated sourcing strategies, agents handling inbound candidates right up to the point where a person needs to step in: all of it, he says, "sounds great on paper." What he has not yet seen is proof at his scale, and his definition of scale is specific. "I'm talking about thousands of hires a year. I don't know if we've seen the impact there yet to say this is the silver bullet that's going to change how we work."

He is not a doubter, though. He is a believer waiting for evidence. There will be a massive change to how the industry works over the next few years, he says, and there will eventually be a silver bullet. "We've seen lots of glimmers of things that are close." When one of them demonstrates real impact at the thousands of hires level, the entire industry will shift, because it will have no choice. He intends to be standing at the front of it rather than reacting to it. "I want to be at the edge of this," he says, "because it's going to change how we operate, whether we like it or not."

Who Gets Left Behind, and His Advice for Everyone Else

His guidance to peers is compact: treat AI as an amplifier, not a replacement. Work out what your team already does well, locate where the real value sits today, then use automation and technology to do that faster and at a scale no individual or team could reach manually. "Make it a force multiplier for you," he says.

He is equally direct about the consequences of ignoring that advice. Excellent sourcers will become even more excellent with these tools in their hands. Recruiters who were never strong sourcers, he believes, will be found out. Those who lean in and keep honing the craft, who learn to find the best candidates rather than simply the first candidates on the market, will still be here. Those who worked transactionally will drift toward HR, sales or elsewhere, and the profession itself will likely be smaller in five years. Kohli does not deliver this as a warning so much as a planning assumption. "As talent leaders, I think we need to get behind that, understand that, and start to shape what our teams look like around it, as opposed to reacting to it when it happens to us."

There is one more cause he presses, quietly and consistently: sourcing leaders remain underrepresented in talent acquisition leadership. It is the discipline he came from, and although he now oversees the whole function, he still argues for the people doing the hardest and least visible part of the work.