Kelly McKenna

A Coordinator Role, and a Misconception Corrected

McKenna's early career was in customer service, a stretch of roles that taught her how to handle people at volume. While working in Ocado's customer success and customer service function, she saw an internal opening for an HR and recruitment coordinator on the technology side of the business and thought, essentially, that HR sounded people-focused enough to suit her.

It turned out to be far more recruitment than HR. She had always assumed recruitment was sales, and sales was not where she saw herself. Instead she fell for it. She started by booking interviews and coordinating diaries, and used the vantage point to teach herself what the engineers around her actually did. "Fell in love with it, to be honest," she says. From coordination she moved up through the recruitment ranks at Ocado until she was a senior recruiter running her own team and owning her own patch, then moved to Retail Insight as Global Talent Partner.

The Three Who Shaped Her

Ask McKenna who built her and she names three people without hesitation. The first is Steve Rogers, the talent manager who hired her into the coordinator role and, in her telling, showed her what she was capable of in the best way possible. He refused to micromanage. His default answer was go and try it. That trust, offered to someone with no recruitment background at all, set the tone for everything after it.

The second is Dan Clark, a hiring manager who had previously worked for Formula 1 companies and who ran the robotics and bot building side of Ocado's technology. Clark taught her what engineering actually is and what the qualities of a strong engineering candidate look like. More than that, he modelled partnership. He came to her for advice, asked her opinion on how to grow a team, wanted her read on the market. "That to me is how a business grows at scale," she says. Together they built an entire team in the space of a few months, and the experience is a large part of why recruitment stuck.

The third is Emily Bowers, now a manager at Mars, whom McKenna describes as phenomenal and deliberately different in style from Steve Rogers, which is precisely why she learned so much from both. Bowers is data-driven, and in McKenna's assessment is second to none on people development and growth in the recruitment space. She now leads a large team of recruiters covering much of EMEA. McKenna nominates her at every opportunity, partly on merit and partly as a woman in tech backing another.

AI as a Teacher, Not a Threat

Because she has worked in technology for her entire career, McKenna watched the arrival of AI as a gradual slope rather than a cliff. Her first experiments were with ChatGPT when it was still new and slightly unnerving: testing images, throwing questions at it, hesitant about what to feed it. That hesitation is long gone. She now leans on AI every day, mostly for the admin-heavy end of the job that used to eat hours: writing a genuinely good advert, constructing Boolean searches for the technical niche roles she recruits into.

She is equally clear about the boundary. "You need human action within a people team," she says, and she does not expect that to change. AI does not yet read behaviour or body language. She is particularly alert to the risk in AI video screening tools, given that technology candidates skew introverted: her concern is that the software over-indexes on introversion and quietly filters out exactly the people a tech business needs. Transformation, in her view, is real and mostly positive, but it comes with caveats worth naming out loud.

There is a benefit she did not anticipate. Time for webinars and events is scarce, so AI has become a source of ideas she would not otherwise have encountered. She will read a suggestion, think that she never considered it, and implement it. "In terms of my learning and growing my skills, it's definitely stretching me," she says. A tool that was supposed to save her time has ended up developing her.

Fail Fast, and Stay Connected

Her advice to talent leaders heading into 2027 is direct: embrace the tech, do not hide from it, and stop defending old-school ways of working that will not survive the world now arriving. To anyone early in their career, she says the same thing in gentler terms. Grow with it. Try it.

The phrase she keeps coming back to is one she picked up at Ocado. Fail fast. She has embedded it into everything she does, and defines it plainly: try it, and if it does not work, that is fine, provided nobody is harmed and nothing is damaged. Grow with the tech, grow with the pace.

The second half of her advice is about people, not tools. She urges talent leaders to stay connected to what is happening across the industry, to watch what other companies are doing and what other recruiters are trying, because the richest feedback in this profession comes from practitioners keeping each other current.

The Glue in the Community

McKenna practises what she prescribes. She credits Pete Tam, now at Carafe, as the biggest advocate not only for her but for everyone in her circle over the past six or seven years. He turns up, meets people, learns the best approaches and takes part in the in-house recruitment and talent meetups that hold a local community together. "He's just been the glue for our community," she says, and she is unequivocal about the debt: without Pete, she does not think she would be where she is.

What she admires is character as much as contribution. He is steady in a crisis, understanding when you need him to be, excited when you need him to be. He has pushed her toward new platforms, including inviting her onto a podcast. From him, she says, she learned a great deal about what a good recruiter actually looks like.

It is a fitting final note for a career that began with someone taking a chance on a customer service professional with no recruitment experience. McKenna has spent the years since compounding that faith: into engineering fluency, into a decade of loyalty, into a global remit, and into a habit of naming, publicly and generously, everyone who helped her get there.