Kelly McKenna

A Coordinator Role, and a Misconception Corrected

Kelly'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 Manager before joining OpenTable. Throughout her time at Ocado, she worked closely with hiring managers who taught her what engineering actually is and what the qualities of a strong engineering candidate look like. They modelled partnership, coming to her for advice and asking her opinion on how to grow teams. Together with one of those managers she built an entire team in the space of a few months, and the experience is a large part of why recruitment stuck.

AI as a Teacher, Not a Threat

Because she has worked in technology for her entire career, Kelly 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. Kelly practises what she prescribes. She credits members of her professional community who turn up, meet people, learn the best approaches and take part in the in-house recruitment and talent meetups that hold a local community together. From them, she says, she learned a great deal about what a good recruiter actually looks like.