Leanne Hardman

A Law Degree, a Move to Kent, and a Second Look at Recruitment

Hardman studied law at university and finished with no fixed sense of what came next. She applied for graduate roles, initially staying close to the field she had trained in, and looked at recruitment jobs at the time without pursuing them. It took three or four years, and a relocation to Kent, where she is still based, before she circled back.

The prompt was self-knowledge rather than ambition. A previous role had carried people elements, and she recognised where her strengths actually sat: conversation, curiosity, relationships. "I'm a really nosy person," she says, and she means it as a professional asset. Finding out what people do, why they are looking, and where they might thrive next is the part of the job she has never tired of.

She started agency-side and learned quickly that it was not the right fit. The model rewarded numbers on the board more than it rewarded getting the match right, and that was not how she wanted to work. Moving in-house changed everything. She began across general hiring, then built her career through a series of technology businesses before arriving at Citywire. The legal training never went to waste either. Employment law, contracts and the compliance edges of hiring all sit close to what she studied, which made the pivot feel less like a departure than a connection.

And the moment that still lands, after all these years and all those hires, is the phone call. Telling someone they have been offered the position. The excitement on the other end of the line is, in her telling, the whole point.

The Manager Who Widened the Lens

Ask Hardman who shaped her and she goes straight to her most recent manager at her previous company. The timing was inauspicious: the new manager arrived just as Hardman went on maternity leave, which carries a familiar anxiety about missing the window to build the relationship and returning already behind. What she found instead was someone who had been through it. Her manager was a mother herself, and the shared experience became the foundation of a strong working bond from the start.

The real test came later. Market conditions forced redundancies at the business and Hardman's role was affected shortly after her return. Her manager did not simply see her out the door. She had already connected Hardman with a recruiter, work that led directly to the Citywire position she holds now, and she stayed close through the transition as a coach as much as a former boss.

More lasting still was the direction she pointed her in. Those conversations were not only about landing the next job but about what the next decade of a talent career could look like: succession planning, development, talent as a wider remit rather than a pipeline of open requisitions. That is the path Hardman is on today, and she credits it plainly. "She supported me in getting where I am today," she says. It is also a template she carries into her own leadership, an understanding that how people are treated at the difficult moments is what they remember.

Automate the Admin, Protect the Conversation

Hardman's position on artificial intelligence is unusually clear for a field full of hedging. She is an enthusiastic adopter of anything that removes friction and a firm sceptic of anything that removes people. Citywire runs Claude and Gemini as its main AI systems, and she uses them for contract automation across jurisdictions, asking for a UK contract or a German contract, then reviewing the output herself rather than losing hours to the paperwork. Job adverts get drafted the same way. Her applicant tracking system's AI features generate CV summaries that surface the elements a role actually calls for.

Crucially, none of it replaces judgment. "It doesn't replace CV screening," she says. Her team still works through candidate applications directly; the technology simply speeds up what surrounds that work. Where she draws a hard line is the growing enthusiasm she sees on LinkedIn for AI-run video interviews at first stage. She does not like it and she avoids letting the tools do too much on her behalf. The measure she applies is simple: does this let her have more conversations with people, or fewer?

Internally, she is the one pushing adoption. Some colleagues prefer the control of doing things themselves, and she is patient about bringing them along. Her own philosophy is less precious. If a tool can take something out of her head, she is happy to hand it over and spend the recovered time on work that only a human can do.

Advice for the Next Generation: Be Nosy About the Business

For anyone entering talent acquisition now, Hardman's counsel is direct and, notably, not about sourcing technique. Ask questions. Especially in-house, she argues, the job begins with understanding the business you serve: the commercial model, where the money is made, who the customers are and why they choose you.

That commercial fluency is what makes the rest possible. It tells you who the right people are for the organisation, and it teaches you the culture, the team dynamics and how each function contributes to the mission. She is also honest about the impossible expectation baked into the role. Recruiters are treated as experts in every job they hire for, which no one ever truly is. Her remedy is to sit side by side with colleagues and learn what they actually do.

It is the same instinct that carried her out of a law degree and into a career built on curiosity. Be nosy. Ask more than you are expected to. Then match the person to the job properly, and make the phone call.