Lee-Roy Fredericks

“Understanding talent remains the hard part of the job, and judgment is always going to be needed.”

Lee-Roy Fredericks has helped Anthropic assemble its international leadership team across the UK and Ireland, Southern Europe and the DACH region, a search that sits at the leading edge of the AI economy. As a Partner at Erevena, the London executive search firm he joined in 2024, he spends his days on exactly that kind of brief: finding the leaders who will carry B2B software companies from early-stage, investor-backed startups through to pre-IPO growth.

His client list reads like a map of where enterprise technology is heading. Alongside Anthropic, Lee-Roy has partnered with Omnea, Sierra AI and Writer, working across go-to-market, general management and board-level roles. Before Erevena, he was a Director at Founders Keepers, specialising in commercial leadership hires. It is the second act of a career that began in high-volume, target-driven recruitment and has moved, deliberately, toward consultative search at the senior end of the market.

A Career That Came Looking for Him

Lee-Roy is originally from South Africa and studied in the UK, earning a Business degree from Durham University. Recruitment was not on his radar. He was doing account management work at a marketing agency when a recruiter called with a simple question: had he ever thought about doing recruitment? "Technically I didn't apply," he says. "They found me."

He landed at Robert Walters, a listed global business of roughly 5,000 people, and the opportunity came with a clear deal attached. He would start in South Africa, and if he performed in his first 12 to 18 months, the company would bring him to its UK headquarters. Returning to the UK had always been the goal. He hit his targets, made the move, and spent eight and a half years with the firm in all, eventually leading part of the Technology division in London.

Those years took him through the management of large teams. Then came a deliberate pivot. Lee-Roy wanted work that was more consultative, closer to senior executives, and centred on high-profile searches for investor-backed businesses. Over the past couple of years he made that leap, a move that took him to Founders Keepers and then to Erevena.

The Zero-to-One Lesson

The person Lee-Roy credits most is a former manager at Robert Walters, and the story begins during COVID. Robert Walters was not known as a technology hub, nor for working with high-growth, investor-backed companies. The business needed to pivot, and his manager decided the moment had arrived. He backed Lee-Roy to set up new product lines across go-to-market and product management.

Two things stayed with him. The first was the nerve of it. "Even through that tough time, we took a risk around how we can build a business," he says, and the bet paid off. The second was a method: how to strip everything back and build from ground zero, without the infrastructure that usually surrounds a team. That zero-to-one instinct has followed him into the roles that came after. The relationship outlasted the job, too. The two remain friends and have attended each other's weddings.

Finding Talent Versus Understanding It

On AI, Lee-Roy starts with his clients. Every company he hires for now needs to be AI-forward or AI-native, built on the technology from the ground up. Those that are not have already fallen behind.

Inside the search profession, he draws a sharp distinction. AI has made finding talent easier. Understanding talent has not become any easier, and judgment remains the core of the work. Where the technology earns its keep is efficiency, compressing long processes into short ones, and in what he calls the memory or context layer that sits around a search. The practical result is getting to 70 percent of the answer within minutes instead of days.

The best talent people, in his view, use that advantage deliberately. They automate the administrative research and keep their own judgment and the relationships within their network firmly in human hands.

Advice for 2027

Lee-Roy's message to fellow talent leaders is blunt: don't take your foot off the pedal. For the first time in two or three years, he sees genuine growth in talent and recruitment across businesses, and he believes the moment calls for doubling down on who organisations bring in and how hiring has changed. Talent leaders, he argues, are the catalyst for that change.

In 2027, that means accelerating how teams operate, how they assess talent, and how they use the infrastructure around them to make important decisions well. The urgency is partly a hedge. Nobody can say where the market will be in two or three years, or which macro challenges might arrive. In technology and high-growth hiring, the present is buoyant, but working alongside AI-native firms like Anthropic is a constant reminder of how quickly any part of the work could change. His answer is to keep pushing the boundaries while the window is open.