Louise Triance

Seven Years, Four Jobs, One Building

The entry point was ordinary enough. Triance was doing temp work after finishing college, and one of the recruitment agencies she was placed with needed somebody to handle admin for the business itself. She took the job. What followed was a seven year stretch inside a firm that ran retained recruitment, contingency and headhunting, and a career that climbed through nearly every function in the building.

She started on admin. Then she took on some of the firm's IT. Then she moved onto the desk as a consultant working retained assignments. Her final role there was headhunting and sourcing, the discipline that arguably still shapes how she thinks about the industry. After seven years she left, not for a bigger agency or a better desk, but to set up a business supporting recruitment people. That decision has defined everything since.

From The Sunday Times to Everything at Once

Triance's perspective on artificial intelligence is shaped by having lived through the last technological upheaval, and the one before that. When she started recruiting, everything was print based. Adverts ran in The Sunday Times. Candidate research meant literally working from a phone directory. Then the internet arrived, and every conversation in recruitment became about the web, about social media, about sourcing online. The profession absorbed it. Now AI is in everything the industry does, and the noise level is familiar.

She expects the loudest debate to burn itself out. There is still a massive conversation about whether AI is taking the jobs of talent acquisition professionals and agency recruiters, and she suspects the industry will move past that fairly soon, landing instead on using the technology ethically, sensibly and productively. Her reading of the parallel debate about staying human is sharper still. That conversation, she argues, has always existed in this space, because the core question of how you work with teams inside an HR and talent acquisition function and hire people without being human predates any algorithm. Some of the current fear that AI will make recruiters less human may simply be reflecting the fact that the profession was not quite as human as it should have been beforehand.

What genuinely surprises her is the pace at the other end of the curve. She still encounters people who need to be taught that a scheduling tool like Calendly makes sense, or why note takers are useful. Some of that is slow adoption. Some of it, she suspects, is people who tried a load of things that did not work for them and stopped trying. Even then she leaves the door open, with characteristic generosity: there may still be a place for the truly artisan individual who does not use the technology at all.

The Case Against the Bubble

Asked what talent leaders should carry into the year ahead, Triance offers advice she cheerfully labels possibly the most boring available: keep an open mind and continue to absorb information about what is happening in this space. The unglamorous framing undersells it. Her argument is that the pressures now stacking up on the profession, technology challenges, economic challenges, the question of how younger people are entering work, and the AI conversation running underneath all of it, cannot be navigated from inside a closed system.

Being in a bubble of your own, she says, is really negative. But absorbing is not the same as copying. Do not lift somebody else's ideas wholesale, and do not go into an industry WhatsApp group asking people to tell you what to do. The version she advocates is more disciplined and more curious than that. Go to conferences. Go to events. Look at technology you have no intention of buying, because the point is to understand why the builders made the choices they made. If someone invites you to a business dinner, go. Join the Slack community relevant to your patch. Engage on the LinkedIn posts that actually matter to your work.

She is most pointed about the people who need this advice least willingly. For those finding the market genuinely tough, who cannot hire or who are drowning in hiring, the temptation is to put your eyes down and focus on the immediate problem. Triance's counter is simple and hard to argue with. Keep looking sideways, and keep looking forward. The industry rarely announces what it is about to become.