Mark Anderson

The Question Nobody Had Thought to Ask Him

Before recruitment, Mark spent five years in alternative dispute resolution, the UK term for mediation, resolving conflicts between commercial parties at a very well known London company. He wanted a change. His best available idea was business development inside a law firm, on the logic that he had spent a long time in the auspices of the legal field, so he left the conflict resolution role and went to an agency to talk it through.

The law firms on offer did not interest him, and he admits he had no other bright ideas at the time. Then the consultant he was meeting asked a question that had never occurred to him: had he considered recruitment? What made the question land was something on his background rather than his experience. Mark had grown up in the Middle East as a child in the 1970s and 1980s. The firm was seeing recruitment growth in the region and, as he recalls the pitch, had nobody covering it properly. He met a couple of people on the team and was hired quickly.

The first plan was different. He was brought in to assist a colleague running offshore recruitment into law firms in jurisdictions such as Cayman and Bermuda. Once his enthusiasm for the region became obvious, the plan was rewritten around him: forget offshore, you can be our Middle East person. He stayed with that employer for five years, two in London and three on the ground after moving full time to Dubai. Twenty one years later, the specialism has never changed.

A Career Built on People Who Stayed

Two employers in 21 years is an unusual statistic in an industry known for churn, and Mark attributes much of it to the people around him rather than to any grand plan. The most telling detail is a mentor relationship that has outlasted the job that created it. He has not worked with his first boss in recruitment for 16 years, yet the two spoke last week, and Mark still goes to him to test ideas. The lesson embedded there is the one his whole practice runs on: relationships in this business are not transactional and they do not expire when the org chart changes.

He credits the consultant who first suggested recruitment to him as the person who saw a career he could not see in himself, and points out that many of the people he has worked with over the years have simply become friends. Recruitment, as he puts it, is a people focused business, and he takes inspiration from the people around him as a matter of routine rather than as an occasional exercise in gratitude.

Asked who else in the field deserves recognition, Mark named Izgi Gur Genc, a former colleague now working in senior HR in Dubai at the crypto platform OKX, having previously been at Binance. His endorsement was immediate and unqualified.

Old School Fundamentals, New School Tools

Mark places himself in the more traditional camp of recruiters, and he means it as an observation rather than a boast. In many respects, he says, he does the same thing he did 21 years ago, and the way he does it has not fundamentally changed. The hardware has: he once carried a BlackBerry and now carries an iPhone. He is careful to note this is not ancient history. He is not describing telex machines and faxes. Still, when he started, LinkedIn did not exist.

What has stayed constant is the method. Relationships get built over Teams, face to face, on phone calls and over WhatsApp, with clients and candidates alike. The database and LinkedIn Recruiter sit underneath that, useful but not decisive. His view is that technology could completely revolutionize the industry, and that it has not yet done so in his corner of it, precisely because his corner is so specialized. Middle East in-house legal is a market where human judgment and trust carry more weight, not less, as the tooling improves.

That does not make him a skeptic. He is clear that AI has the ability to scale what he does to a very different level: speeding up processes, automating administration, lifting the heavy admin load off him so that the human work gets more of his day. The goal, as he frames it, is not replacement but leverage. Candidates want to deal with him. Clients want to deal with him. Everything behind the scenes, he believes, can be done far better and far more smoothly. And he is convinced the curve is still steep. AI may already feel normalized, but in his assessment the industry is very much at the beginning of this journey.

Advice for Talent Leaders Heading Into 2026

His counsel for the year ahead is deliberately unfashionable. Never forget the basics of how agency recruitment is actually done, and never lose track of those core foundations, because no matter what happens and no matter what AI gets brought in, the job still requires managing relationships, thinking critically and building trust. He returns to that last one for emphasis. Gaining trust, he says, is the massive one.

Mark's argument is not nostalgia. It is competitive analysis. People come to him for advice because he has been doing this for two decades, and many of his competitors have not been at it for anywhere near that long. Experience compounds in a niche market in a way that no tool can shortcut. His closing instruction to peers follows logically from it: double down on your skills, find your strengths, and exploit them as much as you can.