Martin Haywood

From the Convenience Store to the Search Desk

Haywood's route into recruitment began, as he readily admits, the way most people's do. He was working for Tesco, managing the retailer's small format convenience stores, a job that meant waking at four or five o'clock in the morning on a Saturday and a Sunday. Wanting a working pattern that looked more like Monday to Friday, he registered with a recruitment agency to find something new, and ended up taking a role with the agency itself.

Michael Page became his first recruitment employer, and retail recruitment his first specialism, a neat piece of continuity given he had spent his early career inside the sector he was now hiring for. He describes it plainly: he had relevant work experience for the market he went on to recruit into. Nothing glamorous, in his telling, but the grounding was real.

Three Mentors, Three Very Different Lessons

Asked who shaped him, Haywood names three, and pointedly refuses to make the list uniformly flattering. The first is the Tesco manager who took his team's credit, and did so shamelessly. That experience gave Haywood his leadership style rather than a role model. He describes it as servant leadership: fostering an environment where people can turn up and be their best and most authentic selves, with the leader acting as cheerleader and ambassador rather than protagonist. "It's not all about one person," he says. The point is to elevate the people doing the work. He still remembers exactly how he felt watching it happen.

The second was a regional managing director at Michael Page, to whom he reported for a short period roughly two years into his recruitment career. It was, he says, his first real exposure to someone operating at that altitude, and the first time anyone taught him to look past the task in front of him. Where are you trying to get to? What is the overarching objective, not just the activity that gets you there? That manager taught him to think commercially, to see how the parts of a business interconnect and how decisions produce knock-on effects elsewhere.

The third was his first boss at Amazon, and here the mirror with that early Tesco manager is exact. Where one man shamelessly claimed the credit, this one shamelessly pushed Haywood's progression. He bought into him completely, handed him responsibility and opportunity, and acted as his ambassador when he was not in the room. Haywood is careful about how he frames the lesson. Sponsors open doors, but as he puts it, "you've still got to walk through the door." Every walk of life, he notes, contains people who give others a platform, and he has never stopped appreciating the one he was given.

Automation, AI and the Human in the Loop

On artificial intelligence, Haywood is enthusiastic and entirely unwilling to inflate the claims. New companies come online every day, he observes, each offering to enhance one element of the process: sifting, scheduling, the assessment stage itself. Talent acquisition as a profession, in his reading, is still working out what the new normal looks like.

His framework is clear. There is automation, there is AI, and there is the human element, and the strongest functions will contain all three. "It's not about AI taking over and doing the whole end-to-end spectrum," he says. The best teams will move quickly to identify where automation performs best, where AI genuinely adds value, and where the human must stay in the loop. That last category, for Haywood, is judgment and decision making. He believes the industry is a long way from letting AI make full decisions, and that this is right. When each element operates within its own sphere of maximum value, he argues, the whole function becomes markedly more efficient because nobody and nothing is working outside its strengths.

He is equally candid about the pressure driving adoption. There is a FOMO in the market, a sense that you must be in the AI race, and he thinks that instinct is broadly correct: this is already a game changing evolution for the industry. But he issues a warning that too few leaders voice out loud. The wrong piece of technology can hold you back as much as the right piece can take you forward. Which is why he insists on the unglamorous work first: define the problem you are actually trying to solve, find the solution that fits your context, then embed it into workflows so everything runs seamlessly together.

Context, he stresses, is not a detail. High volume blue collar hiring is a fundamentally different discipline to small niche white collar recruitment, and a tool that transforms one can be useless in the other. This is why he places such value on peer networking groups, where leaders can see what others are embedding, how it is working for them, and, just as instructively, where it has not worked for someone else. His verdict on the moment: an exciting time, and one the profession is still travelling through.

Innovation Comes From the People Opening the Recs

Ask Haywood for his single strongest piece of advice to other talent leaders and the answer arrives without hedging: one person cannot do it all. Some of the greatest initiatives and innovations he and his teams have produced came from the teams themselves, from the people opening the recs day in and day out and sifting the CVs day in and day out. They are the ones who meet the recurring problems, so they are the ones who invent the solutions.

The leader's task, therefore, is to build the conditions for that. In what he describes as the most technologically advanced time we have known, the job is to unleash the knowledge and power already sitting inside the team rather than to supply every answer from the top. The worst outcome he can imagine is a team full of good ideas and no platform on which to share, develop and evolve them.

That responsibility, he believes, has grown heavier. Leadership has always sat beyond the tactical operation, and the distinction between management and leadership is hardly a new conversation, but the demands now are broader: five generations in the workplace, each with distinct expectations about how, where and when they want to work, and a level of ambiguity around career security and trajectory that previous cohorts did not carry. How a leader shows up as a person, he argues, now matters as much as how they show up as a technical expert.

His prescription is consistent with everything else he believes. Build a strong support network and lean on it. Lean on the team too, so that a group delivers as a group rather than as a collection of individuals. Invest in culture, harmony, engagement and collaboration, none of them novel ideas, all of them more important than ever, so that teams feel united as they navigate whatever the profession becomes next.