Martyn Wright
XML International
“Take on more. Hire really good people.”
Martyn Wright has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Martyn's story.
Ask a room of talent leaders how they got into recruitment and nearly every answer begins with an accident. Martyn Wright puts the figure at 98 percent, and he is emphatically not in it. At 21, freshly graduated and working the university milk rounds, he saw Michael Page advertising for graduate trainees, applied, and took the job. "I actively selected it rather than fell into it," he says. It is a small distinction with a long shadow: everything that followed has been a deliberate choice about how the craft should be practised.
That path carried him from agency into the in-house world, through J.P. Morgan and EY, then into Cielo Talent, the US-headquartered global RPO, and on to his current role at XML International. Along the way he has run executive recruitment himself and spent time in reward. The through line is not a specialism. It is a conviction that recruiting is far more technical, and far more human, than outsiders assume. People think it is easy, he says: you get a job, you get a candidate, you put the two together. "There's a lot of nuances in recruitment, particularly at the moment."
A Game Changer, With Conditions
AI, in Wright's assessment, is a genuine game changer. It has reworked almost every stage of the recruitment life cycle, from sourcing to scheduling, and it has changed the candidate side too. Applications are now radically accessible, which cuts both ways. Candidates can and do fire off hundreds or even thousands of them, diluting the signal recruiters depend on. Even so, he notes, you would be hard pressed to find a recruiter who is not reaching for the technology several times a day.
His sharpest observation is about where the value actually lands. In his experience, whether the tooling proves useful depends almost entirely on the tech stack it attaches to. He has watched organisations whose ATS and underlying systems are not up to scratch reach for another tool as the answer. It rarely is. "Just bolting on another AI tool doesn't really address the issue," he says, because the issue is the stack itself.
What he hopes for from the next wave is counterintuitive. He wants the technology to make recruitment more personal, not less. If automation absorbs the administrative load, recruiters get back the hours they actually value: time with candidates, time with hiring managers, time spent advising. That, in his framing, is the difference between being a recruiter and being a true recruitment business partner.
Breadth, Better Hires, and Radical Openness
Asked what he would tell other talent leaders, Wright offers three things, and the first is to keep saying yes to work that sits outside the job description. Over his career he has taken on responsibilities with no obvious connection to recruitment and found them invaluable. His stint in reward is the clearest example. Understanding how a reward construct is built, and how a candidate's remuneration is actually assembled, made him a materially better recruiter.
The second is to hire people who will challenge you. He has watched leaders quietly recruit for comfort, filling teams with people unlikely to push back, and he considers it a false economy. "Take on more. Hire really good people," he says. The better the people you bring in, the better the function becomes.
The third is openness, with your team, with hiring managers, and with candidates. In an era when anything less than candour is easy to see through, he argues transparency has become a competitive necessity rather than a courtesy. He is clear eyed about the profession's reputational problem: recruitment is taking criticism for practices like ghosting, and he acknowledges that some of it stems from teams being genuinely under-resourced rather than uncaring. The answer, he believes, is to operate as a trusted partner to everyone you touch in the process, wherever it is within your power to do so.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Martyn. We are honored to welcome Martyn Wright to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Martyn. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.