Martyn Wright

The Boss Who Pointed, Then Stepped Back

The formative influence arrived early, in his second role. His line manager at J.P. Morgan had spent roughly 25 years with the firm, had worked on Wall Street, and was well known both inside the bank and across the industry. Wright looked up to him. But what stayed was not the reputation. It was the management style.

The man trusted him. He pointed Wright in the right direction and then let him make the decision himself, giving him room to run without abandoning him to it. Two decades on, that is still the operating model Wright reaches for: set the direction, hire people strong enough to be trusted with it, then resist the urge to hover. It is also why his advice to other leaders circles back so insistently to the calibre of the people they bring in. A leader who lets his team decide has to be certain the team can decide well.

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.

A Practitioner's Eye for Practitioners

Wright reserves particular respect for recruiters who earned their grounding in agency before moving in-house, a route he regards as the best foundation the profession offers. Adam is one of them. Wright knew him first in agency, then as a candidate, and has watched him rise through the ranks at HSBC, one of the world's biggest banks, relocating from the UK to Singapore to lead executive and leadership talent acquisition globally. Having done executive recruitment himself, Wright knows what that demands: highly experienced candidates and genuinely complicated compensation structures involving pensions, buyouts, and stock. "You have to be someone that is on their game."

He is just as generous about Oana, a former EY colleague now at Clifford Chance, whose combination of energy and expertise won over a notoriously demanding business leader in Belgium who had cycled through around seven people in two years. She partnered with him for roughly four years until he retired, and "he wouldn't do anything without speaking to her." Wright reads that as evidence of both character and depth of experience. "A lot of people say they get it," he says. "She gets it."

Then there is Alberto, a client from his Cielo Talent years. Originally Italian, he moved to the UK and later to Spain, and has worked across a striking run of brands: Diageo, one of the biggest drinks companies in the world, Lego, Hitachi Rail, where he was head of talent, and a medical devices business making what Wright calls genuinely life-saving equipment. What impresses him is the range, both of countries and of recruitment disciplines mastered along the way.

The pattern in whom he praises is the pattern of his own career: people who chose this work, kept widening their scope, and never mistook recruitment for the simple business of putting a job and a candidate together. Wright has spent a career learning the nuances on purpose.