Marvin Million

From Doorsteps to Deal Rooms

Million did not arrive in talent acquisition through a graduate scheme. He arrived through sales. Door to door work, charity fundraising, the kind of roles where the pitch either lands or it does not. In his early twenties, with a young child at home, the calculation became straightforward: he wanted a higher basic salary and more stability than commission alone could offer. Recruitment, when he found it, looked like the answer.

He started agency side, where the commission was good and the pace was relentless. What kept him interested, though, was something the model was not really built to deliver. "The one thing that developed for me was being close to the projects," he says. Sending CVs into a client and hoping some stuck felt thin. The more time he spent with HR teams and hiring managers, the more he wanted to understand the work itself, to be part of something bigger than a placement fee. As an external consultant, no matter how generously a client let him in, he never quite lost the sense of being on the back burner: you fill a role, and then you rarely hear how the story ends.

So he moved in-house. His first internal step was a contractor engagement that ran nine months, six on the original term and three on an extension, with a team of people close to his own age and interests that made the work feel settled rather than transactional. A later stop at a company called Imagine put him on the external side of the table again, hiring into tier one and tier two investment banks. The pattern he was building toward, though, was clear. He wanted to be inside the business, seeing projects through end to end.

The People Who Shaped the Method

Ask Million who made him, and he does not reach for a single name. He reaches for a sequence.

The first is Isaac, a fellow consultant with about a year more experience when Million started in recruitment, and now a director of learning and development. Million shadowed him during his induction. Isaac showed him the ropes of how to speak to candidates, how to speak to clients, and how to see things through. Kelsey and Van, colleagues from his first contractor team, taught him something subtler about environment: that a team you actually want to be around changes the quality of the work.

Then came Joe, the internal recruiter at Imagine while Million was the external one bringing candidates in. That professional pairing turned into one of his closest friendships. They have gone skydiving together and travelled widely. Joe eventually left recruitment altogether and, with his business partner Hex, another Imagine alum, now runs a global CBD company stocked in Selfridges. Million tells that story with unmistakable pride.

Three managers stand out above the rest. Sam Facer, his direct manager at Disney, was consultative by instinct, letting his people learn as they grew and trusting them to deliver. The two men bonded as Manchester United supporters; when Million worked out of the Manchester office, they would line the trip up with a European League fixture, take in the game, and head back the following day. Facer's influence, Million says, is visible in how much autonomy he expects and extends today. Carl Thornton worked in a similar register, loading his team with trust and responsibility and then guiding rather than correcting, tweaking small things along the way. Million has watched several people from Thornton's team move into leadership and management roles since, and he reads that as a direct consequence of the style. Carolyn Walker, his current line manager, completes the set. They bounce ideas off each other, and she trusts him to make decisions and carry them through.

AI as Assistant, Not Arbiter

Million is unambiguous that AI has made him more efficient, and equally unambiguous about where he draws the line. He is comfortable with AI recommendations and leans on them himself. What he will not hand over is judgment. The decision about who progresses, the assessment of an answer, the review of a candidate: those require a human.

He is openly sceptical of employers whose first port of call is an AI CV screen followed by a recorded video interview graded by a machine. "For me, that feels impersonal," he says. His preferred configuration is the inverse: a human first contact, supported by AI running quietly in the background, capturing what was said so it can be revisited later.

Where the technology earns its keep is in the work that would otherwise never get done properly. Hiring managers at most companies are stretched thin, and building a rigorous interview process is rarely the thing that survives a busy week. Million uses AI to construct that scaffolding: designing testing, shaping presentation interviews, defining the scope a candidate presentation should cover. He also runs job descriptions through a gender decoder to surface language that skews male or female and rewrite it toward neutral. The through line is consistent. AI removes friction from the process; it does not sit in the seat where a recruiter belongs.

Still a People Function

Asked what he would tell other talent leaders heading deeper into 2026, Million offers a warning aimed squarely at his own profession's growing love of dashboards. The industry is becoming more data-driven, and he does not oppose that. But funnel throughput, drop-off rates, and fill percentages are descriptions of people, not substitutes for them. "Sometimes you can get lost in the numbers," he says. "Remember we're still a people function, still put people first."

That instinct extends to how he talks about peers. Given the chance to point at others doing excellent work, he named Nelly Quincy Jones, who works through Karafi and is seconded to Ocado, and Zara Nabubakkus, most recently a contractor at Relay Technologies. It is a small gesture, and a telling one from someone whose whole career has been shaped by people who chose to invest in him before he had earned it.