Nathan Craigie

From the Kitchen to the Candidate List

Craigie trained and worked as a chef in luxury hotels, an apprenticeship in standards that later became an apprenticeship in judgment. His entry into recruitment was almost accidental. Doing temporary work through an agency, he stopped by its offices one afternoon to collect a cheque and found the team short staffed. They asked if he would sit in and help answer phones and arrange interviews. He said yes immediately. By the end of that same day, they had offered him a role as an assistant in their temporary recruitment team.

Six months later he had learned the mechanics of temp recruitment, and was headhunted into Collins King & Associates, a bespoke luxury recruitment firm serving London's hospitality industry. There he headed up one of the chef's desks for five to six years and completed his CIPD qualifications in his own time, on his own initiative. When Covid arrived and hospitality hiring froze across the capital, the roles simply stopped. Through his network, he landed on his feet on one of the most complex openings in the city: Eataly's flagship London store, with four restaurants, retail space, a cookery school and a wine shop.

He ran full 360 recruitment through the pandemic and the reopening that followed, a period he describes plainly as really tough, really difficult. They opened anyway. By the time he left just over two years later, he was Head of Talent Acquisition.

Building a Hotel Before It Exists

Pre-opening recruitment is its own discipline. There is no employer brand yet, no incumbent team to sell the culture, no track record to point to. There is only a promise and a deadline. Craigie joined Raffles London to staff a building from zero, and the results speak for the standard he set. Best new hotel in the world in year one. Top 50 hotels in both years since.

His remit did not stop at the offer letter. He owns personal development for the entire population of around 480 employees, which means he is judged not only on who walks through the door but on who is still there, and better, a year later. In ultra luxury hospitality, where every guest interaction is delivered by a person, that is the only metric that ultimately matters.

The People Who Shaped Him

Ask Craigie who made him, and he starts in a kitchen. Jamie Jones, his chef at the Four Seasons in Hampshire, was, in his words, an amazing boss to have: a leader who supported his team, taught constantly, and gave young cooks real freedom to express themselves. The brigade won a string of accolades under him. The lesson Craigie carried out of that kitchen was that high standards and creative latitude are not opposites.

In recruitment, two names stand above the rest. Tim Andrews gave him his first shot in the profession, the leap of faith that turned an afternoon of answering phones into a career. Gary King, at Collins King & Associates, guided him through the craft of executive hospitality search. Craigie is still close friends with both, still calls them for advice, and still trades help in the other direction. "They've just been really supportive throughout the years," he says.

His admiration for King is unqualified. King has some 35 to 40 years in recruitment, has worked agency side and in house, and has owned Collins King & Associates for roughly 30 of them, a firm that Craigie estimates has helped tens of thousands of people find work around the UK. He knows everyone in London. He is old school, and, by Craigie's affectionate account, probably not a heavy user of AI. What he is, is a developer of people, the kind of leader who teaches those beneath him to genuinely understand recruitment and the industry it serves. Craigie also singles out Simon Wedlock of the Wolseley Hospitality Group, a peer with a similar hospitality background who is all about the people, has built serious relationships with schools and colleges to bring graduates into the sector, and has been central to the group's strategic recruitment as it has opened new restaurants.

AI, and the Line He Will Not Cross

Craigie is not an AI sceptic. His team already uses it for CV sifting, screening at volume, psychometric testing for incoming staff, and internal development. He expects its role to grow, and he is actively looking at how to utilise it more. But he holds a clear boundary, and it is a commercial one as much as a philosophical one.

"I want to use it, but also want to be very careful of how much we use it, that we don't take away the personal touch," he says. In luxury, emotional intelligence and deep industry knowledge are the product, and he considers both very hard to replicate. The real question, as he frames it, is not whether to adopt AI but how to marry it to the people side. "We still need to understand people," he says. "Their dreams, their experiences, their personalities." AI may get there. He is not convinced it does it fully today, and until it does, he is not willing to trade a candidate's humanity for a faster funnel.

Never Sit Back

Ten years into recruitment, Craigie's advice to other talent leaders is deceptively simple: stay relevant. What the job looks like now bears little resemblance to what it looked like when he started, and the only defence against that pace is relentless curiosity about the industry and the people in it.

In practice, that means building your knowledge base and your portfolio of people the way a chef builds a larder. In London, he notes, restaurants and hotels open and close every other day, and his job is to know all of them: where they are, who the chefs are, who is managing each one. Networking is not a soft skill in his world, it is inventory. "Never sit back and rest," he says, "because there's always going to be something new to learn." New technologies. New ideas. Different ways of doing things. Coming from someone who once picked up a cheque and walked out with a career, it is less a platitude than a description of how he has actually operated for a decade.