Nikhilesh Mathur

The Salesman Who Kept Finding People

Mathur started his career in sales of technology products, work that meant generating leads and hunting down the right person to talk to, every single day. So when his manager asked for help filling a role, he simply pointed that same machinery at hiring. The people he found were hired and turned out to be really good performers. A few months later the CEO came back with a bigger ask for a different function entirely, and that worked too. Then came the offer to switch sides for good.

Recruiting, for him, has never been an administrative function bolted onto HR. It is a market-facing discipline built on sourcing, persuasion and judgment, which is precisely why he has never been rattled by the arrival of new tools.

The second inflection point came years later, when a head of HR recruited him out of agency work and into a regional head of talent acquisition role. Mathur had never worked in-house in his life, and he asked her outright whether she really believed he could do the job. Rather than reassure him, she sat him down and walked through the skills he was already bringing to the table, one by one, until the case made itself. "That was also my very first experience of a skills-based hiring approach," he says. The lesson outlasted the job: assess the person and the capability, not the experience on paper. He has hired that way ever since.

Three Managers, Three Lessons

Mathur is unusually precise about where his leadership instincts came from, and he credits three managers, not all of them comfortable to remember.

The head of HR who moved him in-house reshaped both his career and his thinking about hiring. She proved to him, with evidence, that transferable skill beats identical experience, and he calls that moment pivotal.

An earlier manager taught him something about sustainability. Mathur was working late one evening, trying to clear his desk, when the manager asked what he was doing. "If you clear your desk, we don't need you," came the reply. The point was to prioritize ruthlessly, deliver what today actually requires, and trust that tomorrow exists. He has carried it ever since and now presses the same message on his own teams. Hard work matters, he argues, but so do family, friends and time for yourself, and managers hold most of the power in that equation. Culturally, he notes, few people will step away while their manager is still visibly working. The tone has to be set from the top.

The third influence was a manager whose style he deliberately chose not to inherit. Mathur learned a great deal from him and says so plainly, but the relationship pushed him close to a breaking point, and he came away with a promise to himself: when he became a manager, he would find his own balance between what he owed the business and the fact that he was working with human beings. That single idea, commercial demands weighed against human needs, has become his working definition of good leadership.

AI Is Not New, and That Is the Point

Ask Mathur about artificial intelligence and he pushes back on the framing before he answers. "I think it's somewhat funny that people talk about AI as if it's something new," he says. Recruiting, in his telling, has always been at the forefront of workplace change. Back when most people had no idea how technology worked, recruiters were already running CRM tools and applicant tracking systems, and those platforms have been evolving through every one of his 30 years in the profession. He began with barely any ATS to speak of and no cell phones. Today nobody can imagine the job without LinkedIn, without an ATS, without a mobile in hand. The LLMs and the agentic models are genuinely new in how they operate. Automation in recruiting is not.

What separates the people still standing from the ones who did not make it, he argues, is posture. Those who kept up with the times evolved and are still in the industry. Those who were rigid, who believed there was only one way of doing things, fizzled out. "Technology has become a facilitator in how we do things," he says. "If we take it as something that blocks us, then I'm afraid technology is not going to stop."

His own team is already deep into the work. They use AI across the funnel: marketing, sourcing candidates, engaging with them, booking their time, capturing assessment notes in a non-biased way, and presenting each candidate's strengths and areas of development, then comparing those profiles to identify the strongest runners in a process. Behind the scenes, the same tools build dashboards, market intelligence and structured question sets for hiring conversations. Work that was done manually and would once have taken many days now takes a couple of hours.

His conclusion is blunt and optimistic in equal measure. "This is not about people losing jobs," he says. It is about speed and efficiency, about finding better candidates and delivering a better experience to candidates and hiring managers alike, and, he adds pointedly, about recruiters enjoying their own work rather than only ever thinking about everyone else's. The people on his teams who learned these skills did not lose anything, they acquired premium ones. The risk sits with those who stayed behind, because the roles themselves now assume fluency with AI. And he thinks the profession has barely started: in a function as human-facing as recruiting, he says, "we've only just touched the tip of the iceberg so far."

Challenge Yourself

Asked for the one piece of advice he would give other talent leaders, Mathur does not hesitate. "Challenge yourself. Don't stop yourself." He hears people, including senior leaders, look at what AI is doing to the technology sector and conclude that their own days are numbered. He wants them to treat it as a dare instead. His proof point is close to home: his mother, at 75, now does everything on a mobile phone. If she can make that leap, he reasons, there is very little his generation or the ones behind it cannot do. Two words, he concedes, but they contain a great deal. Challenging yourself is how new skills get learned, how new ways of thinking and working get found, and ultimately how teams innovate and deliver better.

That same standard shapes who he admires. Mathur points to James Harley, a recruiting leader at Syngenta who began as a competitor and became a good friend, and whom he describes as genuinely exceptional at understanding what recruiting is actually about. He names Karim Akram, head of recruiting for UK and Ireland at Deutsche Bank and a former colleague from Mathur's own years at the bank before he joined the stock exchange, a leader his team looks up to and his stakeholders rely on. And he names Annabel Biddle, also of Deutsche Bank, who spent a solid 18 months running recruiting globally for the firm, held the role Akram later stepped into, and now heads up early careers alongside a global remit. For an organization of that scale, Mathur notes, both her stakeholders and her team respected her massively for how she worked.

His reason for choosing all three is identical. They balance the demands of a commercial organization with the needs of a human one, and they deliver results while looking after their people. "That balance is not very easy," he says. "It takes a lot of effort, and the three of them do it really well." It is the standard he holds himself to as well.