Niti Williamson

An Engineer's Route Into Recruiting

Williamson studied engineering, graduated with a first class degree and went to work as a software engineer. An MBA followed, and with it a move to the UK, where she began looking for a graduate programme in engineering or in the business and finance world. The recruitment agency helping with her search made a different proposition. "You're a smart engineering grad," they told her. "We'd love to have somebody like you."

She joined, and to her own surprise she loved it. Her first month produced results strong enough that an internal email about them circulated well beyond her desk. That early success opened the door to Google, and the standards she absorbed there set the trajectory for everything after. "Once you have experienced Google and learnt how to do things properly there," she says, "it just sort of snowballed after that."

The path from Google led eventually to Meta, where she ran a team of 40 recruiters and where her organisation hired hundreds of AI specialists, drawing candidates from CERN, Harvard and MIT. This was, as she puts it, a long forming and ongoing topic for her team long before the rest of the market caught up. The one person still unconvinced is her daughter, who recently asked what her mother actually does for a living. Williamson admits she struggled to make it sound as glamorous as an iron woman or the people who drive the bin trucks, which is what cool looks like when you are that age.

The Bosses Who Kept Pushing

Ask Williamson who shaped her and she does not reach first for clients or executives. She reaches for her managers. "It's always the bosses who kind of give you the right amount of encouragement and then push," she says. In every job she has held, she has had a manager who backed her, and she has consciously tried to be that person for her own teams.

Chief among them is Jim Miller, her manager at Google and now a VP at Ashby. Fifteen years on, the relationship endures in both directions: she recently organised his birthday party, and he is still, in her words, pushing her forward. That kind of longevity is its own quiet performance review.

She also draws inspiration from women in technology, a group she belonged to when belonging was considerably harder. Fifteen or twenty years ago, being a woman in tech required a stubbornness she has not forgotten. Ami Vora, then VP at WhatsApp and now at Anthropic, is one of the figures she names as genuinely inspirational, someone she has exchanged messages with and taken encouragement from. Williamson's read on mentorship is practical rather than sentimental: the right people do not simply cheer, they apply pressure at the right moment.

Champion of the AI Agenda

Williamson sits firmly in the camp that is excited about AI, and she has the receipts to explain why. Her decade of hiring AI, machine learning and NLP talent means she watched this wave form from the inside. What interests her now is applying it to her own function and beyond.

As Dext's AI champion, she is driving AI projects across the business, examining the company's tool stack department by department to identify where AI belongs. In talent acquisition the work is already underway: her team is implementing Ashby as its new applicant tracking system while evaluating what else the recruitment experience requires. Working alongside Danielle Leon at parent company Iris, she has demoed or tested roughly 25 different AI driven tools, hunting for what genuinely fits rather than what merely demos well.

She is candid that this is an unusual remit. "TA folk don't always, or HR or people folk don't always get those tech opportunities," she notes. She took it anyway. For Williamson, the prize is not marginal efficiency but a different mode of work altogether. "It's going to make us better," she says. "It's going to allow us to solve bigger problems that have never been solved by humans."

Advice for What Comes Next

Her counsel to recruiters heading into 2027, whether they are in their first year or already leading teams, is unambiguous: embrace AI and do not be afraid of it. She does not believe the profession is about to disappear. She does believe the profession is about to change shape, and that the people who thrive will be the ones who built fluency early.

"The more AI tools you use right now and get used to, you create those skills, and that will help you stay on in your job and do your job in a different way," she says. What remains irreplaceable, in her view, is the human layer: talking to candidates, assessing people, reading the things a model cannot. AI can support enormous amounts of the work around that core, but the core itself still needs a person.

Her instruction is deliberately blunt, and it is the same one she has followed her entire career. Become an expert with AI tools right now.