Peter Weston

A Detour From Town Planning

Peter studied geography at university for the least strategic reason imaginable: it was interesting. There was no career plan attached to the choice, only genuine enjoyment of the subject and of learning in that space. A stretch of travel followed, with a place on a certified town planning masters already lined up on the other side of it.

Travel changed the calculation. What surfaced was a clear preference for a career that shifted day to day rather than one that meant sitting at a desk doing the same thing over and over. Back home and without a firm answer, Peter applied for a handful of jobs, one of them advertised as a travel sales role, and was invited in to meet the employer.

The employer, it emerged, did not exist. The session was run by a recruitment to recruitment firm that had posted the advert purely to get people interested, and there were roughly twenty people in the room. Halfway through, Peter was the one who put a hand up and asked what had become of the position everyone present had applied for. The question drew a few laughs, and the answer amounted to a crash course in how the industry actually operated. Rather than walk away from it, Peter treated the whole episode as a first look inside the profession and went on to speak with a range of businesses. One of those conversations was with Harvey Nash, and it has not needed repeating since.

The People Who Set The Standard

Ask Peter about influence and the answer runs away from the archetype of the hard charging billing machine. The manager Peter reports to today is, by that description, not a traditional recruiter in any sense and not really a traditional salesperson either. What that manager is, consistently, is a decent and friendly person, and the lesson landed permanently: people want to work with people they like and people they trust. Integrity, professionalism, transparency and honesty are the words Peter now uses to describe a personal operating style, and all of them trace back to watching someone senior prove that the human approach is in fact the commercial one.

A second influence came from a colleague whose work in the diversity and inclusion space earned an OBE. Peter sat in on a long run of client meetings alongside that colleague and noticed what was absent from them. There was no selling. There were no leading questions engineered to steer an answer. Instead there was patient attention: getting to know people, listening properly, and recognising the patterns underneath what was being said. For Peter, that became a working method as much as a memory, and the takeaway was simple enough to carry anywhere. Listen to people, be a nice human being, and it gets you a long way.

Where AI Earns Its Keep

Peter has written a number of articles on artificial intelligence in hiring and has been featured on the subject in publications including Computer Weekly and the Financial Times. The position staked out in that work runs against the prevailing gloom. Much of the commentary assumes the technology arrives to take jobs away. Peter does not see it that way.

The opportunity, as Peter frames it, is subtraction rather than replacement. Strip out the mundane work and the admin heavy tasks, and what is left is time on the phone with actual people, which is where recruiters have always added value. The clearest example is the humble note taker. Freed from scribbling frantically through a conversation, a recruiter can be present in the meeting, listen properly, take the information on board and think about what is being said while it is being said. Peter rates that as one of the best applications the industry has found so far, precisely because it makes the human part of the job easier rather than smaller.

The Limits Of The Model

The enthusiasm has a hard edge to it. Peter is blunt about the volume of candidates and hiring managers now leaning on AI to write their own profiles or to screen CVs, and rates the results as working really, really badly. The cost is the human element, and once that is gone the process starts producing outcomes no experienced recruiter would sign off on.

The cautionary tale Peter reaches for was picked up at an industry event. Bloomberg put an AI model in place to screen applications and build shortlists for software developers, trained on the company's own historic hiring data. Because no female candidate had been hired into those roles in the previous two years, the model instantly rejected every female applicant. It was early days for the technology, a couple of years ago now, but the lesson has not aged. A system that leans entirely on historical data and on the models built on top of it cannot think outside the box, and Peter names the missing ingredient precisely: critical thinking. Listening to people while thinking about what they are telling you remains, in this view, the single most valuable thing a recruiter brings to the table.

A Career Built Of Good Days

The advice Peter offers is deliberately unglamorous and rather hard to argue with. Be a nice person. Be someone you are proud of today. Do that often enough and the days accumulate into a career worth being proud of, which is a more durable measure of success than any quarterly number.

That instinct extends to how Peter talks about others in the field. Asked to point to someone deserving wider recognition, Peter named a leader with roughly thirty years in recruitment, now serving as a chair and non executive director, whose focus has moved firmly into diversity, equality and inclusion. The assessment was unqualified: fantastic in what has been achieved, and the most important person in that space. Fourteen years in, still crediting other people for the standard, Peter has built a career on the belief that character compounds faster than technique.