Renu Midha

From a London HR Desk to Both Sides of the House

Midha began her career in human resources as an HR business partner in London, the generalist seat where performance conversations, organizational questions, and employee relations all land on the same desk. That grounding shaped how she thinks about hiring: not as a transaction that ends at offer acceptance, but as the front end of an employment relationship the business will live with for years.

The move to the United States brought a move into talent acquisition. She took a role in early careers, hiring at the entry point of the pipeline rather than competing for finished professionals, and that assignment carried her from the HR side of the house to the recruiting side for good. "That's kind of the journey," she says, "in terms of having both sides of experience."

That dual fluency is rarer than it sounds, and more useful than it used to be. Having sat in both chairs, Midha can translate between them at a moment when talent functions are increasingly asked to justify themselves in business terms rather than requisition counts.

The Manager Who Said Try It Anyway

Asked who shaped her, Midha goes back to a manager early in her career who was, as she puts it, more risk focused. The philosophy was simple and unusual: let's try something new, and if it doesn't work, that's totally fine. The important qualifier, and the reason the lesson stuck rather than curdled into recklessness, was that the experimentation always sat inside an understanding of the broader organizational risks. Permission was real, but so was judgment.

Midha has carried that forward into her own management practice. "We all have great ideas, they can be different, and some of them can be outside of the box," she says, "but we have to try." For a leader who now grants that same permission to the people she manages, it is a deliberate inheritance rather than a stylistic habit.

The second influence is less a person than a discipline. Confidence, she argues, is downstream of knowing things, and knowing things is downstream of being a lifelong learner. Midha reads constantly, and she is refreshingly unsnobbish about the format. It does not have to be a book. TikTok, she points out, exists for a reason. AI is here whether anyone is ready or not. Learning, in her framing, is not a project with an end date but a constant, and a precondition for growth.

The third influence is the one most leaders are too proud to name. "Some of it is luck," she says, before immediately reframing it: you build a certain piece of luck within your own village as you grow in your role and within your organization. Midha is an unapologetic believer that it takes a village to be successful, and she deliberately surrounds herself with people who know more than she does across a number of different areas. Coming from a recruiter, that is a fairly practical form of humility.

The 100X Problem

The candidate side of the AI story, Midha believes, is under-discussed relative to its impact. Companies that have not yet adopted AI are catching up, and that conversation gets the airtime. Meanwhile candidates armed with Gemini, ChatGPT, and everything adjacent have already changed the physics of the funnel. If you can apply 100 times in a day, she notes, you never would have been able to do that before. It is genuinely advantageous to candidates, and she says so plainly.

The consequence lands on recruiters. Teams are being flooded with applications that all look and sound and feel the same, which erodes the traditional screening signals almost entirely. Midha's conclusion is not to lament the volume but to raise the skill level of the people receiving it. Recruiters, she argues, now need to upskill in order to differentiate a candidate pool that has been algorithmically flattened. The craft has moved. Reading a resume is no longer the job; reading past one is.

Listen First, Then Build the Plan

Her advice to other talent leaders starts with a verb that rarely tops these lists. Listen. Whatever the state of AI adoption at your own company, whether it is front and center and ready to go or still theoretical, seek to learn, to listen, and to understand first, then interpret what will actually work for the organization you are in. Market trends, she says, should be taken with a grain of salt. One size does not fit all.

The interpretation should then be structured rather than urgent. Midha insists that nothing has to happen immediately, but that leaders should always arrive with a plan built in horizons: zero to three, three to five, five plus. It is a discipline that converts anxiety about change into sequencing, and it gives executives something concrete to approve.

None of which excuses timidity. Leaders, she says, need a certain level of willingness to take a risk, to ask the questions that may not be comfortable, and to push the envelope. It is the lesson from that first manager, now stated in her own voice and aimed at her peers.

On the technology itself she is neither an evangelist nor a skeptic. Talent acquisition, like every other business unit, is rapidly evolving, and Midha sees this as the moment when the function has to get on board. The purpose is not displacement but leverage: doing the work more efficiently and more effectively so that talent leaders can be more strategic in their approach. That is the caveat she keeps returning to around AI today, and the reason she keeps reading.