Sarah Ware

Falling Into It, Then Falling For It

Ware left university without a plan. She landed a good job in the finance department of a travel company and found, fairly quickly, that she did not love it. Her boyfriend at the time was working in recruiting, running high-volume temporary placements in construction, and in the evenings she would help him out by calling candidates. It did not take him long to notice what was happening. "You're really good at this," he told her, "and you're bored with your job. Why don't you go and try and do recruiting?"

She did. The relationship ended soon afterwards, but the career did not. She joined an agency local to her, loved the work, and wanted more of it. A friend passed her CV along to another friend, and she landed a role in a London agency called Morgan McKinley, then focused entirely on financial services. She spent roughly five years recruiting into investment banking. "I really did literally fall into it," she says. "There was no calculation about what I was going to do. It was just, this is good, and I loved it from day one."

What a Kind Leader Actually Does

Her first manager in London was Martin Killeen, and more than twenty years later they are still in touch, even though they have not been in the same room for something like eighteen years. What she took from him had almost nothing to do with recruitment technique. It was a model of leadership she has spent her career trying to live up to.

Ware calls it kind leadership, and she is careful to define it precisely. A kind leader is not simply someone who does nice things. It is someone who is calmly honest with you, who shapes how you think, and who helps you reframe a problem so you can see it differently. Above all, Killeen empowered rather than rescued. Plenty of managers, she notes, respond to a junior person in trouble with a reassuring "don't worry, I'll sort that for you," and then quietly remove the problem. "But actually that's not what you're after," she says. "You want to know how to learn to tackle these kind of challenges." She was junior at the time. She still thinks about him when the leadership quandaries land on her own desk.

Killeen is now a talent acquisition manager at SRAM, the bicycle components company in Chicago, and was previously head of recruiting for IMC Trading. Ware rates him as one of the most impressive people she has worked with, full stop.

Permission to Fail, and Grace Under Pressure

The second influence she names is Rachel Shepherd, an HR business partner at IBM during Ware's tenure there as senior talent acquisition manager. The two covered the same business units from very different seats, and Shepherd became a coach and mentor in the truest sense. She never blew smoke. What she offered instead was a corrective to one of the most corrosive beliefs in high-performance recruiting: that you are only as good as your most recent success. Shepherd taught her to allow herself to fail, to learn and grow from it, and to eliminate options by choice when thinking about where a career should go. Five years since they last met in person, they still trade questions on LinkedIn, and increasingly in both directions.

The third is Sarah Jackson, VP of Talent at Sage, who was Ware's manager there. Ware's time at Sage was compressed and difficult. There were two or three iterations of the team during her tenure, she had to make a significant number of her people redundant, and her own role was eventually included. What she remembers is not the turbulence but the conduct. "There's just ways of handling people with, like, an intense humility and grace," she says. That lesson lands with particular force in a field where many practitioners, herself included, came up through the agency path. Agency recruiting is not aggressive, she is careful to say, but it is competitive, high energy and high octane. Choosing humility inside that environment is a deliberate act, and in her experience it is what brings the best out of people.

All three still guide her, none of them are her boss, and the reversal is what she treasures most: the moment when the mentor comes to you with the question. She would add Candice Winter to the list without hesitation, a former senior director at IBM and NTT Data now working as a fractional talent acquisition consultant. "If you'd asked me for five, she would've been in my five, for sure."

Everybody Is Running a Different Race

On artificial intelligence, Ware refuses both the hype and the panic. Her central observation is that the industry is not in one race but many. She has worked in businesses that were genuinely strong at building AI tooling for their own customers while being noticeably slower at adopting anyone else's, simply because ways of working and priorities sat elsewhere. She has also interviewed with organisations operating at the true frontier. Both realities are normal.

That leads her somewhere unfashionable. Yes, the landscape is changing enormously, and yes, the trajectory is steep. But precisely because the pace of evolution is so rapid, only a handful of companies will ever be at the cutting edge at any given moment. "We can't all be there," she says. Businesses do not need to fear being left behind quite as much as they are being pitched to fear it, and there is real value in learning from other people's experiences rather than being first. The line she does draw is between moving at your own pace and not moving at all.

On the existential question, she is unequivocal. Talent acquisition will not be replaced by AI. It will be enhanced by it, and enhanced exponentially. The practitioners who lean into the tooling will be in a stronger position, and she expects a second-order benefit that gets discussed far less: AI as a leveller that strips out some of the intergenerational friction in today's workplaces.

The Case for Getting Your Hands Dirty

Her advice to fellow talent leaders is disarmingly practical, and she admits it may not sound revolutionary. Use the tools. Do not simply build a strategy for the use of tools. She has seen the pattern too many times, including in ATS implementations: leadership does the critical analysis, makes the pitch to the business, wins the budget, and then assigns the actual hands-on work to someone in the team. "Leaders don't really get that hands-on with this stuff," she says, and that gap is where she believes many will struggle. Nobody is well positioned to argue one way or the other about a platform they have never operated themselves.

She holds herself to the same standard. Between assignments she has been testing platforms and attending conferences on the space, working through several different AI tools built for talent acquisition in the space of four weeks, Claude among them, simply because they looked interesting. The point of the exercise, she stresses, is not to crown a winner. "It's about what's right for your purposes right now," she says: knowing how to use it, how to optimize it, how to write commands properly, and how to get your organisation to the best possible position with the tooling it already has. Coming from someone whose entire career began by picking up a phone in the evenings to help out a friend, the through line is hard to miss. Ware learns by doing, and she expects the leaders around her to do the same.