Sharon Kardam

The Turn Nobody Advised Her to Take

Kardam studied marketing and landed her first job in generalist HR, a role she still describes as wonderful. Early in her career she put her hand up for everything, and one of those things was recruiting. She loved it immediately. When the dream marketing offer arrived, she famously said no.

The trade was not a small one. She gave up permanence and a good salary for heavy commission and the raw end of tech hiring, in a market where the developers she chased had all the leverage. That decision set the pattern for everything that followed: an appetite for the harder, more interesting version of the job, and a comfort with building the plane while flying it. She has been implementing new technology into talent functions for her entire career since.

Her parents made that risk thinkable. Immigrants who arrived in the country with nothing, they taught her the value of opportunity and the habit of never saying no to it. When she walked away from the safe job, they were the ones cheering. "You kind of make your own destiny," she says, a line that reads less like a slogan than a family inheritance.

The Leader Who Rewrote Her Definition of Leadership

Kardam had run big teams for years before she met Emma Winterson-Haywood, now Chief People Officer at Wayve, the company building the AI that powers autonomous vehicles. Winterson-Haywood changed not the scale of Kardam's leadership but its character.

"I'd spent my whole career thinking leadership was about being the strong one, having all the answers," Kardam says. What she learned instead was that nobody has all the answers, and that vulnerability and authenticity are not weaknesses in a leader but the mechanism by which teams actually cohere. From that point her approach shifted, and with it her ability to harness the people around her rather than simply direct them. She names it as one of the most impactful lessons of her working life.

That willingness to say what she does not yet know is, tellingly, still on display. Asked about AI, she declines the easy expertise: "I don't think any of us have got the answers in terms of value creation." Few leaders with her tenure would risk the admission. It is the same authenticity she was taught, applied to the biggest open question in her field.

What AI Is Actually Giving Talent Teams

Kardam is blunt that the last year has tipped much of what she learned in talent acquisition on its head. But her read on the shift is more precise than the usual enthusiasm. The breakthrough she points to is not a single tool, it is the architecture: tech stacks that finally connect the whole ecosystem instead of automating one process at a time.

The consequence is space. For most of her career, she says, talent teams wanted to do more consultative work but stayed buried in sourcing and admin. That weight has begun to disperse. She now sees her teams free to be deliberate about assessment and to sit at the table helping leaders choose the right people for their roles, the work that was always meant to be the point. She counts herself fortunate that at Foster + Partners the space exists and the team can step into it, while at other organizations the same room is being created and not yet used.

The open question she keeps returning to is craft. If admin can be automated and sourcing can be leveraged, then the human interactions become the whole value proposition, and the profession has to develop them accordingly. "How do we develop our craft to a point that we can really bring different values, things that obviously you can't automate?" That, in her view, is the work of the next few years, and she is honest that nobody has finished answering it.

Razor Sharp on Business Outcomes

Asked for the single most important piece of advice she would give other talent leaders, Kardam does not hesitate. Be completely outcome and business focused. Whoever you are with, in whatever moment, be razor sharp on business outcomes, and make sure everything you do lines up to contributing to one.

It sounds simple, and she knows it. She also knows how often it fails. Too many talent acquisition and HR functions drift into what she calls TA speak and HR speak, an internal dialect that never connects back to a business result. The functions that drive the most value, in her experience, are the ones whose value is clearly articulated and understood by leadership from the very top. "If you're not part of the regular conversation from a leadership business point of view, that's a critical point where I see things go wrong."

Coming from someone who began in marketing, the emphasis makes sense. Kardam treats the credibility of the talent function as something that must be earned and communicated, not assumed. It is the throughline of her career: from commission based tech recruiting, where results were the only currency, to fractional leadership, where a client's outcomes are the entire brief.

The Company She Keeps

Kardam's influence shows up in other people's careers. Mani Kumar, now Head of Talent Acquisition at the BBC, is someone she recruited into the organization herself and someone she rates highly. She speaks with equal admiration of James Ryding, Head of Talent Acquisition at Publicis Groupe, and of Dave Owen, formerly Head of Talent Acquisition at Dyson and now working fractionally across consulting, tech stack and AI.

That last choice is a deliberate one. Owen's shape of career, she notes, is a little left field by traditional standards, and closer to where the profession is heading: fractional, consultative, technology fluent. Kardam, working the same way herself, is describing a model she helped normalize. Nearly three decades after betting her career on a market nobody could predict, she is still choosing the version of the job that does not yet have a template.