Simon Wedlock

From the Floor to the Function

Wedlock's route into recruitment began with an approach he very nearly turned down. He was working operationally in hospitality when a recruiter asked whether he fancied joining an agency. His instinct was to stay in operations. "I thought recruiters were like estate agents," he recalls of the industry's reputation at the time. "No one wanted to be one."

What changed his mind was realising how little he would actually be giving up. The role was still about connecting people within the hospitality industry, still about working with great businesses and with the producers behind some of the best restaurants, bars and hotels in the market. The subject matter he loved stayed intact. The punishing hours of live service did not.

The translation turned out to be more direct than he expected. Hospitality, as he describes it, is entirely about people: building connections, providing great experiences. A recruitment process can be built on exactly the same principles. Make candidates feel genuinely valued through their journey. Give them the opportunity to find a role they will actually want to stay in long term. Wedlock has since worked both agency-side and in-house, and he sees the same core discipline running through both.

The People Who Shaped the Method

Two figures stand out when Wedlock traces his own development. The first is the operations manager who gave him the work-with-purpose rule. Its value went well beyond table service. It taught him to interrogate his own presence in a room, to understand why he was in service, why he was in operations, and what it would take to eventually run a restaurant of his own.

The second is a former head of people who recruited him into a role and became, in his description, an incredible ambassador for what a people and culture function is supposed to be. What impressed Wedlock was not strategy but bandwidth of attention. That leader had time for people. They listened to everything, whether the matter was relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things or a genuine headache. "Applying that patience really stood out for me," he says. It reset his understanding of how to be effective in a people role, and he still measures himself against it.

A third voice belongs to a former colleague who offered a line Wedlock now repeats as doctrine: a CV is only five per cent of a person. Everything else, the reasoning goes, only surfaces in conversation.

Give People the Benefit of the Doubt

Asked what he would tell other talent leaders, Wedlock does not reach for a framework. He reaches for a posture: give people the benefit of the doubt. You never know what has brought someone to their next application. They might be looking tentatively at the market. They might urgently need a change. They might be trying to get out of a culture that has become unhealthy for them. None of that is legible on a document.

So his instruction is simple and unfashionably human. Give them a chance. Hear their side of the story. Form an opinion based on speaking to them rather than making a snap decision on a piece of paper or an application that arrives through an ATS. The dividend, he argues, is not only fairness but discovery: "You'll find that there's things that you never realized that you wanted in an applicant that comes just from having that time and that care and that attention to having a conversation."

He is equally candid about what the job costs. Recruiting can be a thankless task, full of rejection, silence, and candidates who accept a role elsewhere when you were certain you had the better one. His advice to peers in-house and in agency alike is to bank the wins deliberately and return to them when the run of results turns. That habit, he says, makes the journey and the experience a lot more worthwhile.

AI as Supplement, Not Substitute

Wedlock uses AI daily, mostly ChatGPT and Copilot across the Microsoft and Outlook suite, and he notes that colleagues in the business also work with Claude. He turns to it when he hits a creative block, or when he has a high volume of messages to write and wants a different angle on the language. It makes his life smoother, speeds up decision-making, and cuts the time sunk into complex tasks.

What it does not do is take over his day or his job, and he is deliberate about keeping it that way. He remains passionate about writing his own content and generating his own ideas, because they come from his own mind. The alternative worries him: drop in a couple of prompts, take the output, skip the fact-checking, and before long you have lost your own voice to one that is not yours.

He applies the same standard to candidates. AI has given applicants far more scope to enhance a CV, which can cut both ways. His guidance is to lead with your own experience and background and let AI sharpen it, rather than handing over the whole application. "If you just let AI run everything, you're going to be unstuck, and you're going to have an application that looks very AI-driven."

Zoomed out, he expects AI to keep threading itself into ordinary life, through phones, laptops, office software and eventually cars, until it simply blends into the way we live. His concern is not the technology but the abdication it invites. He half-jokingly invokes Wall-E, the passengers immobile in their chairs while robots handle everything, as the caricature version of a real fear. The safeguard, in his view, is insisting that AI works for us and with us, so that people continue to make their own decisions and the creative and people-based industries, hospitality very much among them, are not hollowed out.

The Constant Beneath the Change

Wedlock is clear-eyed about how the market has shifted. Candidates have more choice than ever. Stability is not what it was, with many people inclined to move on after two or three years, and each time they return to the market they arrive equipped with new tools. Loyalty has to be earned rather than assumed.

His answer to all of it is the one he has been practising since he first walked a restaurant floor with a reason. Slow down enough to listen. Treat an application as the beginning of a relationship, not the end of an assessment. Let people tell you their story, because it will tell you far more than a CV ever will. In an industry racing to automate the front end of hiring, Wedlock's insistence on the conversation is not nostalgia. It is a competitive position.