Tamsin Colsey
Beacon Talent
“I wanted to bring the in-house mindset to really early stage companies that don't yet have a TA team.”
Tamsin Colsey has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing the 100 most exceptional leaders and practitioners in talent acquisition. Honorees are selected by the Talent 100 committee from thousands of nominations and candidates across the industry, chosen for the impact of their work, the depth of their craft, and their influence on the future of recruiting. This is Tamsin's story.
Tamsin Colsey's career in talent began with someone else's interview. She was a languages graduate sitting across from a hiring manager in the expert network space when he noticed that every answer she gave circled back to the same theme: building long-term relationships. Executive search, he suggested, might be a closer match for what she actually wanted from a career than the job she was interviewing for. She took the note. A decade later, she is the founder of Beacon Talent.
A People-Facing Brief, Found by Accident
What Colsey knew going into graduation was directional rather than specific. She wanted something people-facing. She wanted pace. Beyond that, she was interviewing across several industries and several kinds of role, testing which environment would hold her interest. The advice she received in that expert network interview turned out to be unusually well aimed.
Her first years in recruitment, beginning roughly ten years ago, were spent at The Up Group, a digital executive search firm. It was, by her own assessment, an ideal way to enter the profession: constant exposure to strong technology leaders, and exactly the tempo and human contact she had been looking for. It also gave her an early education in what a well-run search business looks like from the inside, a reference point she would return to when she eventually built her own.
Seven Years In-House, and a Unicorn
From search, Colsey moved in-house, where she has now spent around seven years across a couple of technology startups. Tractable is where she built the bulk of her career. She joined as a business recruiter, then took on technical recruitment and people partnering, and worked her way up to Head of Talent Acquisition over five years with the company. Tractable grew steeply during that period and became an AI unicorn, which meant Colsey was building hiring engines against a moving target: headcount plans, org designs and seniority mixes that changed as fast as the valuation did.
That growth journey also made her an early practitioner in applied AI. She has been working inside AI companies for five or six years now, well before the current wave of tooling arrived in talent teams, which gives her a useful immunity to hype. She still supports Tractable a couple of days a week on a fractional basis alongside running her own firm.
Beacon Talent and the In-House Mindset
In January of this year, after five years at Tractable, Colsey decided the moment had arrived to do the thing she had always intended to do at some point: start her own business. Beacon Talent is built around a specific conviction. Very early stage companies, the ones without a talent acquisition function of any kind, deserve the same standard of thinking that a well-resourced in-house team would apply. Instead they often get a transactional agency relationship and a patchy candidate experience.
So Colsey works closely with founders on the highest stakes hiring they will ever do: the founding team. That means partnering on role definition, market reality and process rather than simply shipping profiles, and repairing the damage where earlier agency engagements have left founders skeptical. Six months in, the model is her answer to a gap she watched from both sides of the table, first in search and then in-house.
Two Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Her
Ask Colsey who shaped her and the first name predates her career entirely. Her father is an entrepreneur who ran a successful business for more than 30 years, and she grew up in an entrepreneurial household watching what that work gave him. It was not the mechanics of running a company that stayed with her so much as the energy it clearly generated in him. The idea of building something of her own sat in the back of her mind for years before she acted on it.
The second name is Clare Johnston, founder of The Up Group and Colsey's first employer in the industry. Johnston took a significant risk early in her own career and built the firm from scratch at a point when the European technology ecosystem was, as Colsey puts it, a little underserved. What impressed Colsey was the dual achievement: not only a strong executive search business, but a genuine network and community for European tech leaders alongside it. Working with someone operating at that level so early in her own career set a durable benchmark.
A Fork in the Road for AI
Colsey is enthusiastic about what AI has done to the daily texture of talent work. Tasks that used to be manual and time-consuming are no longer tasks at all, and the acceleration in the last couple of years has been sharp enough to reshape the landscape. But she is clear-eyed about the fact that the industry is standing at a fork in the road, and that individual companies and talent leaders will choose different paths from here.
One path is what she calls a scattergun approach: embedding AI everywhere in the process without much thought about why, which she expects will produce some poor outcomes. The other is deliberate and strategic, and it buys back time for the part of the job that no tool can do. Her argument rests on something that has not changed at all across her ten years in the profession. Candidates are still deciding where to spend the next few years of their careers and their lives, they still want a human presence in that process, and they still want to feel that an employer is investing in them. Tools and automations, in her view, should be facilitating that rather than fully replacing the human side of the role.
Advice for the Leaders Coming Next
Colsey's counsel to fellow talent leaders starts with an honest read of the market. Org charts are changing quickly, partly driven by AI. Five years ago it was common to see very large talent acquisition teams inside startups; that structure is flattening, middle management layers are eroding, and roles are shifting shape. She does not soften the implication for anyone treating the traditional path as a guarantee.
The opportunity, she argues, belongs to the people who change alongside the industry. The leaders who stay relevant will be the ones who stay close to the work and the detail themselves rather than managing at a distance, who keep the actual end goal front of mind, and who apply AI in the specific places where it drives good outcomes instead of jumping on every new trend. It is a discipline she practices as well as recommends, continuing to experiment with new tools as they appear while keeping the founding teams she builds squarely at the center.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Tamsin. We are honored to welcome Tamsin Colsey to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Tamsin. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.
