Thom Staight

Three Firms, One Piece of Advice

The origin story is unusually literal. Staight was a graduate with very little work experience and no fixed idea of what he wanted to do, so he did the obvious thing and went to the people whose job it was to place people. "After the third time that happened," he says of the firms suggesting he join them, "I thought there's so many people saying this, I probably should look into it."

What he did next is the tell. Rather than accepting the nearest offer, he became, in his words, more organized and structured, and went out to meet a broad cross section of the London recruitment market. There were a lot of firms at that time. He filtered for the ones that seemed the most professional and had the best offering, picked one, and joined. "The rest is history." The instinct to survey the landscape before committing has never really left him.

The Managers Who Built the Operator

Staight is generous about the people who shaped him, and precise about what each contributed. In his first management role, still in his twenties and working at an executive search agency in London, a couple of very good managers drilled into him what he calls real operational rigour around process, along with the value of data in running a team: knowing what is actually happening inside your processes, where they are working and where they are not. Decades later, he says, that has stuck.

At Microsoft, where he has now spent a long stretch of his career, he offers a line few people can honestly say: "I've never had a bad boss at Microsoft." His first manager there was Elke Jorans, whom he describes as super smart and a different kind of boss from those he had known before, more intellectually reflective, genuinely interested in breaking problems down in interesting ways and finding different solutions. He had been empowered before and given real autonomy to run his businesses, but Jorans, he says, took that to a new level.

Chuck Edwards, who ran Microsoft's global talent acquisition function when it was first created and when Staight first joined, taught him something different again: how to lead a large scale function, how to inspire big teams, and how to create a vision they will follow. His current manager sits at the other end of the spectrum from Edwards and is, in Staight's assessment, extremely decisive and unusually strong at pulling together very large and disparate groups of people to get things done. Together, over the past eighteen months to two years, they have delivered significant change at Microsoft in both how recruiting is delivered and in the underlying tech stack.

The Application Flood

Ask Staight what AI has actually changed and he answers from both ends of the market. On the candidate side, the ability to tailor applications quickly and effectively and to apply to jobs at scale has transformed the volume of applications hitting every posted role. Layer on the economic instability present in most markets around the world, and candidate behaviour has shifted in ways the industry is still absorbing.

That creates genuine opportunity for candidates. It lands rather differently on the recruiter. "It's always been difficult to deliver a good candidate experience when you have large numbers of applicants," he notes, and the numbers now have gone through the roof. The live problem for recruiters and recruiting leaders, as he frames it, is how to handle that volume while still giving each individual something that qualifies as a good experience, even as the definition of a good experience is forced to evolve. Underneath it sits the harder question: how do you see past thousands of finely tuned applications and still hire the best people for the firm you work for?

Tech Literacy Is Now the Job

Staight's central argument to other talent leaders is that the tooling landscape has become genuinely unpredictable. Recruiting tools and recruiting technology, he says, are changing "faster in a more unpredictable way than it has at any point that I've been in recruiting." Navigating that means satisfying several constraints at once: staying compliant from a regulatory point of view, staying responsible in the experience delivered to every stakeholder group, applicants, candidates, hiring managers and the recruiters doing the work, and still solving for the volume dynamic.

His prescription is blunt and unfashionably demanding. Recruitment will always have very strong operational elements, but recruiting leaders in particular now need to become tech literate. They need to think hard not only about what they are doing today but about whether what they are building can be future proofed, because the technology evolves so quickly. And they need to do it in a way that is both ethical and experience driven. "That's super, super challenging," he says, "much more so than it has been in the past." Coming from someone who has watched the function reinvent itself several times, that is not hand wringing. It is a calibration.

The Peers He Watches

Staight keeps a short list of practitioners whose thinking he rates, and he names them readily. Hayden Hughes, a managing director at AMS who built up and ran the firm's global sourcing organization and did substantial work rolling technology out through it, he calls a thoughtful expert on sourcing and talent attraction, "an interesting cat." Martin Haywood, who once worked for Staight and later held several roles at Amazon including in its devices business, now leads technology talent acquisition at Sainsbury's, one of the UK's largest retailers, a job Staight admires precisely because of its scale and diversity. And Cath Possami, his exact opposite number at Amazon running EMEA and Asia, gets the respect reserved for someone carrying an identical load at a direct competitor.

It is a revealing list. None of the three are chosen for title alone; each is chosen for having built something at scale or thought carefully about how the work is changing. Which is, in the end, the same standard Staight applies to himself.