Thomas Warner

From Hospitality Floors to High Growth Tech

Warner studied hospitality and came off a management course knowing almost nothing about the industry he would spend his working life in. His brother, who had been recruiting for a couple of years by then, is still in the game, now living in Hong Kong and running several ventures there. Warner put his hat forward for a handful of interviews, met a few firms, and joined a small agency.

The formative years came next, at Stoddart May, which he joined roughly six or seven months into that firm's own journey. That is where the bulk of his education happened. Hands-on leaders taught him what the industry actually was, then coached him from a sourcer working the candidate side into an operator capable of running a desk, winning clients and eventually going out on his own. When the moment came to choose between moving to another firm or building something, he chose to build. GroTech was the result.

The People Who Made the Difference

Warner's first recruitment gig put him in an office alongside a high energy colleague he clicked with immediately. Twelve years on, that man was best man at Warner's wedding last year. He has since taken a different route, running his own company outside recruitment, and remains the person Warner calls to pressure test commercial thinking, marketing angles and the perennial question of how to stand out in a saturated industry.

The leaders at Stoddart May gave him the craft. What Warner had to learn later, and admits he learned the hard way, was that he did not need to do everything alone. "A little bit headstrong at the start," is how he describes his early years as a founder, wanting to do it without help. The correction has been deliberate. Over the last two or three years he has pushed himself to integrate far more with the wider industry, partnering with Talent Journey, a UK based group whose network and mentorship he credits with opening doors, and staying close to a circle of former colleagues who now sit in managing director and sales director seats.

Those relationships live in WhatsApp groups as much as in boardrooms, and Warner is emphatic about what they have taught him: the assumption that everyone in recruitment is in competition with everyone else is wrong. People genuinely want to help. "It's quite an isolated job sometimes," he says of running a lean business, and his answer has been collaboration alongside healthy competition. Peers doing something completely different will hand you an idea you would never have reached alone, and you can do the same for them.

Machines for the Admin, Humans for the Rest

Warner is unambiguously an AI optimist, but a discriminating one. His inbox, like every recruiter's, is full of vendors promising to automate everything, and he is unpersuaded that everything should be. Recruitment, he argues, will endure precisely because of what it asks of people. Changing job is among the most frightening things a person does, and in tech over the last two or three years he has had far more redundancy conversations than at any earlier point in his career, with candidates who have been impacted and candidates who sense it coming and want to get ahead of it. Those are not conversations to hand to a bot.

What he has handed over is the admin. ChatGPT is his primary tool, and he has built a range of custom bots and workflows around it to strip out the tedious layer of the job. The output shows up where clients feel it: sharper scorecards, better structured reviews, richer candidate insights, and fast, useful material on employer branding and marketing that he can align to a client's positioning. He uses SourceWell for sequencing, always with the caveat that candidate interaction is not something to sequence away. Notably, he has not put AI agents anywhere near screening.

The gain is measurable in hours. "The hours I have back now is crazy," he says, and he is clear that the beneficiary is not only him. Compared with his offering two or three years ago, Warner believes the level of service GroTech delivers to both clients and candidates has genuinely heightened. He is aware of the counter-argument, and he follows it closely, from the LinkedIn debates about applicants rejected by an ATS to the blunter recruiter criticism on Reddit. He does not dismiss any of it. He simply refuses to accept that automation and humanity are a trade.

Advice for the Year Ahead

Asked what he would tell other talent leaders heading into 2027, Warner does not hedge. Whether you enjoy it or not, AI is not going away, and it is being adopted heavily across the board. The real work is discrimination: find the right tools, and find a way to integrate them into your everyday that makes the experience better for every side of the transaction, not just for yourself.

That means looking honestly at your own market. Warner recruits go-to-market and commercial talent for high growth tech, a corner of the industry where clients and candidates are already living inside these tools, which makes adoption comparatively natural. Other sectors will differ. His instruction is to interrogate which parts of your specific process AI will genuinely improve, adopt there, and leave the rest alone. In his reading, the technology will not remove recruiters. It will remove the parts of the job that were never the point, and give practitioners more time for the candidate, the client and the relationship. "Meeting clients, meeting candidates, finding that match and putting it together," as he puts it. That is the job, and it always was.