Thomas Woodhams

From a Fruit Market to the Front of the Tech Market

The sales instinct came first, and it came from home. Woodhams's nan owned a fruit market, and it was she who told him early that he was a natural born salesman. He believed her. He went into sales, then insurance, and then watched a friend move into recruitment and decided to copy him. Eleven years later he is still in it, and he has never worked in anything but technology.

The other half of the equation was already there. As a kid he built computers and played around with machines, and he loved sport with the same intensity. Those two threads, tech and sport, converged at Sony Sports Technology, which he describes plainly as a dream come true.

The path there ran through both sides of the industry. Woodhams spent seven years in agency, including five running his own recruitment firm, before moving into in-house talent acquisition just over four years ago. Owning the agency taught him what the work costs. Burnout ended that chapter, and the move in-house gave him a different kind of platform: fewer transactions, deeper relationships, and the space to build hiring processes that reflect his values rather than someone else's fee model.

The Recruiter Who Codes

Most technical recruiters learn a vocabulary. Woodhams learned the craft. Because he codes, he can steer conversations past the buzzword stage and into the substance of what an engineer has actually built, and he has found that this changes the entire tenor of a first contact. Candidates share their GitHubs. They share code. The conversation stops being a screen and becomes an exchange between two people who speak the same language.

The payoff, in his telling, is trust. Engineers are quick to detect when a recruiter is reciting a job description back at them, and equally quick to open up when they realize they are not being handled. That credibility is the foundation of everything else he does: it is why hiring managers listen to him, and why candidates stay in process with him.

AI as a Tool, Not a Voice

At Sony Sports Technology, Woodhams sits close to a real tension in the AI conversation. The company's code is, as he puts it, precious treasure. Feed it into an open model and the questions multiply fast: how much does the AI now know, what can be released, who actually owns the rights to what has been put in, and what stops a competitor from benefiting. He and his colleagues are embracing the technology, but with their eyes open.

On the candidate side, his concern is different and sharper. AI has become, for many applicants, not an assistant but a substitute voice. Cover notes and applications increasingly read as though they were written by the same person, because in a sense they were. "When you've got a tool that makes people feel the same," he says, the recruiter is left with eight candidates who sound identical and no honest way to tell who is exceptional. His counsel to jobseekers is precise rather than prohibitive: use it to catch the gaps between your CV and the job description, use it to notice what you missed, but never let it speak for you. Used as full-time ghostwriter, it becomes detrimental to your own reputation, both in the workplace and in the market.

For himself, he holds the line publicly. He never uses AI to write his LinkedIn posts, favoring video instead. AI, in his framing, is a tool for automation and speed. It is not an identity.

The Leader Who Made Room

Ask Woodhams who shaped him and one name arrives with real feeling: Tim Chattaway, a director at Sony Sports Technology. Their history is longer than their current org chart suggests. Two months into his agency career, as a brand new technical recruiter, Woodhams pitched Chattaway for a place on the PSL and was granted a meeting. Years later, he ended up working for him.

What Chattaway taught him was twofold. First, how to run a candidate experience properly. Second, and more personally, that a leader should communicate with each person according to what that person actually needs, rather than broadcasting one style at everyone. Chattaway, who has spoken at Ashby One, also gave Woodhams a chance at an organization he had only ever dreamed of joining, at a point when his own work history did not tell a tidy story. "He's really shaped who I am," Woodhams says. "He's a fantastic leader." He also points to Dominic Joyce of Schneider Electric and Jen Huulme as leaders whose work he holds in high regard.

Creating Safe Spaces

Asked for the single best piece of advice he would give other talent leaders, Woodhams does not hesitate: create safe spaces for people to be themselves. It is not an abstraction for him. He speaks openly about a decade lived with gambling and drug addiction, and about the ADHD diagnosis that became the turning point. He is now seven years clean, and he has turned that experience into a professional purpose he pursues every day.

That purpose expresses itself as advocacy for neurodiversity in the workplace and for genuinely inclusive hiring. He pushes for reasonable adjustments and clear frameworks so that people who are autistic or have ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia are not quietly penalized by processes that were never designed with them in mind. A candidate who does not hold eye contact should not be marked down for it. A candidate whose mind jumps from a TV show to a fact about hippos is not failing an interview; they are simply thinking in a way the interviewer has not accounted for. "Giving people a voice to feel seen and heard," he says, is what he wants to be known for.

His closing note is the same one he applies to himself. Everyone is learning, adapting, and trying to show up as well as they can. Take one day as it comes. Do not self-sabotage. Do not set impossible expectations. Do what you can.