Will Adamthwaite
FMC Global Talent
“AI will never replace the human touch that recruitment needs, but as a tool it is brilliant.”
Will Adamthwaite has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Will's story.
Will Adamthwaite's recruiting career began behind the taps of a Belgian beer bar in Bristol, built from scratch, staffed from scratch, and run on a clock that had shifts starting at 10:00 PM and finishing long after most of the city had gone to bed. Hiring the team was the part of the job that stuck. Fourteen years later, Adamthwaite is Associate Director of Recruitment at FMC Global Talent, working at the executive end of the market and running a desk on a four-day week that only functions because artificial intelligence has been threaded through nearly every step of the process. The through line from the bar to the boardroom search is the same instinct: pay attention to the person in front of you, and build the systems that let you do it.
The move out of hospitality was practical. Adamthwaite wanted a role that resembled something closer to nine to five, and found one at FMC. What was meant to be a change of hours turned into a career. Fourteen years at a single business is unusual in an industry that treats two-year tenures as a long stint, and Adamthwaite's read on that is straightforward: it has been a good business to grow with.
What Fourteen Years in One Place Teaches You
Staying put has given Adamthwaite an unusually long apprenticeship in leadership by observation. The most formative influence has been a manager Adamthwaite has now worked alongside for a decade, joining a different team on arrival before moving across. What stood out was not sales acumen but temperament: an approach to management, mentoring and leadership that Adamthwaite describes as rare in recruitment, and rarer still in sales. The lessons ranged from the granular to the strategic, covering how to manage a day-to-day workload, how to develop business, and how to mentor others coming up through a team.
The second influence came from the client side. While helping a VP of global sales build out a go-to-market team across Asia-Pacific, Adamthwaite watched a leader hold together a group of people who were entirely remote. The tenacity was impressive. The relationship-building was more impressive. Getting distributed people to perform without the scaffolding of an office is a problem plenty of leaders have described and fewer have solved, and Adamthwaite took the model as a reference point rather than an anecdote.
Active Listening at the Executive Level
FMC's work sits at the senior and executive end of the market, where a single conversation can determine whether a search moves forward at all. Adamthwaite's argument for AI starts there. A recruiter typing notes in another tab is not listening, and at exec level, not listening is expensive. So the notetaker goes on the table during a face-to-face meeting and the conversation gets full attention.
The workflow does not stop when the meeting does. On the drive home, Adamthwaite uses a notetaker that dictates a summary of what was discussed, asks follow-up questions, and pushes the record straight into the CRM. Candidate identification runs through custom GPT workflows. There is even a fee calculator Adamthwaite built personally: when a client wants to negotiate terms, the numbers go in and the tool works out where the best return on time and investment actually sits. The philosophy behind all of it is refreshingly unprecious. Give it a go. If it works, great. If it does not, tweak it.
The Four-Day Week That AI Made Possible
The clearest proof of the approach is on the calendar. Adamthwaite's team works Monday through Thursday, a genuine four-day week in an industry not known for restraint around hours. That is not a perk bolted on top of business as usual. It is only possible, in Adamthwaite's telling, because AI has been embedded across the team's programs and processes to make everyone more efficient. The time saved is not abstract; it is a day.
For someone who left hospitality specifically to escape a punishing schedule, the symmetry is hard to miss. Adamthwaite is candid about the limits, though. Technology optimizes performance and buys back hours, but it does not replace the human element that recruitment depends on. The tools exist to protect the conversation, not to substitute for it.
Advice for Talent Leaders
Heading into 2027, Adamthwaite's counsel to other talent leaders is aimed squarely at the people with the most authority and, often, the least fluency. Be open-minded to technology. Plenty of senior operators are not as computer savvy as they believe themselves to be, and the fresh ideas tend to come from the juniors on the team, who are usually the ones genuinely pushing AI adoption inside an organization. Listening to them is not generosity. It is self-interest.
The structural version of that advice is simpler still: appoint an AI champion in every team, someone responsible for embedding the learning rather than leaving it to individual curiosity. It is the same conviction that runs through everything else Adamthwaite does, from the notetaker on the boardroom table to the four-day week. Technology is worth adopting precisely because of what it frees people up to do, which is the part of recruitment no tool has ever done well.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Will. We are honored to welcome Will Adamthwaite to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Will. 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.