Richard Edgerton

I’m a senior recruitment and talent leader with over 20 years’ experience helping organisations find, attract and build the people they need to grow. My career spans agency and in-house recruitment, as well as eight years as the owner of my own recruitment consulting business, giving me experience from both sides of the hiring relationship and first-hand understanding of the commercial realities of running a business.

I have particular experience across financial services, consulting and professional services, working closely with senior leaders on hiring strategy, workforce capability, recruitment operations and the practical people challenges that come with growth and change.

My experience also includes senior recruitment leadership within an international financial services consultancy. I have built and developed internal recruitment capability, recruited across specialist and highly competitive markets and worked with senior stakeholders across different countries and cultures. Over the past five years, the recruitment strategies and direct hiring capability I have developed have resulted in more than £1 million in avoided agency fees.

I also bring an entrepreneurial and product perspective to recruitment. I founded and developed a Gender Decoder tool designed to help organisations identify potentially biased language in recruitment content and encourage more inclusive hiring. Applied within a live recruitment environment, the approach contributed to a 30% increase in female applicants over a 12-month period.

Alongside my executive career, I have experience as a Strategic Advisor to UProspr (now HighlightX), contributing an in-house recruitment perspective to product development, candidate experience and inclusive hiring. This has enabled me to look at talent challenges from both sides: as a customer and practitioner using recruitment products and services, and as an advisor helping to shape them.

As an advisor, I bring a pragmatic and commercial perspective on people and growth. I can help founders and leadership teams answer some of the difficult questions that emerge as a business grows: Who do we need to hire next? Are we hiring the right people at the right level? How do we compete for specialist talent? When should we build internal recruitment capability rather than rely on agencies? How do we create a hiring approach, candidate proposition and recruitment infrastructure that can scale with the business?

Having spent more than 20 years tackling these challenges, I can help businesses avoid costly hiring mistakes, challenge assumptions around people and capability, improve how they attract and assess talent, and build recruitment approaches that actively support growth. I can also bring practical insight into recruitment technology, candidate experience, inclusive hiring and senior recruitment.

I’m particularly interested in supporting start-ups and scale-ups in FinTech, financial services, professional services, HRTech and B2B technology. I believe I can add most value where a business is growing, professionalising or entering its next stage and needs experienced, practical advice on the people, talent and organisational decisions that will help it get there.

If those are some of the challenges your business is facing, I’d be very happy to explore where my experience could add value.