I know I am lucky to be able to say that I had a happy childhood, I grew up in rural East Anglia in a small village where every boy of the same age were friends and all played together. I have always been obsessed with sport and playing for the village football team was basically the highlight of mine – and all my friends – lives. I must have played for the village team for about 5 or 6 years (mostly as a pretty average defender) and in that time I only scored one goal…and it was an absolute belter. It had a touch of the Tony Yeboah about it, hit first time on the half volley from outside the area and it nearly took the roof of the net off. The team and crowd all went mental – I think I was the only player to not have scored a goal in the entire time the team had been running. To this day (I still try and play football every week), I haven’t scored a better goal.

After university I moved to London and lived with a group of mates in a series of house shares across North London. They were GREAT times, we all had decent jobs (so had money to spend), and we had a brilliant time. We went out all the time, all had the same interests. Music, clubbing, football (we all played together) all came first and work came second. My first job out of Uni was on an Insurance company grad scheme, it was awful and like lots of people I landed in recruitment as an escape route while trying to work out what to do with my life. But I realised during my first year in recruitment that actually I was pretty good at it – and for the first time I enjoyed going to work. Around the same time, my girlfriend (now wife) was leaving her house share and the question of moving in together came up. That was the moment I decided that actually it was time to stop going clubbing on a Tuesday night and to start making some different priorities. 20 years later we are married with 2 kids and I’m still in recruitment, so it was probably the right call.

I love books – both fiction and non-fiction – and try and read every day. I really wanted to give a considered and inspirational answer here, but a bit like choosing top 5 records or movies, it’s impossible. So instead 3 fiction books I have read recently that I would recommend are;

Only as I re-read this do I realise I have been reading books about people who are separate from society – or regarded as outsiders. I don’t think this reflects my lifetime of reading – or me as a person – but maybe there is something about 2020 which has made me choose these or made them stick with me.

Thierry Henry.

He is everything I want to be and never was! I had an Arsenal season ticket at Highbury for the Wenger glory years a, so had the joy of watching him at his absolute peak. Not only was he one of the best footballers ever to play, but he made it look so graceful and elegant. He is also (still) achingly cool. It’s a shallow choice, but it’s important to acknowledge what are actually the important things in life.

Give me the goal or the idea first – then talk about everything else. I really struggle to motivate myself if I don’t know the context and the goal. I think this is why I work well in companies and teams with a clear mission, I really want to be able to tie what I do back to that main goal. Without that it’s hard to find any sense of purpose.

So much to say, I am actually not sure when to start. Definitely the habit of making bad jokes during the boring parts of a meeting – even I find that annoying.

Definitely not is the short answer, but there is not one event that was significant in itself – it’s been an evolution which is still happening. I grew up in a rural area which was conservative with a small and big C, this accurately described my family as well. Until I went to university I probably didn’t really challenge the received wisdom I grew up with on any significant political topic. But as with lots of people – especially those who grow up in rural areas or small towns – university exposes you to people with life experiences different to your own for the first time – it also exposed me to a level of privilege I had never really seen up close before. Although I came from an economically comfortable family background – and most of my friends growing up would have felt the same way – it isn’t until you start to get to know people from either end of the economic spectrum that you recognise the degree of difference and the impact it has on attitudes and opportunity.

None of the difference in economic background stopped people being friends in a university environment, although it was often noticeable who came back from Christmas holidays with a suspiciously Caribbean tan. But as we left university what become clear was that ability wasn’t the key differentiator on who would get what opportunity, but it was knowledge of and access to different worlds (Finance and media especially) that would make a difference. The kids from ‘middle class’ metropolitan families had a level of knowledge and connection the rest of us didn’t. That turned into internships, interviews and jobs that others didn’t get access to. In the first ten years of my career I became increasingly frustrated with the number of people in jobs beyond their capability, largely as a result of networks and schools. If you live in the UK we have a public life dominated by the 7% of people lucky enough to have a private education, to the exclusion of anyone else. This is especially true in politics & the media and I don’t believe it serves anyone well. Working in recruitment means that you get to meet people from a real cross section of society, the more I interviewed candidates coming from less privileged (and even outright deprived backgrounds) and you learn how much harder it has been for them to reach each successive step in their career, the more clear the level of inequity is that is built into the system. Access to certain industries and jobs is becoming more, rather than less restricted, especially when you overlay other factors, on top of income and class such as race, geography, disability.

My wife and I are both lucky enough to have had decent careers, so can afford to live in a textbook home counties commuter town. Becoming a parent and witnessing the kind of behaviour that happens when jostling for primary and secondary school places are up for grabs, has served to make me only more radical. As a white man from an economically secure family, I had a high level of privilege relative to the vast majority of people. My kids will have an even higher level of privilege then I did, as a parent I struggle with the conflict between wanting to provide the best opportunities for my kids and wanting to level the playing field for everyone – not to do something for my kids that displaces a deserving kid from a less privileged background. I don’t have a solution for this – but getting rid of all private education and investing hugely in education and early years childcare would be a good start.

I bought a cheese subscription during Lockdown part 1. Each month I now get a box of cheese delivered. It is probably the highlight of my month.

Cheese obvs.

I loved Black Panther, but I remember feeling sorry for Michael B Jordan’s character who actually was the one asking most of the interesting questions; why didn’t Wakanda do more to help people (especially black people) outside Wakanda? Why hide that technology from the rest of humanity – and also why accept an inherited and absolute monarchy!? Don’t get me wrong – he was obviously a bad guy – but I thought he was given a raw deal. He was asking fair questions, but he just got his ass kicked.

One of my first managers told me that if I had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right, it probably wasn’t. So don’t ignore that feeling and dig into the detail to find out what’s going on. I must have shared that a thousand times since, it’s a 100% true.

I worked for one company for 15 years, for most of the last 5 years there I was massively frustrated, for lots of reasons the company was increasingly not a great fit for me. But despite chances to leave I stayed for far too long. I learnt more in the first 12 months after I left, then in the five previous years, so no doubt not moving sooner remains a big mistake. This isn’t to say it was a bad company, just that the time when it was a good company for me had long since passed.

Totally – on more than one occasion. When I first joined Microsoft I realised I knew way less than I thought I did and I leaned heavily on people around me to learn, I have always thought of myself as a good collaborator but I had to really change the way I worked with people. What I did realise was that I had been hired not because I knew everything, but I did bring some knowledge which my boss and the team wanted. So I tried to focus on what I could bring to the team and then relied on learning (fast) to keep up.

There’s so much hope placed on AI solving everything in recruitment and automation replacing Recruiters, I think the promises are outstripping the capability of the technology in the short term. Working with AI engineers at Microsoft and witnessing the problems in trying to create effective and fair models and finding the right data to train them, makes me realise the complexity of the human interactions and judgements required in recruitment. While automation and AI will undoubtedly change a recruiter’s role, the idea that we can replace recruiters any time soon is dangerous and will likely bring unfairness into recruitment processes.

We have all shifted to operating in a fully virtual way, both internally in how we operate our teams and how we run processes for candidates and hiring managers. I think on both sides the winners will be the companies most comfortable culturally with operating in a virtual way. For some organisations it has been a more difficult shift then others; teams that didn’t already place trust and autonomy in the individual’s own hands, have struggled when teams are fully remote and employees have to balance work with a far greater set of personal pressures. Some organisation’s existing cultures made this easy for employees and their managers – and this has even enabled bonds to strengthen within teams as they support each other effectively. Others have adapted their culture to a new reality very effectively, but those who have not adapted and are expecting to immediately switch back to old ways of working are struggling and will continue to. I don’t think it is realistic – or fair to employees – to think anyone will or should accept the inflexibility of a fully office culture.

No not really. Work hard and be nice to people.

How have the events of 2020 changed the unwritten contract between employee and employer and what impact will that have on how we recruit in the next 5 years?

Brett Baumoel, VP TA Engineering, Microsoft, Paul McNamara, Partner, Eton Bridge or Martin Haywood, TA Manager, Amazon

Thank you to Thom Staight for taking 20 Questions for The Brainfood Tribune.