2026 June- ESIX London Roundtable

Our ESIX London Roundtable highlighted a significant tension happening right now. On one hand, in-house exec recruiting teams are being expected to act as strategic advisors: shaping demand, influencing talent decisions, and bringing real market intelligence to the table. But on the other hand, in these ‘do more with less’ leaner times, as hiring volumes increase and complexity rises many teams are being pulled back into delivery and execution.

We were kindly hosted by the excellent Mirjam Dekker and her outstanding team at BT Group in their wonderful offices and learned all about their function’s evolution and plans. There was a particular focus on their team of ‘Leadership Hiring Professionals’, along with how that role has elevated, now with more career development and growth opportunities, which is always a challenge in small in-house teams.

After that, the general ESIX: Executive Search Information Exchange Roundtable discussion went in various directions, though interestingly not as much towards AI as usual – perhaps indicating that AI use is normalizing, or perhaps because everyone is ‘all-AI’d-out’!

We actually talked more about our various teams and how they were differently resourced, with varying workload levels, and the variations in the internal/external hire mix at different companies. The latter, we decided, could be determined by externalities for each industry as much as it might be internal policy or culture.

One common theme among the ‘what’s keeping you up at night’ discussion was definitely change – either mergers, divestitures, new CEO’s, new team structures, and so on, and though this is the norm in our world, it seems that change (and the stress it brings) has been a stronger theme in a few recent meetings. Something to watch...