Insights Archive | Arctic Shores

How to Change Your Hiring Process (Without Losing the Rest of the Business)

Written by Arctic Shores | Sep 30, 2026, 4:51:01 PM

Changing how you hire is rarely the hard part. Bringing the rest of the business with you is, especially in a large, complex organisation.

That was the theme of a panel at our last TA Disruptors Summit, where Hung Lee sat down with three TA leaders who've each pushed a significant change through: Sophie Clark, Global Group Resourcing Director at Entain; Laura Boyle, who leads Emerging Talent at Publicis Groupe; and Richard Freeborn, Group Head of TA at Howden.

Between them they've built employer brands from scratch, restructured teams around AI, and centralised hiring across dozens of business units. Here's what they'd tell you about how to change your hiring process without stalling, or losing the business on the way.

Why do hiring changes fail, even when the idea is right?

Usually because the change arrives before the person leading it has understood how the organisation actually works.

Richard's most useful story was a failure. In his first weeks at Howden he moved to roll out an employee value proposition, something he'd done before at a bigger, more established company. It didn't land. The idea wasn't wrong. He simply hadn't yet understood how the business saw TA. Howden is founder-led and had run for years without a real TA function, so a proportion of senior leaders didn't share the assumptions he'd brought from more corporate worlds. Some didn't see TA as something that sourced candidates at all.

His point generalises beyond one company. "Context is everything," he said, contrasting a banking world of rational, numbers-led decisions with the creative, gut-led culture he met at Adidas, where the same business case landed completely differently depending on who was in the room. The org chart and the documents won't tell you how a place really works. You only learn the lived truths once you're in it, so learn them first, stay humble about what you don't yet know, and move in micro steps rather than one big bang.

How do you stop change being "done to" your team?

Get ahead of it. Contribute the intelligence that shapes the decision, instead of waiting to receive the plan.

Sophie's team were facing their second big product and technology restructure in a year, and the change fatigue was real. Rather than wait to be handed the plan, she put her team ahead of it. Over three months they interviewed around 200 candidates in the market, to test whether the roles the business wanted to design could actually be hired for.

That did three things. It gave the business real evidence for decisions on how to level and where to locate roles. It made her team fluent in the hiring ask before a single role opened. And it turned "not again" into "we're shaping this."

Hung named the principle underneath it. Change feels completely different depending on whether you're upstream of it or downstream: whether you're contributing intelligence and shaping what happens, or receiving a decision someone else made. Downstream, your sense of agency drops and anxiety climbs. Upstream, you reposition and gain from the change.

How long does stakeholder buy-in take, and when is it "done"?

Longer than you think, and it's never quite done.

Laura has spent four years bringing 20-plus Publicis agencies around a single principle: hire for future potential, not past experience. The lesson she keeps returning to is that the beautifully laid-out change plan isn't what makes the difference. The relationships are. She has spent an enormous amount of time at every layer of the business, and the hardest layer wasn't the top, where it was a straightforward data conversation, but the agency leads below it.

What unlocked them was ownership. Rather than telling agency leads that leadership wanted this, she brought them into a room together, something that had never really happened, and asked what made their best entry-level talent special. They assumed they were all hiring different people; in fact they were hiring a very similar profile. Nobody talked about pedigree or academic background. It was all attitude, behaviours and skills. (Arctic Shores helped facilitate those sessions.) That shared realisation laid the foundation for the whole strategy.

And it doesn't end. People join, leaders move on, and the market shifts, so the reason the change matters has to be made again and again; the "why" Laura started with before AI looks different today. One accelerant she'd lean on harder next time is internal competition: once one agency saw another winning better talent and better clients off the back of the new approach, they wanted in. As she put it, proof travels faster than persuasion.

Should you drive change top-down or bottom-up?

Both at once, and don't forget the middle.

All three agreed you have to run top-down and bottom-up concurrently. Richard's warning is that the middle is what gets squeezed: senior leaders have signed off on the business case, the people on the ground understand the need, but middle managers often haven't had the message cascaded clearly and aren't close enough to the detail. That's where change stalls. Be nimble, too: one business line might be top-down and directive, another bottom-up, so a single playbook won't fit. "The north star is really simple," Richard said, "but you've got about 25 to 30 different journeys, with different timescales, to get there."

Sophie added that advocacy can come from any level. A strong relationship with a people partner creates a champion who carries the message where your own team can't. And Hung made the sharp point that a yes from the top is often consequence-free, the people who actually live the change are the ones most likely to resist it, so that's where the real work sits. 

How do you handle a business that's internally misaligned?

Get the decision-makers around one table with a quantifiable business case, and name someone accountable for the outcome.

Richard's route is to use TA's biggest advantage: it's measurable. Most changes have a business case you can quantify, so put the commercial impact on the table, spell out what happens if the business doesn't align, and use your HRD or HR business partner to facilitate the conversation. Sophie's addition is not to down tools but to name a single accountable owner, a project sponsor or HRD, otherwise you loop endlessly with no one responsible for the outcome. Her line for a manager who says the change isn't their priority: "I'm not here in service of you, I'm here in service of the organisation."

What should you do on Monday?

The panel's closing advice, in short:

  • Understand the context before you touch anything, and celebrate the micro-wins along the way (Richard).

  • Expect to iterate. You're not changing from A to B, but A to B to C to D, so start with what's in your remit and build proof points (Sophie).

  • Accept that it will be messy, and enjoy it. A converted cynic is the best advocate you'll get (Laura).

The thread tying it all together is agency. The teams that change well get themselves, and their business, ahead of the shift, shaping it rather than bracing for it. That's how you change how you hire and keep the business with you.

Key takeaways

  • Read the business before you change it. Hiring changes fail when they arrive before you understand how the organisation sees TA. Learn the lived truths, stay humble, and move in micro steps.

  • Get ahead of the change. Contribute the intelligence that shapes the decision. Sophie's team interviewed 200 candidates before a role opened, turning "not again" into "we're shaping this."

  • The stakeholder work is the job. The relationships matter more than the plan, the middle layer is hardest, and it's never finished. Proof travels faster than persuasion.

  • Run top-down and bottom-up together. Don't let the middle get squeezed, and adapt the approach to each business line.

  • For a misaligned business, use the numbers. Put a quantifiable business case on the table and name one accountable owner.

  • Expect to iterate, and expect mess. Change now runs A to B to C to D. Start small, build proof points, and turn your cynics into advocates.

Watch the full session

The full panel covers more than we could fit here, including how to work with a business whose leadership is internally misaligned, and how Publicis keeps it fair when several agencies want the same candidate.

Watch or listen to the full session below.

And if you're planning a change to how you hire, explore how Arctic Shores can help.

 

Speakers

  • Hung Lee (moderator), Recruiting Brainfood
  • Sophie Clark, Global Group Resourcing Director, Entain
  • Laura Boyle, Emerging Talent lead, Publicis Groupe
  • Richard Freeborn, Group Head of TA, Howden

Transcript

Hung Lee: Let's do some self-intros, it's better than me introducing you. Let's go from left to right. Sophie, would you like to introduce yourself, who you are and what you do?

Sophie Clark: Hi everyone. I'm Sophie Clark, global group resourcing director for Entain. No one's heard of Entain, so our attractor brands are Ladbrokes, Coral, Foxy Bingo. So, in the sports betting and gaming space.

Laura Boyle: Hi everyone, I'm Laura and I head up emerging talent for Publicis Groupe. For those who don't know Publicis Groupe, we're one of the giant holding companies in the advertising, media and PR world.

Richard Freeborn: Hey everybody, I'm Richard, group head of TA at a company called Howden, an insurance broker. Relatively young, it's been around about 32 years, about 26,000 people.

Hung Lee: So all the panellists are here because you've all encountered change management scenarios. I'm going to start with you, Richard. Lessons learned on changes that maybe didn't land as well as you might have imagined. Can you give us a story?

Richard Freeborn: Sure. Luckily I've made a career out of conceptual failure most of the time. I'll talk about employee value proposition at Howden. This is one not to put on your film, because I'll be very blunt about it.

I joined Howden about 16 or 17 months ago. Literally my second day, I was in the final-stage RFP decision meeting to decide which organisation we'd partner with to develop and deploy the first employee value proposition at Howden. This seemed perfect. I'd done it before at Adidas, a larger company, so naively I was like, been there, done that, we can roll this out pretty successfully.

We'd shortlisted internally which organisation we'd partner with, and I had an unnamed senior stakeholder, one of my peers, going into a meeting with one of the three founding members of the organisation. It was a lift conversation: "I'm going up to talk about a series of things, is it worth me briefing them on the EVP work you're about to deploy?" Naively, second or third day in, I said, "Yeah, go brief them." First epic error, because we had someone who wasn't a specialist going to brief a senior stakeholder, and they didn't have the technical expertise or the foundation of knowledge about what an EVP even was.

About two hours later the person comes bounding towards me. "Didn't go that great." The business stakeholder had said, "We're a people-first organisation, that's what we say, we don't need an EVP, let alone an employer brand, let alone consistent recruitment marketing. Why do we need recruitment marketing? We've got our corporate brand." So that was the first error: I let someone without the technical expertise go and brief a senior stakeholder.

The second piece was I didn't really understand the context of the organisation. I'm going to go off on a tangent, but bear with me. I didn't understand the lived truths of the senior stakeholders at Howden in terms of what they perceived TA to be. Fast forward about six months, I was at our leaders' summit, a leadership workshop for our top 350 or so people. Bounding over to me in a break was the chief of staff to one of our revenue-generating business lines, and it started with my surname, "Freeborn". When they start with your surname, it's going to be a bad conversation. "Freeborn, I don't agree with what you're doing with TA." I said, "What do you mean? I've only been here about six months, I can't have done much wrong yet." She said, "Well, you're bloating the function."

For context, we do about 5,000 to 6,000 hires a year, and at the point I joined, the group TA function was 12 people. We're now 40 people. So we've grown exponentially, but I still think we're pretty lean for what we do. "Well, you're bloating the function. All these costs get recharged to the business. What resource do you actually need to administer contracts?" I was like, what the flip.

This isn't a criticism of her, but she'd been in the organisation about 28, 29 years, and for probably 25 of those she'd never had an HR function, let alone a TA organisation. Her lived experience of TA was: we, the business, go and find the candidates, we hand them over to TA, and you administer the contracts and paperwork. So to her, me bloating the function to 40 people was an exponential increase in cost, and she couldn't fathom why.

The reason I digress onto that: we were trying to deploy an EVP, but we didn't have an employer brand or recruitment marketing, and a proportion of our senior leaders who'd grown with the organisation didn't even understand that TA could source candidates. Of course it wasn't going to land. So the second big lesson was understand the context of the organisation. I come from Barclays, BNP Paribas, Adidas, places with established HR functions that knew what they were for.

The third big error was we went big bang. We were talking about a global EVP, and we hadn't even deployed recruitment toolkits to various markets. So now, and a colleague on my team knows this because it's going to be her job to do it, we're taking micro steps. We're talking about attraction toolkits this year, because in the argument with our corporate marketing team we didn't want "brand" or "marketing" in the title. So attraction toolkits first, then the employer brand, then EVP. And piloting, finding champions in the business to pilot with first. So three big errors: got the wrong person to brief, didn't understand the context, and big bang.

Hung Lee: Round of applause for Richard. Just to dig in on the nature of the company: how important is it to understand the different categories of companies? You've come from big, mature corporates, then moved into a founder-led, PE-backed business.

Richard Freeborn: Context is everything, even when contrasting mature organisations. My background is predominantly banking, then a weird detour to Bavaria and sporting goods at Adidas. In banking, very rational decisions: X plus Y equals Z, the numbers say it, decision made. At Adidas it took me a huge time to adjust. It's a creative, designer-led, thoughtful place. I'd say, "Here's the business case, sign off." That resonated with the CFO, but you're talking to the chief brands officer, and it's "I get that the numbers say that, Richard, but my gut's telling me something different." So context, understanding the stakeholders and their lived experience of TA, is a big learning curve I probably learned the hard way.

Hung Lee: Institutional knowledge, isn't it. How the organisation operates outside the org chart and the explicit documentation. You won't know it until you're in it. Final question: how would you accelerate your learning on institutional knowledge?

Richard Freeborn: Be humble. You get hired for your technical expertise, but bring some humility alongside it. I've learned that the hard way, coming in brash, "here's my 12-month roadmap, we're going to get all sorts done." Listen to your team, hopefully some of them know a good deal more than you. Surround yourself with people from inside the organisation and outside it. Have that blend.

Hung Lee: Sophie, let's go to you. We talked about institutional knowledge, but sometimes the data shows you what needs to be done. Can you give us the change management experience you encountered?

Sophie Clark: Absolutely. I joined in 2024 from Capita, which I thought was a company that loved change, until I joined Entain. About six months in we did a wholesale product and technology restructure. It was a painful six to nine months, but we got through it. Then I sat down with my chief product and technology officer in April this year and he said, "We're going to do it again." We're fundamentally rethinking what we need to hire in product and tech, as most organisations are, in the advent of AI changing skill sets and ways of working.

The first thing that went through my mind was, not again, my team have this massive change fatigue, and we're never included at that early seat at the table. So I made a recommendation that, in tandem with the internal changes, we conduct some market intelligence, a review of what's going on out there with candidates. We did our usual talent intelligence report with a brilliant provider, but we needed to go deeper. So for the past three months my team have been interviewing around 200 candidates in the market for real insight on how these changes would land. Is this a role you'd be interested in? Is our company one you'd want to join? Understanding their motivations, and critically, being able to feed that insight back to the business as they design their model, around what's actually feasible. Do these candidates even exist in the external market? They can do a lot internally on the restructure, but if we can't hire these people, it's largely irrelevant.

It was useful for three reasons. One, it gave us a huge amount of rich data. Two, my team are now really familiar with the hiring ask, because they've spoken to 200 candidates across our core locations, so we can start planning attraction, assessment, and engagement. But the main driver was that I needed my team to feel like they co-owned this change. I needed them bought in from the beginning, with a voice in the room, so they can be credible with stakeholders and say, "Your idea is a plan on a page. We've spoken to 200 candidates. We know the mood music, and we can tell you what other companies are doing." It's already informing decisions on leveling of roles and location strategy, where talent is more readily available. And my team are excited, they can't wait to start hiring, because they've got such a good grasp of the market. So it pivoted the mindset from "oh no, not again, we're being done to" to "no, we're involved, we're in this together", with that upfront co-ownership.

Hung Lee: That, by the way, is how you become "strategic". Change feels different depending on whether you're upstream or downstream of it. If you're downstream, someone else made the decision, you don't have a sense of agency, and anxiety shoots up. If you're upstream, contributing intelligence and shaping what happens, you reposition and gain from it.

Sophie Clark: Absolutely. One thing we try to encourage across TA is a growth mindset, this agility. This activity has only strengthened those skills for future change.

Hung Lee: How did you come up with the insight that you needed to reframe the challenge? Was it obvious at the time?

Sophie Clark: It was probably coupled with the external talent intelligence work. It's within my remit, so I don't need permission for my team to go and talk to candidates, I don't need to influence anyone to do it. And I wanted the business to feel we're credible, that we're not shying away from yet another change, we're ahead of it.

Hung Lee: Can you give us an update? Where are you right now?

Sophie Clark: We've finished our market test, created a full deck for the business on what aligns with the wider talent intelligence report, and we're presenting it to our chief product and technology officer this week.

Hung Lee: Good luck with that, you'll have to update us. Round of applause for Sophie, a brilliant example. Laura, going to you. We know the Publicis brand, but there are countless companies within it. Can you give the context of the group, and your challenge dealing with so many different business units?

Laura Boyle: Publicis Groupe is a massive global organisation, about 90,000 strong globally. Here in the UK alone we own 20-plus agencies, all with their own specialisms, cultures and ways of doing things. When I came in four years ago, I was tasked with looking at the macro-level data across the whole group, which no one had really done before, the agencies all operated separately. Group leadership had invested in bringing someone in to centralise an emerging talent function, so I was fortunate to have senior backing to think about how we do something new, in an industry that's typically quite behind closed doors and traditional in how it hires.

I had to present initially, "This is what we're seeing at group level." But at the agency level they weren't interested in that data. The macro data was really clear, there were key problems we needed to solve by centralising. But at the agency level they weren't seeing it at that scale. To your point, Richard, we're working with creative minds, people used to getting others to think, feel and do things. They don't want to sit and have me talk to them about the pipeline and the data.

So what we realised early, and where I had leadership buy-in, was that we needed to bring the whole business on a journey of hiring for potential. We knew that as the bedrock of our strategy would solve so many of the issues the data showed. And we had to bring every agency with us, which took a lot of effort, persistence and determination. The key thing we learned was the amount of time that had to be spent on stakeholder engagement, nuanced for every layer of the business. At the very top it was a data conversation, and that was the easiest part. But the next layer down, the agency leads, was really hard. We were never going to succeed top-down, saying "senior leadership want this, we need to make it happen." We needed to bring them into a conversation that made them feel like they were coming up with the solutions.

How we did that: we brought agency leads from across the agencies into one room, which had never really happened before, and asked them to look at commonalities across their entry-level talent. To all intents and purposes they believed they were hiring different people, but when we opened the lid, they were hiring a very similar profile. We ran work streams across role types, and asked them what made their top talent special, the magic ingredients. Arctic Shores helped facilitate those conversations, which gave them credibility. What was amazing was that nobody talked about pedigree, nobody talked about academic profile. It was all about attitude, behaviours and skill sets. That was the aha moment, "why have we never sat and done this before? It's such a simple concept." And that laid the foundations for us to pitch the proposition and build the strategy.

That's not to say the stakeholder engagement stopped. We've had to do it down through every level, and we're still doing it three, four years on. It's taken an inordinate amount of time and effort, but that's the stuff that made the difference, not the beautifully laid-out change plan. You can get stuck in the weeds of talking, listening and articulating what you're trying to do in their language, but that's what led to success.

Hung Lee: Just so I'm clear, where you wanted to get to was a centralised way to hire high-potential people that would then feed into these 20-plus business units?

Laura Boyle: We wanted to reset the business around a hiring-for-potential model. A lot of that was driven by a desire to diversify who we were bringing in. Advertising and marketing is quite a homogeneous industry, and Publicis Groupe could clearly see the profitability benefits of diversifying, because they need to resonate with a consumer population that's incredibly diverse. So it was clear to make that link. Hiring for potential could become the bedrock, and we could build an entire process from outreach and attraction through to induction around it. The key was aligning and galvanising people around that as a consistent principle. What we haven't done is uniformly apply it, not every agency follows the exact same process. There's nuance for each role type. So we've achieved consistency and endurance across the group, but built processes that work for each area and find those signals early.

Hung Lee: I love the combination of a standardised principle with localised implementation, giving respect to the local identities. On stakeholder management, you mentioned an inordinate amount of time. Is there a way to calculate or forecast how much it takes?

Laura Boyle: That's an interesting question. Truthfully I don't know, because it's unique to your business context. We probably underestimated it. You can make the change happen, it was embedded a year, 18 months ago, but we're still having those conversations, because we implemented change in a changing organisation. People come and go, business leaders, my team, hiring managers, and they're not coming from places where this is the norm. So every time a new hiring manager or agency leader joins, we've had to re-educate and run top-up sessions. And the reason you're doing it distils over time, when you're four years down the line and the change is largely embedded, it's still got to come through loud and clear to people who aren't aware of it, and you can't rely on others to distil those messages for you. So I don't know that there's a way of quantifying it. It's become BAU for my team. We've got to keep equipping the team who are at the front line of the questions and resistance with the messages, tools and resources, in the context of the environment we're operating in. We started this journey before AI was a thing, and the reasons we were doing it then look very different to today, so we've had to reframe the "why" in line with how the market shifted.

Hung Lee: I love the need for repetition over time, and consistency. Whenever a new person comes in, they need onboarding into the new way of doing things. If anybody knows how to forecast the amount of stakeholder management needed, please let us know. Now, top-down versus bottom-up, a question for all of you. We've got to do both, that's the obvious answer, but there are trade-offs. How do you think about how much time you invest in top-down sponsorship versus the smaller work at the bottom that might lead to more substantive change? Richard, first.

Richard Freeborn: You've hit the nail on the head, you have to do both concurrently, and you mustn't miss out the middle, which is usually who gets squeezed most. You've got the people on the ground who understand the nuts and bolts, junior hiring managers, junior folk in your team, they're in the weeds, they understand the need. You've got the macro-level picture, and if you're in an organisation like mine you've built the commercial business case, everybody's signed on, they understand the ROI. The reason you really need to deliver it is those people in the middle, who probably haven't had the message cascaded clearly from the top and aren't close enough to the weeds below. No organisation I've been in has got that spot on. And be nimble: one business line might be very top-down and dictatorial, the CEO says jump and you say how high; another might be very bottom-up. It's not one-size-fits-all. You almost need an ethnographer's view of the business, different units, even teams, can be culturally different. One thing my team will be sick of me saying: the north star is really simple, but you've got about 25 to 30 different journeys, with different timescales, to get there. That's the art, that's the difficult stuff.

Hung Lee: Sophie, on this.

Sophie Clark: It's also about building advocacy and having champions for the change, and that can be at any level. You establish a great relationship with a people partner or HR partner, and they advocate and support it. I do echo the middle-management point, we get a lot of nods at the very senior level, "yeah, absolutely, we'll support that", and then my recruiters struggle to push that message up to middle management. So we leverage the broader people function and create advocates willing to champion you.

Hung Lee: It's sometimes easy to get a yes from the top, because it's consequence-free at that level, they don't have to live the experience of the change, they're out of the operation. The people who directly experience it are much more likely to have a strong opinion or resistance. Laura, back to you. If you did this again at a different business, knowing what you've learned over four years, what would you tell yourself about getting that balance right?

Laura Boyle: I agree with everything that's been said. The thing I'd be more purposeful about is how we phased it. We were careful not to apply this everywhere all at once. We started in the high-volume areas where we could see success quickly, and used people who were a bit more innovative in their thinking, who could push the momentum. It's amazing how quickly internal competition starts to play its hand, when one agency sees another doing something well and winning more clients, they want to jump on it. If I did it again, I'd leverage that more. Once we had one agency CEO singing the praises of talent, a completely new face doing incredible things and landing incredible campaign ideas, another agency lead wants a piece of that. That's super powerful, and that's where the wheels started turning faster, when the proof points became very real and obvious in the output of the work. I'd accelerate that approach next time.

Hung Lee: You've got to manifest the change as early as you can and get those advocates on board, otherwise we end up hectoring people. TA and HR just become the thing that constantly sends the mass emails around, and that quickly erodes our credibility. Let's do a quick round robin before questions. One takeaway for people who go back to the office next week thinking, "right, I've got this change management problem." Richard.

Richard Freeborn: I'll cheat and give a couple. One, already touched on, understand the context. Two, be pragmatic and celebrate the micro steps and micro wins along the way. Get the advocates and get them competing, most senior leaders are competitive by nature. And the only thing we haven't touched on: have the mechanisms in place to spot small, hopefully not catastrophic, failures along the way, and be agile in your plan.

Sophie Clark: I'd echo the agility. In the current landscape we're not changing from A to B, we're changing from A to B to C to D, and it will keep iterating. Explain that this isn't a change programme that ends when it's done. And start with what's in your gift, in your remit. Start small. The proof points then become really helpful when you're driving change on a more wholesale scale.

Laura Boyle: For me, it's going to be messy, so embrace the messiness. That's the fun stuff. It wouldn't have been the journey we've had if everything just slotted into place. There's nothing better than proving somebody wrong, a converted cynic is the best thing ever, so celebrate that and thread it through the team. The more of that you get, the more it spurs you on.

Hung Lee: I love that. It is messy, we're dealing with human beings. Let's take some questions. First one: how do you work with a business that's internally misaligned? You've identified that middle management, C-level and the operator level are misaligned, and they've asked you to do something that affects everybody.

Richard Freeborn: You need to get them around the table talking to each other and facilitate that. Leverage the HRDs, put the commercial business case on the table. One of the great things about TA, and the reason I've stuck with it rather than being an HR generalist, no offence to any in the room, is it's the most immediately tangible and quantifiable, really quickly. Most things in HR you can measure, but TA is relatively simple to quantify. So most changes have a quantifiable business case. You explain, "If you don't align, this is the impact", and most growing businesses will flounder if TA isn't firing on most, if not all, cylinders. Explain the problem statement and the impact if they don't align, then get them around the table, leveraging your HRD or HR business partner to facilitate.

Hung Lee: Do you ever down tools, Sophie?

Sophie Clark: No, absolutely not. It's really important to name someone accountable for the direction, otherwise you're constantly in this triangle loop of "what are we trying to achieve", and no one's accountable for the outcome. So a project sponsor, an HRD, someone has to be the voice of reason. I've had so many conversations with individual managers who say, "Well, I don't care about our brand", and it's about saying, "I'm not here in service of you, I'm here in service of the organisation, so I sometimes have to put my big bad corporate hat on and say, you may not care about this, but you're part of a bigger organisation, and you need to toe the company line."

Hung Lee: Final question, for Laura. In a centralised TA approach with multiple affiliate businesses, how do you manage internal competition for great candidates? You've pipelined amazing high-potential people and there's a bunfight for them.

Laura Boyle: Super interesting. We run our assessment centres by practice area, so all the media roles, say, will have hiring managers from multiple agencies in the room. Inevitably there are one or two standout candidates everybody wants. We've done a lot of upskilling for the people who run those assessment centres to help them navigate it. But what we do is go to an "offer to choose" process, and put the decision back in the candidate's hands. We give them information about the role and the agency, we ask each agency to have a personalised conversation, and the candidate chooses between multiple offers, as they would between offers from different employers. That's the only way we can do it fairly.

Hung Lee: Fantastic. I could keep chatting to this panel for ages. A round of applause for Sophie, Laura and Richard.