“Echo chambers are costing you and the business”
Thank you Tom Thomas for the generosity and the push. Not only for having me on Vision Voices, but for nudging me out from behind my desk and in front of the camera. People who know me know the camera is one piece of equipment that has been my nemesis for years.
I loved the conversation because it is exactly the kind of hiring discussion we need more of. The format gives us space to actually unpack what we are seeing in the market, not just talk about it in the abstract.
The market is not “shifting.” It is changing. Properly.
A few things we got into:
Consciously building teams with diversity of thought and perspective is now a must-have. Echo chambers are costing you, and they are costing the business. The boardrooms that hire well in 2026 are the ones doing the harder work of bringing in genuinely different perspectives, not just different faces.
Digital fluency is baseline, not a nice to have. A senior candidate who cannot move comfortably across the tools their team already lives in is not modernising the function. They are slowing it down.
Recruiters need to earn their seat by bringing market intelligence, discretion, and pattern recognition. A LinkedIn export with a cover page is not a shortlist. A directory of names is not a search. If your search partner cannot tell you what the market is actually paying, who is genuinely open, and who is positioning, they are not doing the work.
AI is a fantastic tool. Use it like one. It does not replace good judgement or the “unique you.” And stay miles away from cookie-cutter outreach and spray-and-pray messages.
Vision Voices Episode 2 is live. The full conversation goes deeper than the four points here. Tom and I get into what has actually changed in regional hiring across the last decade, why the muscle memory of the last cycle is not coming back, and what we look for in the senior people we recommend.
If any of the four points above are landing in your week, we are probably already in a version of this conversation with one of your peers in the region. Watch the full episode at the link above. Or meet the team directly.
— Anjali Samuel, Managing Partner
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“She is a woman of substance. It is not a joke to thrive as a head hunter in the region for over 3 decades. She has matched some of the top FMCG talents to some of the best companies in the Middle East. She has seen it all.”
Tom Thomas
