When Nicola McQueen accepted her Lifetime Achievement Award at the TIARAs, her reflections on more than 25 years in recruitment offered much more than an entertaining journey through an extraordinary career. They provided some important lessons for an industry navigating profound technological, economic and structural change.
From pioneering managed services at Capita to leading NHS Professionals through the Covid pandemic, Nicola’s career has demonstrated the extraordinary impact the recruitment industry can have when it looks beyond filling vacancies to solving critical organisational challenges.
Her speech offered six particularly relevant lessons for today’s staffing and talent solutions leaders.
- Never underestimate the opportunities this industry creates
For today’s leaders, the message is to preserve that entrepreneurial spirit. As organisations become larger, more sophisticated and increasingly technology-driven, they must not lose the culture of opportunity and individual initiative that has historically made recruitment such a dynamic industry.
- Focus on outcomes, not simply processes
An early career disaster involving a broken-down Nissan Micra, an international candidate and a missed airport collection taught Nicola a valuable lesson: even the best-laid plans sometimes fail.
Her conclusion was simple: what matters most is whether you deliver the outcome.
This is particularly relevant as staffing firms invest heavily in technology, automation and process optimisation. Operational efficiency matters, but clients ultimately judge providers by the problems they solve and the results they achieve.
- Resourcefulness and decisive leadership are competitive advantages
Perhaps the most powerful examples came from her time as CEO of NHS Professionals in 2019. Faced with an unprecedented healthcare workforce crisis, her team launched the Stand Up, Step Forward, Save Lives campaign, assembling a national advertising initiative in just 48 hours.
Despite last-minute government objections over clearance procedures, the campaign aired and generated 60,000 applications from people willing to support the NHS. The experience illustrated something Nicola believes distinguishes the recruitment industry: its ability to mobilise people, resources and relationships at extraordinary speed when circumstances demand it.
- Recruitment’s real value is what it enables organisations to achieve
Throughout her career, Nicola has worked on major programmes, including recruitment for the British Army, the BBC’s and the development of managed service models at Capita.
But it was her experience during the pandemic that brought the industry’s wider purpose into sharpest focus: recruitment is too often underestimated because it is viewed as a cost, a supplier relationship or a transaction. In reality, the industry enables businesses to grow, organisations to transform, individuals to build careers and essential public services to function.
- Embrace technological change without losing the human advantage
Understanding people, recognising potential, building trust and helping organisations achieve their ambitions remain fundamental.
Her optimism about AI is rooted in the belief that technology can create more opportunities to concentrate on the judgement, relationships and human connections that distinguish great recruitment.
- Keep learning, reinventing and challenging yourself
After more than 25 years in recruitment, Nicola has moved into a new leadership role at one of the UK’s largest care organisations. Yet she has discovered that its biggest challenges remain fundamentally about attracting, retaining, developing and inspiring people.
Her career demonstrates both the transferability of recruitment leadership skills and the importance of remaining curious and adaptable. For leaders in an industry facing another period of reinvention, that mindset may be more important than ever.
The enduring lesson: Judge success by what becomes possible
Perhaps the most memorable message from Nicola’s speech was her reflection that a career in recruitment should not ultimately be judged by the jobs filled or contracts won, but by what becomes possible as a result.
It is a powerful challenge to an industry still too frequently defined by transactional metrics, margins and placement volumes.
The industry’s future will be shaped not just by how efficiently it supplies talent, but by how effectively it helps organisations solve problems, build capability, achieve outcomes they could not otherwise deliver and, fundamentally celebrate the difference the industry can make to people’s lives.