Annabel Nichols is an award winning global talent strategist recognised for delivering Global Recruiting and HR transformations at Accenture and Avanade, accelerating business growth, inclusion and engagement at scale.
What’s a recent professional achievement of yours that you are proud of?
1) Named as one of Recruiter’s Top 11 most Influential In House Recruiters
2)Designed and implemented ‘License to Hire’, a global interviewer training program. Quadrupled interviewer population to 8K+ and certification completion target exceeded by 5%
3) Transformed our Candidate Experience strategy, doubling scores in 12 months and winning 4 awards [ERE Media ‘Talent Board’ Candidate Experience awards
What is your prediction for the future of the TA industry?
I believe we need to have a clearer understanding of what AI and agentic capabilities will be needed to augment TA and the huge possibilities this will unlock. I’m not sure yet what this will look like, but may well be us having parallel type workforces, a hybrid type approach – with one agentic and the other human. Our Human TA SME’s roles will evolve to be ‘experience’ experts, focused on surprising and delighting candidates and managing the agentic workforce to successfully deliver the transactional and formulaic type tasks. Our human TA skills in turn evolve to include the onboarding, training and ongoing fine tuning and governance of AI agents, and being an SME of the business, workflows and process – ensuring the agents continue to be up to date, accurate, unbiased and relevant. There will also be a huge change and adoption management piece which will become a vital component of TA Leaders roles.
What projects are you planning on working on in 2026?
Working with C-Suite to build a robust, ethical, agile and best in class TA AI Strategy that accelerates business growth, drives operational excellence and inclusion at scale