Grace is a seasoned Talent Acquisition leader with over 13 years of experience specializing in the dynamic Life Sciences and Biotechnology industries. She excels at building recruitment strategies that are deeply aligned with the business roadmap, using a powerful combination of data insights and market intelligence.
Grace is passionate about leveraging technology not just for efficiency, but as a tool to empower her team. By adopting innovative TA tech, she enables her team to focus on high-impact activities like creative employer branding, sourcing niche talent, and cementing Talent Acquisition’s role as a strategic partner to the business. Despite this focus on innovation, she holds the human element of recruiting as paramount, ensuring the candidate experience is always at the forefront.
Outside of the world of TA, Grace can be found enjoying the countryside with her toddler, dog, and a few chickens in tow—and never without a cup of tea.
What’s a recent professional achievement of yours that you are proud of?
I am most proud of our recent initiative to integrate technology throughout the entire recruitment lifecycle, specifically the development of a bespoke AI agent. Previously, our job descriptions were highly variant, but this tool has brought crucial consistency to our language and levelled competencies. Its strategic impact has been twofold:
Firstly, it has become a powerful tool for analyzing our job architecture and understanding how new roles fit within our business structure. By testing JDs against our framework, it helps hiring managers truly understand the level they are hiring for. This leads to better-informed decisions, sometimes revealing that a role can be hired at a more junior level based on the core competencies and expected deliverables.
Secondly, these high-quality JDs enable us to design more robust and condensed interview processes. With precisely defined competencies from the outset, interviewers can delve deeper into a candidate’s key skills, giving us confidence that we are hiring exceptional talent who are truly aligned to the role. This has freed up significant time for the TA team, which we are already reinvesting in creative employer branding opportunities and developing new ways of sourcing talent.
Aside from this, the redevelopment and deployment of a new candidate centric careers site which truly reflects the businesses culture, removes application barriers and was rich in employee generated content (for my last organisation).
What is your prediction for the future of the TA industry?
I predict a move towards more deliberate and strategic technology adoption. While AI is powerful, it isn’t a silver bullet, and there’s no single solution that fits all needs. The future will require a disciplined approach to building a TA tech stack, ensuring it doesn’t become a disjointed and unmanageable ecosystem. The goal is to strike a critical balance: leveraging technology to create a robust and candidate-friendly process, thereby freeing TA professionals to focus on strategic impact. Technology should support, not replace, the irreplaceable human element at the heart of our industry.
What projects are you planning on working on in 2026?
We will continue to build on our technological innovations with a dual focus. Firstly, we will ensure every enhancement directly improves our candidate experience. Secondly, we will leverage our tech to translate raw talent market data into real-time, strategic insights for our Executive Committee. My goal is to move TA from a reactive function to a proactive driver of the overarching people strategy, armed with accurate and timely intelligence.