Career Journeys in Talent Acquisition: Tori Graham

Thanks for reading! This series is designed to shine a spotlight on Talent Acquisition professionals and highlight their career journeys and learnings so far. Today, we're joined by Tori Graham. If you'd like to be next, please reach out to a TTC Community Manager.

Introduce yourself in one sentence:

Tori Graham has spent her career building teams, challenging assumptions and asking better questions, guided by one simple philosophy: curiosity over certainty and humanity over process.

Can you walk us through the key milestones in your career in the talent acquisition space? What were some pivotal moments or decisions that shaped your journey?

I started in recruitment completely by accident. Don't we all?

After a couple of years in agency recruitment, I realised I was becoming frustrated by the fact I never got to see what happened after a placement. I wanted to know whether people were thriving, not just whether they accepted the offer. That curiosity led me in-house, joining HelloFresh, a business with such a strong employer brand that candidates wanted to hear from us.

While I was there, I was diagnosed with ADHD. It completely blindsided me that nobody suddenly saw me as less capable. If anything, I was given more freedom to figure out how I worked best, and that experience fundamentally changed how I thought about people at work. It taught me that when you design work around people's strengths rather than expecting everyone to work the same way, everyone benefits.

My next big milestone was joining Bother as the first Talent hire, with the challenge of bringing recruitment back in-house after relying on RPOs. It was one of those roles where I got to build as well as hire, creating processes from scratch, significantly reducing recruitment spend and averaging a time-to-hire of around 25 days across everything from customer experience roles to highly specialised engineering, data and product positions.

Like many people in Talent Acquisition, I wasn't immune to the post-COVID redundancy waves. As the market slowed, I decided to take what was supposed to be a passion project and see where it could go. I founded Audacity to help organisations build more inclusive workplaces for neurodivergent people through training, consultancy and one-to-one coaching. I'm incredibly grateful to the hundreds of organisations that trusted me, especially considering I often described my workshops as "professional bullying" because I challenged leaders to rethink long-held assumptions. Somehow, that became a selling point.

Looking back, another pivotal moment was speaking at RecFest about ADHD and how employers can unlock the strengths that often come with it. That talk probably did more to shape Audacity than I realised at the time.

Which brings me to today. The Talent Acquisition market is recovering (somewhat) and, thankfully, so have I after a couple of years of 80-hour weeks. I wouldn't change a minute of building my own business. It taught me more about resilience, commercial thinking and influencing than any job ever could.

But at my core, I'm a recruiter. I love solving hiring problems, partnering with leaders and helping people find roles where they'll genuinely thrive. That's the thread that's run through my entire career, regardless of the job title.

In this rapidly evolving industry, what strategies or practices have you adopted to continuously enhance your skills and stay ahead of the curve? Do you have any resources or learning methods you'd recommend to others?

One thing I've always been intentional about is keeping my ear to the ground. I still have relationships with colleagues from every stage of my career and they're now spread across start-ups, scale-ups, enterprise businesses, agencies and internal TA teams. They're all solving different problems, hiring in different markets and working with different philosophies. Having those conversations regularly means my own thinking is constantly being challenged.

One of my greatest strengths, not that you asked, is that I have strong opinions, loosely held. I genuinely like being wrong because it means I've learned something. Recruitment changes too quickly to become attached to a single way of doing things.

The same applies to how I use AI. I don't ask ChatGPT to do my job for me. I use it as someone to challenge my thinking. I'll explain a hiring problem, tell it what I think the solution is, then ask it to poke holes in my reasoning, consider unintended consequences or argue the opposite case. It's a brilliant way to avoid confirmation bias, but only if you're willing to hear an answer you don't like.

Ultimately, I don't think there's one right way to be a great recruiter, but there are plenty of ways to be a bad one. Staying curious, being guided by a strong moral compass and accepting that none of us ever stop learning are probably the closest things I've found to universal truths in Talent Acquisition.

What has been the most challenging aspect of your career in talent acquisition, especially when you were actively seeking work? How did you overcome it, and what advice would you offer to others facing similar hurdles?

I truly believe that what's meant for you won't pass you by. That doesn't mean redundancy, rejection or being at the mercy of the market doesn't, to put it bluntly, fucking suck. It absolutely does. Talent Acquisition has always been cyclical. One minute you're drowning in vacancies, the next you're one of thousands of recruiters all competing for the same handful of roles.

Looking for work as a recruiter is a uniquely strange experience because you can't help but notice everything. You spot poor candidate experience, overly complicated application processes, endless interview stages and ghosting. It's particularly frustrating when you're applying for the very role that exists to fix those problems.

What gets me through it is trying not to take the process personally. Hiring decisions are made with incomplete information, changing priorities and countless factors you'll never see as a candidate. You can spend hours wondering why you weren't selected, but most of the time you'll never know. I'd rather put that energy into the next application than into trying to reverse engineer a decision I wasn't part of.

If there's one piece of advice I'd give to recruiters, it's this: go through your own hiring process. Apply for jobs. Experience the friction. Find the clunky bits. Ask yourself what barriers you've unintentionally created. A sentence saying, "Even if you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply," doesn't magically make a process inclusive. If we genuinely want to improve diversity, especially in senior hiring, we have to design recruitment processes that make talented people feel able to participate, not just invited to.

Nothing has made me a more empathetic recruiter than spending time as a candidate again.

The recruiting world can be fast-paced and demanding. How do you strike a balance between your professional commitments and personal life? Are there specific routines or rituals you follow?

I've learned about work-life integration by getting it wrong in almost every conceivable way.

The last two years of running my own business meant 80+ hour weeks were the norm. Work became my life. I missed important moments, both in my own life and in the lives of people I love, because I was pursuing a mission that felt so much bigger than me. Earlier in my career, I'd sleep with my work phone next to the bed, take calls on date nights and answer emails at family gatherings despite no one asking or expecting me to.

Over time, I realised something that's surprisingly easy to forget in Talent Acquisition: we're not saving lives. What we do matters, but a candidate can usually wait a few hours for an answer. If they genuinely can't, your process probably isn't robust enough in the first place.

These days, I'm much clearer about protecting the things that fill my cup. If something matters to me, it goes in my calendar. Whether that's time with family, seeing friends or simply switching off, it's much harder to ignore your own needs when they're scheduled alongside your meetings.

I also don't think balance looks the same every week. Some seasons of life demand more from work and others create space for the rest of your life. Rather than fighting that, I've learned to move with the seasons and appreciate what each one brings.

As someone involved in talent acquisition, you've likely witnessed various technology and trend shifts. Which technologies or trends do you believe have had the most significant impact on the industry, and how have they influenced your role?

I think AI is going to have a profound impact on Talent Acquisition, but not every application of it is going to make hiring better.

One trend that particularly concerns me is AI interviews at the point of application. Will they help filter out candidates who don't actually know what they're talking about? Probably. But recruitment isn't just about filtering people out, it's about attracting great people in the first place.

If you're trying to engage passive candidates, many simply won't invest the time. If you only ask certain candidates to complete AI interviews, you've just introduced another opportunity for bias. And if someone spends time completing an AI interview only to receive silence for two weeks, you've created emotional investment with no return. They'll remember your company, just probably not for the reasons you hoped.

Where I think AI shines is as an amplifier. It can remove repetitive admin, help recruiters analyse information more effectively and even challenge our own thinking. I use LLMs regularly, not to make decisions for me, but to question my assumptions and help me see problems from different angles.

Talent Acquisition has always been, and always will be, a fundamentally human function. Technology should make us better at the human parts of our job, not replace them.

For those entering the talent acquisition space or those looking to pivot within it, what's the one piece of practical advice you'd give to help them thrive, especially if they are actively job-seeking?

If I could give one piece of advice, it would be to build relationships, not networks.

Particularly in the start-up and scale-up world, you'll often find yourself as the only person in Talent Acquisition. Finding your people, whether that's through communities like The Talent Community or the recruiters you've worked alongside over the years, becomes invaluable. They'll challenge your thinking, celebrate your wins, pick you up after the inevitable lows and remind you you're not alone.

Those relationships shouldn't stop with other recruiters either. Some of the most valuable people in my network are candidates I couldn't hire, hiring managers I've partnered with or colleagues who've gone on to incredible things elsewhere. You never know when your paths will cross again, or when one of you will have an opportunity that changes the other's career.

Recruitment is a surprisingly small world, and reputations travel fast. Skills can be learned, technology will continue to evolve and trends will come and go, but people remember how you made them feel.

As I've said throughout, Talent Acquisition will always be a fundamentally human function. Being a good human is one advantage that no technology, trend or gimmick can ever take away from you.