Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top London based Director operating in the Human Resources space. If you think a Director is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
John F. Ferraro
Board Of Director of ManpowerGroup
Mr. Ferraro became a member of the Advance Auto Parts Board of Directors in February 2015 and was appointed Lead Independent Director in November 2015. Mr. Ferraro served as Global Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Ernst & Young (EY), a leading professional services firm from 2007 to December 2014. In addition, Mr. Ferraro served as a member of EY’s Global Executive board for more than 10 years. Prior to his COO role, Mr. Ferraro served in several senior leadership positions at EY, including Global Vice Chair Audit. He joined EY in 1976 and has served a variety of global companies. Mr. Ferraro is a CPA and a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. He currently serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees of Marquette University.
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About : ManpowerGroup is a multinational human resource consulting firm, providing recruitment and assessment, training and development, and more.
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Ciara Jordan
Global Operations & Professional Services Director of SHL
Ciara Jordan is the Senior Vice President, Global Operations at Cision. Jordan has more than 20 years of business operations and process expertise. She is responsible for Cision’s global influencer research teams, monitoring production, distribution editorial ops and client services for EMEA and India. Prior to joining Cision, Ciara held leadership roles at Dell, Durrants and Gorkana Group. Ciara has a Bachelor of Commerce and Master in Business Studies from University College Galway, Ireland.
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About SHL: SHL, the global leader in talent innovation, helps companies transform productivity through deeper people insight.
Richard Doherty
Senior Director Product Marketing EMEA of Workday
Richard Doherty is senior director product marketing at Workday with EMEA-wide responsibilities for Workday’s HCM and financial management applications. Prior to joining Workday, Richard was part of a team that pioneered cloud based recruiting and talent management solutions in Europe. Joining Jobpartners as one of the first employees in 2000, Richard held a number of positions across professional services, sales and marketing, helping Jobpartners grow into one of the market leaders in Europe. In 2011 Jobpartners was acquired by Taleo, the cloud recruiting and talent management leader at the time. Richard subsequently spent time at Taleo and Oracle as HCM Strategy Director before joining Workday. Richard holds a degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.
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About Workday: Workday provides SaaS-based enterprise solutions for a company’s human resources and financial management activities.
Patrick Wehrmann
Group Managing Director & CEO, StepStone UK of StepStone
Patrick Wehrmann joined StepStone 2012 as member of the supervisory board. In February 2014 he was appointed to his current role as Group Managing Director with specific responsibilities for the group businesses (Totaljobsgroup, Jobsite, SAON UK) in the UK, Mergers and Acquisitions and international HR. Before joining StepStone as Group Managing Director, Patrick served as Managing Director of Axel Springer Digital Classifieds. In this position he held several supervisory and advisory board positions in the digital classifieds businesses of Axel Springer worldwide. Previously, he was Commercial Publishing Director / CFO of the BILD Group and the Axel Springer Magazine Division as well as COO/CFO of the Axel Springer Magazine and International Division. In the beginning of his career he held several positions in the French, German, US and UK businesses of Axel Springer. Patrick graduated in Business Administration (Diplom-Kaufmann) at European Business School (EBS) in Oestrich-Winkel. He also studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Dijon (France) and at the University of Colorado.
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About StepStone: StepStone is a leading international provider of software and services for the human capital management sector.
Alex Fourlis
Managing Director UK of CareerBuilder
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About Broadbean, CareerBuilder: CareerBuilder is an online platform specialized in HR Software-as-a-Service to help companies with the recruitment process.
Stephen Edwards
Group Marketing Director & Chief Marketing Officer of Robert Walters
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About Robert Walters: Robert Walters is a global, specialist professional recruitment consultancy.
Toby Fitzherbert
Non Executive Director of CIPHR
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About CIPHR: CIPHR is a privately held company and is a vendor of human capital management software.
Bill Atkinson
Business Development Director of Concentra
Bill is responsible for driving Concentra’s Analytics Solutions business through the development of Value Propositions and associated products and repeatable solutions. Bill has over 20 years of experience in PE (LDC, Easynet), Consulting (A.T. Kearney) and industry (BOC Gases; Eli Lily) where he has led teams across several operational functions (sales, delivery, project management, service management and support)
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About Concentra, TrueCue: Concentra is a UK-based business consulting and technology services company, serving clients across a number of economic sectors.
Haitham Al-Khatib
Managing Director of Clearmove
Founder @ Clearmove
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About Clearmove: Clearmove specializes in the fields of relocation services, global mobility, travel, and enterprise solutions.
Andrew Lavelle
Co-Founder & Managing Director of TalentPool
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About Alvius, TalentPool: TalentPool is a Talent Matching Platform connecting talented recent graduates.
Tom Davenport
Director of TalentPool
Tom Davenport is a Co-Founder at TalentPool.
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About Alvius, British Army, TalentPool: TalentPool is a Talent Matching Platform connecting talented recent graduates.
Tamsin Jones
Co-Founder and Executive Director of TheBoardroom Africa
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About TheBoardroom Africa: The Boardroom Africa (TBR Africa) promotes exceptional female talent to boards across the continent
Pawan Lokwani
Director of Recruitment Smart Technologies
Pawan is a young, successful, and award-winning entrepreneur based in the UK . He has experience in the talent market globally in Europe, Americas and Asia for more than 15 years and has successfully built teams globally and sold enterprise solutions to global clients.
His passion to channel growth and economic opportunities make him stand out from the crowd. Pawan began his career with one of the world’s largest consultancy firms in India. In recognition of his outstanding performance, Pawan was moved up the ladder and transferred to the firm’s London headquarters where he, once again, outshined his peer group. He has led projects for few of the world’s largest institutions like Warner Brothers, Ofcom, Universal Pictures, Cadbury etc.
While he achieved unprecedented success in his career, Pawan was quick to pay heed to the entrepreneurial spirit within him to set up his own Technology consultancy firm in the UK. By the time he was 35, Pawan had already expanded businesses to five countries employing over 80 people.
At an early stage of his entrepreneurial journey, Pawan had a clear-sighted vision to steer opportunities in the disruptive technologies and thus started building AI business to get 10X returns on the efforts deployed.
With a background in Sales, Technology and team development, Pawan is successfully scaling up the Talent AI B2B saas venture – Recruitment Smart Technologies to achieve global heights
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About Recruitment Smart Technologies: SAAS, B2B, DeepTech, Talent Supply chain automation, HR, Recruitment
Yusuf Jazakallah
Director of Recruitment Smart Technologies
Yusuf Jazakallah is a Director at Recruitment Smart Technologies.
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About Recruitment Smart Technologies: SAAS, B2B, DeepTech, Talent Supply chain automation, HR, Recruitment
Stephen Herniman
Finance Director of Meet
Stephen Herniman serves as finance director at Meet, a recruitment company focused on the life science industry.
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About Meet: Meet is a recruitment solutions provider in the life sciences industry.
Hannah Stockley
Director & HR Consultant of HR Optimisation
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About HR Optimisation: HR Optimisation works with tiny companies to implement HR strategies and actions that are realistic, simple, and extremely successful.
Geoffrey Banda
Co-Founder & Director of Myjobo.com
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About Myjobo.com: Myjobo.com is Malawi’s leading online site for jobs, recruitment and careers. It covers both the formal and informal employment marketplace.
Dan Collier
Co-Founder, Director of Sales and Strategy & CEO of ElevateDirect.com
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About ElevateDirect.com: Productivity enhancement tool for recruitment across all workforce categories
Paul Owen
Managing Director of Sales Talent Spotters
Paul set up Sales Talent Spotters in 2011 to help companies find and retain good salespeople and to help people with the proven ability to sell – or the potential to sell (his particular passion) – to find great jobs. Like many business people, he identified a gap in the sales recruitment market having experienced recruitment services that claimed to do much but failed to deliver. Prior to setting up Sales Talent Spotters, Paul spent 15 years developing market-leading services alongside successful sales teams. Highlights included a property company which he grew by 400% in 5 years and a trade body he set up from scratch to over 400 members in 3 years. In 2012, as part of his mission to find new sales talent, he launched the nationwide skills programme – Let’s get Britain selling!© – to introduce thousands more people to the world of sales. It is now delivered at over 30 universities across the UK. A regular and engaging speaker at business events on all things sales, he is a judge of both National Sales Awards and Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
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About Sales Talent Spotters: Sales Talent Spotters is an exceptional recruitment firm.
Edward Farquhar
Director of Grace Personnel
With over 15 years of City experience specialising in SMEs, Ed has invaluable experience in guiding and working with management teams.
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About Grace Personnel: Grace Personnel provide recruitment for permanent and temporary office support personnel throughout Maidenhead.
Nigel Gibson
Director of Gibson Professional Search
Nigel Gibson has over 20 years of senior level experience in the satellite industry having served in executive positions for industry leading companies including Telesat, SES and GlobeCast. In 2014 he founded GPS, Gibson Professional Search, an executive search and recruitment business focused on the satellite industry. As a result of Nigel’s industry expertise and global network GPS has grown quickly to become a leading player in satcoms recruitment, providing many of the industry’s most successful companies with talented executives.
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About Gibson Professional Search: GPS is executive search firm that specialises in the satellite communication telecommunication and broadcast service industries.
Andrew Griffin
Managing Director of Oakhall
Andrew Griffin is the managing director of [Oakhall Ltd](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/oakhall#/entity). Previously, he was the senior vice president of industry and investor relations at [Monitise](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/monitise). Prior to Monitise, Griffin worked at Robertson Stephens and UBS, holding positions as technology equity analyst. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering from the [University of Southampton](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/university-of-southampton-2#/entity).
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About Oakhall: Oakhall is a specialist and unique firm of consultants that helps boards and executive teams increase there company performance.
Vicky Ciacca
Director of Be Positive Analysis Solutions
Vicky Di Ciacca is a Director of Be Positive Analysis Solutions and is passionate about Business Analysis and promoting best practice and knowledge sharing. She has over 15 years experience of delivering change as a BA, consultant and trainer. Vicky is currently working with the IIBA UK chapter to establish the Scottish Regional Events.
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About Be Positive Analysis Solutions: We’re not recruitment consultants, so we don’t think like recruitment consultants. We’re business analysts; we think like you.
