We are so pleased to announce that our Co-Founder, Emma Storey, has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, an annual award recognising up to 100 of the most exceptional leaders and practitioners across talent acquisition.
Honourees are selected from thousands of nominations and candidates across the industry, based on the impact of their work, the depth of their craft and their influence on the future of recruiting.
For Emma, the recognition is particularly meaningful because it reflects something that has been at the heart of Hera since day one: recruitment should be about people, not just placements.
The compliment Emma hears most often from candidates is not really a compliment about recruiting at all. “I don’t even know if I can call you recruiters,” people tell her. “It’s like you’re our personal agent.”
Emma has now spent a decade in recruitment, the last three building Hera, which has been designed around a simple conviction: that the fastest invoice is rarely the best outcome. Here at Hera, we work with tech startups and scaleups, building close relationships with founders and helping them build diverse teams, with a particular focus on women in tech and on diversity in tech more broadly.
A career change that stuck
Emma came to recruitment around ten years ago, after roughly eight years working in a completely different field and making the decision that she wanted a genuine career change.
She didn’t know much about the industry she was walking into. “I didn’t really know what recruiting was, but I thought it looked like a job that I could do.”
That was enough to make her put herself forward, landing at an agency working a risk and compliance desk within insurance, about as far from tech as a starting point gets.
She moved into tech recruitment during that same first stretch of her career and went on to work across three different agencies before eventually founding Hera.
That journey, from insurance compliance to product and engineering leadership searches for fast-growing technology companies, gave her something more useful than a specialism.
It gave her a comparative view of how recruitment firms actually operate, and a clear sense of which parts of the standard playbook she wanted no part of.
The founders who handed her the reins
Emma spent the majority of her recruiting career at ISL Talent, run by two founders she still credits for shaping her career: Alan and Henry.
What made the company unusual, she says, was that it was highly autonomous and not KPI driven. It was a genuine departure from how most agencies are run.
That freedom allowed her to develop a method of her own rather than simply inheriting one.
“That autonomy really helped me to flourish in this role and start to be quite creative with it, and start to recruit in my own way, rather than just a specific way that I’d kind of been taught previously.”
Recruitment, Emma notes, is notoriously money-driven, often organised around how quickly an invoice can be paid. “I was never really about that. It was much more about doing a more thorough and a better job for the candidates and the clients at the same time.”
Being given the space to work that way is what she appreciated most from those founders, and it is the operating principle she carried into Hera.
AI and the shrinking middle
Emma is candid that AI has shaken up the recruitment industry, and that the evidence shows up first in her own job flow.
Across the junior and mid end of the market, she has watched teams get smaller. Not eliminated, she is careful to say, but leaner. And the expectations placed on new hires have shifted with them.
“The expectation of people coming in and the speed at which they’re expected to work is definitely different now with the use of AI.”
Here at Hera, we have chosen to embrace the tools rather than resist them. Both our co-founders are working mothers running a business, so making the most of the time available matters.
“There aren’t many hours in the day, and we’re trying to get as much done as we can.”
Anything that can be built into their workflows to make the work quicker, easier, better and “more credible” goes in.
For Emma, AI isn’t just about automation either, she uses it as a thinking partner on a daily basis. The technology may be changing how recruiters work, but for us at Hera, it hasn’t changed what good recruitment should feel like.
Humanising recruitment
Asked what advice she would offer other recruiting leaders heading into 2027, Emma doesn’t reach for a tactic.
She comes back to the ethos that Hera was founded on: “We treat people how we expect to be treated.”
The whole brand, and the whole reason we exist, is candidate and client experience. That means treating people not as CVs and LinkedIn profiles, but as people. As humans, parents, and caregivers. Whatever makes a person’s story and job search unique matters to us at Hera, and Emma makes sure it matters to her clients too.
In practice, that means touchpoints, documentation, and support throughout the entire hiring process. It is the part candidates single out most often, and the reason they reach for words like “personal agent” rather than recruiter.
On the client side, it means refusing to define success by speed.
“It’s not about just filling a role as quickly as we can,” Emma says. “It’s about understanding what the challenges are for the business, creating a strategy with them.”
Then comes finding the right person. More specifically, finding the right person who will stay.
That is followed by work on retention, making sure new hires are thriving once they are inside the business.
“There’s a whole piece that we can do as recruiters rather than just the recruitment itself.”
The commercial logic isn’t lost on Emma either. Being human and genuinely caring about people, she notes, tends to pay off in repeat business.
The people she points to
Emma is also quick to point towards the people who have helped shape her journey. Such as our other Co-Founder, Nicola Morse and the person Emma built Hera with, whom she describes simply as “absolutely amazing.”
Outside the business, she names Chris White of Kodu, who recruits in product design for physical products and hosts a podcast, and whose community work she singles out above the rest of it. “He’s fab,” she says.
That kind of contribution matters to Emma, because ultimately, the future of recruitment isn’t just about better technology or faster processes; it’s about better experiences.
A recognition that means something
Being named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026 is a brilliant recognition for Emma.
But perhaps the most fitting thing about it is that the award recognises more than what she has achieved.
It recognises how she works.
Ten years into her recruitment career, Emma is still questioning the traditional way of doing things, still looking for ways to improve the experience for candidates and clients, and still firmly of the belief that recruitment works best when you remember the people at the centre of it.
That’s what Hera was built around & it’s what we’ll keep building on.
Congratulations, Emma. We’re very proud of you!