A recently published list on Coder Magazine’s Substack — “The Top 100 Most Influential People in Recruitment” – has generated some buzz, but also raised some eyebrows. It was great to see our own Greg Savage included on the list – a well-deserved nod to his decades of leadership, insight, and enduring influence across the recruitment industry globally. On the surface, it appears to showcase a wide-ranging cohort of industry voices. However, dig a little deeper and the list resembles more of a corporate prestige ranking than a genuine reflection of who is actively shaping the future of talent acquisition and ‘recruitment’.
The dominance of Fortune 500 internal talent leads, tech executives, and VC-backed HRtech founders leaves one asking: where are the recruiters?
A missed opportunity to reflect the full ecosystem
Lists like these serve a purpose: they celebrate influence, elevate voices, and often give credibility to new or under-recognised players in the field. But when the list overwhelmingly favours high-profile individuals from major corporates, it begins to feel more like a PR victory lap than a snapshot of recruitment’s real change agents.
The omission of traditional and boutique recruitment agencies is particularly striking. These businesses from nimble start-ups to established consultancies – are the ones deeply embedded in sourcing, attracting, and securing talent across industries. They are headhunting passive candidates, unlocking hard-to-reach markets, and managing negotiations that directly impact organisational performance.
It’s the recruiter in a boutique firm cold-calling niche engineers; the agency that builds entire contingent workforces in regional areas; the firm that curates candidate pools for industries chronically short on skills. Influence in recruitment isn’t just about creating talent marketplaces or overseeing employer brands — it’s about actually getting people into jobs. Often, the ones doing that work aren’t found on glossy lists.
Internal talent is important – But it’s not the whole story
The growing influence of internal talent acquisition (TA) teams cannot be denied. Many are leading initiatives in skills-based hiring, internal mobility, and inclusive hiring. Their contributions to employee retention, workforce planning, and candidate experience have evolved significantly over the past decade.
But there’s a fundamental difference between those managing inbound interest and those creating markets where none yet exist. Recruitment agencies, by contrast, work at the frontline of supply and demand — where the talent pipeline is not warm, not known, and often not looking. They don’t just fill jobs; they find the people no one else could, and bring them to roles they didn’t even know they wanted. That’s influence.
To ignore agency recruiters in favour of TA leaders is to privilege one part of the funnel and miss the source of much of its value.
Innovation isn’t always loud
Another oversight is the lack of emerging, disruptive players from outside the Fortune 500 sphere. Many of the most exciting developments in recruitment today are coming from start-ups, bootstrapped businesses, and independent consultants — not major corporates with employer branding budgets.
Australia alone has seen a boom in niche recruitment players doing things differently: from AI-assisted candidate curation to on-demand recruiter models, and boutique agencies embedded directly inside scale-up teams. These innovators don’t always have PR firms or media visibility, but they’re transforming outcomes every day.
If we’re serious about celebrating the people driving recruitment forward, we need lists that:
- Acknowledge agency recruiters and their role in shaping industries.
- Recognise executional influence, not just digital footprint.
- Celebrate start-ups, SMEs and regional players that are delivering results in hard-to-staff sectors.
- Consider metrics beyond job titles – such as time-to-hire reductions, quality-of-hire outcomes, and hiring innovations.
There’s a missed opportunity here, perhaps Australia needs a list of their own…
