Amy Golding

Despite the fact I look like a twelve-year-old boy, I am in fact the Group CEO of Opus Talent Solutions. After graduating from Cambridge University in 2008, (and a brief stint pretending to be a journalist in China), I joined the strategy team at Deloitte in the Tech and Media team. After five years of living the corporate dream, I left for the rather glamorous sounding opportunity of being James Caan’s Personal Business Advisor. One of my first projects was to work on the sale of six recruitment companies he owned, which we sold as a Group for almost £90 million.

Whilst working with James, I got to know the recruitment market very well. I realised there was a lot of room for improvement in the industry and have been a (wo)man on a mission ever since. I started my own company, Recruitment Entrepreneur, in 2014 with the aim of addressing one of the problems in the industry: the overcrowding and fragmentation.

RE is a Venture Capital fund specifically for recruitment start-ups. We provided not only funding but also all the support functions and advice needed to truly scale a recruitment business in the right way. Focussing on one industry meant we could benefit from economies of scale and control the level of service that start-up companies were giving to their clients. I sold my shares in 2016, by which time the company had reached 13 unique businesses generating £17,000,000 in annual revenue.

I joined Opus because it was the only other recruitment company I had come across that I felt shared my vision of serving the world of work better by constantly innovating solutions to work-based problems. In order to do this effectively, we have transitioned the company from being a pure recruitment company into a talent consultancy where we partner with our clients to look at the entire workforce journey in their organisation, and improving it at every step: from their employer branding to the recruitment of new staff, to the retention and performance improvement of current staff.

I think I’m the only person on earth who doesn’t say they ‘fell into recruitment’. I’m the weirdo that walked into it with my eyes wide open and I love it. And in Opus, I have found the perfect home for my two greatest career passions – improving the workplace and focussing on technology and innovation, both for ourselves and our clients.

When I’m not playing at being a grown-up trying to run the world, I am playing at being a hippy and trying to save the world, through my qualifications in Yoga, Ayuvedic medicine, massage, and breathing techniques.