We provide in-depth market intelligence, including real-time data on compensation trends, competitor hiring practices, and talent movement within your industry. This service ensures you're well-informed about market dynamics, helping you stay competitive in your talent strategy.
Our hiring and workforce advisory services are designed to bring clarity at moments of change. We help leaders define the right roles, assess whether to hire or redesign, and align team structure with business priorities and AI-era realities.
For critical leadership roles, we support succession planning to strengthen continuity and reduce risk in an AI-enabled organisation. We provide senior leadership and AI-informed advisory to help organisations prepare for future leadership transitions.
We specialise in executive and embedded search for senior leadership and emerging AI-era roles across the knowledge economy, including market research, insight, ResTech, strategy, innovation and consultancy. We focus on roles where the cost of getting it wrong is high.
Our onboarding advisory supports the effective integration of new hires in AI-enabled organisations. We help leaders design onboarding frameworks where people and AI agents work in harmony from day one, supporting clarity, adoption and long-term effectiveness.
Equity, fairness and bias awareness are integral to high-stakes hiring decisions, especially where AI-assisted tools are part of the process. We provide DE&I and bias advisory, embedding human-in-the-loop judgement into AI-assisted hiring frameworks to help organisations build equitable teams and reduce risk.
We proactively build talent pipelines aligned to your growth and change agenda, including transitions to agentic and human-led workforces. This approach helps leaders plan workforce needs, manage change with confidence, and maintain access to high-quality talent as the organisation evolves.
From first interaction to offer decision, we optimise the hiring journey to support clarity, fairness and trust. This includes shaping human and AI-assisted touchpoints, feedback loops and interview decision-making to ensure a rigorous, candidate-respectful experience.
Our on-demand talent acquisition advisory provides leadership teams with senior TA judgement, without the commitment of a permanent hire. Designed for organisations navigating change, growth or uncertainty, this offering delivers flexible, AI-era hiring guidance through advisory support or retained engagement.
We provide decision-focused training for hiring leaders to strengthen interview judgement, mitigate bias and improve decision quality in senior hiring processes, including AI-assisted hiring.This equips teams to assess talent rigorously, make confident hiring decisions, and secure the right capability for the organisation.
Using market and talent intelligence, we benchmark compensation to support fair, competitive and defensible decisions. This enables leaders to make informed choices on pay structures and rewards, supporting attraction, retention and workforce sustainability.
For market research, insight, ResTech and consultancy businesses, AI is no longer a side project. It is reshaping delivery, client expectations, data quality, workflow, pricing and commercial strategy. Talent Pools helps leadership teams define the capability they actually need before they hire, so AI-era appointments are built around the business problem, not just another shiny job title.
AI governance isn’t compliance theatre. It is the strategic capability that determines whether AI investments deliver sustainable competitive advantage, protect client trust, and avoid unnecessary risk. Boards are asking for governance. Regulators are demanding it. And most organisations do not yet have the leadership in place to deliver it.
The cost of getting this wrong is significant. A poor appointment in an AI governance or transformation role does not just slow progress. It can create regulatory exposure, erode board confidence, damage client trust, and derail an entire technology roadmap. These are roles where defining the brief matters as much as running the search. We work with founders, boards and PE-backed businesses to shape the role before we fill it, so the appointment is built to last.
Retained, engaged and embedded mandates only. That means full commitment, no contingency shortcuts, and no database or AI-tool-generated shortlists dressed up as search. Every mandate is built around your specific brief, your market, and the capability you actually need. Every shortlist is earned.
Founder of Talent Pools
Joanna founded Talent Pools to help ambitious organisations make better hiring and workforce decisions in a rapidly changing market. Too often, leaders are forced to act with incomplete information or default to familiar profiles. She wanted to change that.
Her specialist sector is the knowledge economy, particularly the world of insights, consultancy, and data-driven firms. Through flexible advisory, search, and talent intelligence engagements, she works with founders and leadership teams in this sector to reduce risk, access non-obvious capability, and ensure each hire supports long-term growth and competitive advantage.
Today, her work sits at the intersection of executive search, AI-era workforce strategy and leadership advisory. She helps organisations understand whether they need to hire for AI, govern AI more effectively, or redesign roles around AI-enabled change. That perspective informs every search engagement, whether she is appointing a CAIO, CDAO, Head of Insights, Chief Research Officer or transformation leader.
In 2023, I attended a Generative AI conference in San Francisco, and it transformed my perspective on the future of market research. Since then, I’ve been focused on how AI can amplify, not replace, rigorous research thinking. Working with AI-powered insights platforms as they scaled confirmed my belief that increasingly agentic tools unlock new opportunities, while rendering human judgement and human-in-the-loop decision making more important than ever.
I founded Talent Pools after identifying a clear gap in the market. Digital and technology recruiters often miss the nuance and rigour of the insights and knowledge economy, while traditional search practitioners struggle with the pace, ambition, and vision required to attract talent organisations navigating AI-driven transformation. Talent Pools bridges that gap by combining executive search expertise with AI fluency and a passion for innovation, empowering the ambitious firms to build high-performing, future-focused leadership teams. 
Cambri
Loops
Boxclever
Sparkler, now part of PA Consulting
Horizon Strategy
Three Hands
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