Emerging roles — the professions as they form.
Alongside our broader practice, we run a dedicated desk for appointments in emerging roles: the positions and professions that are new enough that the market around them is still being built. This page is our account of that work: what it is, why it is different, and how we approach it.
Almost all recruitment is built for established titles — roles with settled descriptions, known career paths and a talent pool that can be searched. The harder and more interesting appointments are the new ones: the first governance lead for a technology that arrived last year, the assurance function nobody needed until the regulation changed, the specialist role whose job description is being written while the search runs. Between those two worlds sits a distinct craft — hiring for roles that do not yet have a market.
These appointments do not reward keyword matching, because the keywords have not settled. They reward mapping adjacent fields, judging potential against pedigree, and helping an organisation define a post at the same time as filling it. It is slower, more considered work — which is precisely why it suits a small practice and not a volume one.
- AI governance, safety & assuranceThe roles forming around safe, accountable AI — governance leads, assurance and risk specialists, and the policy people who connect systems to institutions.
- Climate & sustainabilitySustainability officers, climate-risk and reporting roles, and the specialists building functions that regulation created within the last decade.
- Data ethics & privacyThe trust professions — privacy engineering, data ethics and governance roles that barely existed as job families until recently.
- Emerging technology riskQuantum-readiness, biosecurity, resilience and the security specialisms that arrive with each new generation of systems.
- First-of-a-kind appointmentsThe posts that fit no existing template — new functions inside established organisations, defined and filled in the same motion.
Titles mislead in young fields: the same words describe very different jobs from one organisation to the next, and candidates arrive by unusual routes — the good ones often have never held the title they are perfectly suited to. There is no settled pipeline to search and no salary history to lean on; there is adjacent talent to map, potential to judge, and an organisation to help think. We treat the definition of the role as part of the assignment, not a preamble to it.
The desk runs on the same shape as the practice: a small book of assignments, direct contact throughout, and searches that start from a real understanding of the field rather than keyword matches. People in these fields tend to be selective and well-informed; they are approached accordingly.