Avril Moriarty

Avril started her recruitment career in Dublin, where she quickly moved into large-scale hiring for global clients and later became the standalone recruiter supporting Microsoft’s outsourced operation. That included workforce planning alongside executive teams and hiring close to 300 people in six weeks across the US. After moving to New Zealand, Avril led recruitment teams and programmes across Adecco, Hays, Vodafone and ASB, spanning technology, sales, corporate and volume hiring. At Vodafone, she helped turn around an underperforming managed recruitment programme before joining the business internally to lead one of its talent acquisition teams. Most recently, she built Madison’s professional services recruitment offering, growing a new specialist team that became the strongest-performing team in the business during a difficult market.

Avril is particularly good at working out what a business genuinely needs, rather than simply recruiting to the brief she is given. She combines strong judgement with an instinct for people, building rapport quickly and asking the questions that reveal what may sit underneath the obvious requirement. From there, she focuses on finding a solution that will work in practice.

Building Madison’s professional services team from the ground up remains a career highlight. Avril inherited one person, built a team of five specialist recruiters and created a successful new offering in the middle of an economic downturn. She is equally proud of seeing the people she hired and developed go on to succeed, including supporting one team member from low confidence through to promotion.

Avril’s own career began because someone recognised the skills and potential that were less obvious on paper. It shaped how she approaches recruitment today. She looks beyond a conventional career path to understand what someone can bring, where they could thrive and what that could mean for the business hiring them.

Avril is warm, candid and highly communicative. She builds relationships quickly, adapts her approach to the person and situation, and gives clients a clear view of what is realistic. She brings plenty of energy and humour to the work, while keeping the focus firmly on getting the right outcome.