I will be honest with you. Awards are a strange thing.
You do not sit down one morning and decide to win one. You just keep doing the work, day after day, trying to help the people in front of you. And then someone taps you on the shoulder and says: we think what you are doing matters.
So when CEO Review named me Most Influential CEO 2026 for Behavioural Insight Leadership in the UK, and recognised PeopleMaps as Leading Personality Assessment Platform 2026, I will not pretend I was not pleased. I was.
But here is what actually matters about it.
The problem we are solving is still not solved.
Most organisations are still hiring people who look great on paper and then spending the next few months wondering why things are not working out.
They are still replacing the same roles over and over. Still writing off recruitment costs as a fact of life. Still running managers through training programmes that do not stick because the training does not account for who those managers actually are.
The fit problem. That is what nobody wants to say out loud.
It is not a sourcing problem. You do not need more CVs. You need to know whether the person in front of you is naturally wired to do the job well and thrive in it. That is a completely different question.
That is what PeopleMaps has been answering for 25 years.
What behavioural insight actually does
When you understand how someone is wired before they walk through the door, a lot of things get easier.
You stop making decisions based on gut feeling and start making them based on evidence. Evidence about how this person communicates, how they handle pressure, what kind of environment they do their best work in, how they are likely to respond to management.
One large organisation cut its recruitment costs by over 50% and all but eliminated new hire retention issues after putting PeopleMaps at the centre of their hiring process. Not by hiring fewer people. By hiring the right people.
That is what behavioural insight does when you actually use it.
Why this award matters to me
Awards like this cut through the noise. There are a lot of people in this space saying a lot of things, and it can be hard to know who to listen to.
Being recognised as Most Influential CEO 2026 for Behavioural Insight Leadership in the UK means a few more people might stop and pay attention to what we have been saying for two and a half decades.
That personality fit is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a hire that works and one that costs you six months of salary and a lot of frustration.
If that message lands with even a handful more CEOs, HR Directors, or managers this year, then the award has done its job.
What comes next
We keep building. We keep helping organisations stop hiring strangers and start building teams that actually work.
If you are curious about what that looks like in practice, the best place to start is a 20-minute call. No pitch deck, no PowerPoint. Just a conversation about where the gaps are in your current process and whether what we do fits.
You can book that here: peoplemaps.com/contact
