From the athletics track to HR

Hughes was a professional sportsman for Team GB for many years post University. “Up until the age of 27 I was an athlete doing the 110m and 400m hurdles across multiple global championships,” he says, acknowledging that it was an ‘incredible life’ taking him to many competitions and to many countries. Hughes downplays his many sporting accomplishments – he has medals from the Commonwealth Games and has taken home the titles for European U23 champion too.

His first foray away from the track was in 2008 when he was forced to take a year out due to injury and spent a year in the Adidas head office which he ‘loved’. It was a natural fit to step into sports marketing. “It was a good entry into what life would look like after athletics.” Hughes eventually retired from his sports career in the year that London hosted the Olympics, 2012. He found himself working for Michael Page and ran the offices across the East Midlands.

As with any growing adult, the course of life took hold, and Hughes was now a family man with a wife and children. Opting to seek a new challenge, he decided in 2015 to take on the role as Talent Acquisition Manager at Boots in Nottingham. In this position he was responsible for the recruitment strategy for the business across retail, beauty, and pharmacy with over 2,500 stores, equating to 20,000 hires per year. He says it was one of his favourite jobs which took him ‘out and about’ into the store branches.

His next move was to Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy with over 20,000 stores and 440,000 colleagues. Hughes role here was working specifically within the global brands division now known as No.7 Beauty who were responsible for the activation of beauty and healthcare brands all over the world. He worked there for the next three years and at the point of leaving, this global leader had net sales of over $130 billion. It was Hughes first experience working within a big group role – he began to take on a wider remit then pure recruitment and was being exposed to employee value proposition for the first time. This was a remit across APAC, Americas and Europe. He then got a phone call from Costa Coffee that had been bought by Coca-Cola.

It wasn’t until Hughes researched Costa Coffee that he understood the ambition

“They said they had a need to supercharge their support functions with HR being one of them,” and he was asked to set up a global talent acquisition team. Initially he wasn’t sure this was the right move, as he admits to loving his job at WBA and was settled there. However, it was a conversation to explore with an open mind.

He adds, “Little did I know that Costa Coffee wasn’t a little retailer at all, it was a big global, powerhouse working across FMCG, Technology and B2B. When they called me a second time with the full candidate brief, I began to get excited.” He took the plunge however three weeks after starting covid hit and year one plans changed dramatically.

The business coped very well during this period and today is owned by Coca-Cola who wanted to build a total beverage business but were missing out on an end to end coffee offering. Costa now trade in 46 markets, “We’re a lot bigger than people realise,” says Hughes. The global business, he explains is significant now. Markets such as China and the Middle East have an impressive stores estate.

"The second thing people aren’t always aware of is our impressive mix of propositions. While our history is in the UK stores space, we now operate a much broader coffee offering. This includes our ‘At Home’ range such as beans and pods, through to our Costa Express business which boasts over 14,000 machines in the UK alone. One of the growing areas is our Ready to Drink range, which is already an established business in China and Japan.”

As for what the day job entails, Hughes say he operates a ‘centre of excellence’ – globally his remit does cover all of those markets. His work harks back to his early experiences of recruitment too and he oversees the acquisition of everything from barista staff to executive roles.