From Executive Search to Empowering HR Leaders: Fay Phillips-Jones on Building Coaching With Fay
After nearly two decades in HR and executive search, Fay Phillips-Jones kept noticing the same pattern from her seat on the hiring side of the table: talented HR professionals, people who had spent their careers guiding others through change, often struggled to advocate for themselves. She watched capable candidates undersell their own value and lose out, not because they lacked ability, but because they lacked the space to find their confidence again.
That observation led her to found Coaching With Fay in 2020, offering the kind of thoughtful, human support she had always wished she could give candidates during her years in executive search. Today, she works with HR and People professionals across the globe, helping them navigate everything from burnout and career pivots to redundancy and internal promotions, combining psychological insight with practical strategy in a way that goes far beyond a polished CV.
Alongside her one to one coaching, Fay runs Career Circles With Fay, a free fortnightly community where HR professionals can share what they're navigating and find real peer support. We spoke with Fay about what led her to this work, the deeper problem she's solving for her clients, and what's next for both her business and her free community.
What inspired you to start?
After nearly two decades across HR and executive search, I spent years on the other side of the hiring table — watching capable HR professionals, people who had spent their careers guiding others through change, find it far harder to navigate their own. I saw people undersell themselves from the very first conversation, lower their expectations, and lose out to candidates who weren't necessarily more capable, just more confident in saying what they brought. Underneath it all was the human reality of a job search: rejection after rejection, some still juggling a demanding role, others out of work altogether, all while supporting a family and keeping up with the mortgage. Executive search is a commercial, sales-led environment, and however much I wanted to help, my time and responsibility sat largely with the hiring client and my own commercial targets, not the candidate. I founded Coaching With Fay in 2020 to give people the thoughtful, human support and space I had always wished I could offer them.
What problem are you solving?
Career decisions are rarely just about finding a new job or improving a CV. The HR and People professionals from across the globe that I support are often navigating much bigger questions around confidence, identity, progression and what they genuinely want from the next stage of their careers. They may be feeling quietly unfulfilled, burnt out, or simply aware they've started taking a back seat — under-motivated or under-utilised, without quite knowing why. It isn't always about finding a new role; sometimes it's about finding their voice again, building new skills, or choosing to direct their own path rather than coasting through it. For others, it's about recovering from redundancy, considering a pivot, coming back after a career break, or pursuing a more senior role internally. My role is to help them make sense of where they are, reconnect with their strengths, and turn that clarity into purposeful action — coaching, CV and LinkedIn positioning, interview preparation, personal branding, or a focused job-search strategy. It's the combination of deeper reflection, psychological insight and practical strategy that makes the work so effective.
What's next for you?
I'd love to make more of the insight and learning from my one-to-one coaching accessible to a wider community - through thoughtful content, practical resources, and eventually, carefully designed courses - without losing the deeply personal support that has always been at the heart of Coaching With Fay. I'm also continuing to grow Career Circles With Fay, my free community for HR and People professionals, where we meet fortnightly and create a safe, welcoming space for people to come as they are, share what they're navigating, and experience real peer support and professional connection. Several members have secured new roles and chosen to stay on, quietly supporting others who are still finding their way forward — which tells me more about what we've built than any growth plan ever could.
Just as importantly, what's next for me is personal. After years in the pace of corporate life, I'm building something that lets me be properly present — as a mum to a very busy five-year-old and two equally busy stepsons, that's the part I protect hardest.
