Introduction
Kameka McLean arrived in the UK from Jamaica at sixteen with A-star grades and a plan to become a lawyer or journalist. Her father's paperwork error over her visitor's visa meant she could not enrol in college, and her qualifications were downgraded so severely that her top marks were treated as barely passing. She started working in HR by accident, to help support her family, and has spent the years since building a career most people only see the surface of.
Now a Group Head of HR who has led people functions across more than forty countries, Kameka is candid in this conversation about what the job actually involves behind the scenes: being the person awake at one in the morning drafting an email that says a decision is not right, and living with the reputational cost of being the one who says no.
A rude awakening at sixteen
Kameka grew up believing the UK would offer the meritocracy her family had hoped for, in contrast to what they understood of the United States. That belief did not survive her first year. Her father, unfamiliar with UK immigration rules, submitted her college application incorrectly, and the resulting delay meant she never enrolled in the further education she had planned. Her hard-won Jamaican exam results were treated as roughly equivalent to a UK grade D. She describes feeling, for the first time, like nobody, despite years of being told she was the brightest in her family.
Finding HR by chance in a lift
Kameka's first HR role came from a chance encounter. While accompanying her aunt to a cleaning job interview, she met a frustrated man in a lift who had just been stood up for an interview of his own. She asked if he was okay, mentioned she was looking for work to support her parents, and he offered her the role on the spot. That man, James, the CEO of a Black-owned publishing company, became her first real mentor, funding her through NVQ levels one to three and telling her he wanted to see her as a CHRO one day, opening doors for people who had not had his own opportunities.
Saving a hundred jobs in two weeks
Asked for a concrete example of the value HR can add when it is treated as a strategic partner rather than an afterthought, Kameka describes a moment where a multi-country organisation was preparing to make around one hundred people redundant. She asked for four weeks to explore alternatives and was given two. Within that window, she contacted HR leads in every entity across the group, found roughly 150 open roles in other countries, matched skills to those vacancies, and prevented the vast majority of the redundancies, saving the company significant redundancy and relocation costs in the process.
Why she has been called difficult by senior leaders
Kameka does not shy away from admitting she is unpopular with some leadership teams. Her stance is that if a decision goes against employment law or basic fairness, she will refuse to implement it, regardless of how that affects her own standing. She describes being labelled difficult, or accused of not following instructions, but holds firm to a simple test: as long as a decision is rooted in integrity and honesty, she does not need anyone's approval of it.
On the DEI backlash: it wasn't authentic in the first place
Asked about the current political pushback against DEI initiatives, Kameka's assessment is sharp: much of what is now being dismantled was never authentic to begin with. She describes organisations that treated inclusion as a tick-box exercise, in some cases discriminating against one group to force in another, which she argues was always going to trigger resentment and backlash. Her own long-standing approach, predating the post-2020 wave of corporate interest, has been to widen recruitment nets through partnerships with non-Russell Group universities and community organisations rather than setting quotas that pit groups against each other.
Why AI cannot replace HR's human core
Kameka's organisation uses AI selectively, for example to flag when a candidate's CV has clearly been written by AI, but she draws a firm line against letting it take over relationship-based decisions. Her argument is direct: no one is going to sit in front of a computer and tell an AI system their father died today. That kind of trust has to be built through consistent, visible human presence, and she warns that HR professionals who let that human element slip are the ones most likely to be replaced.
What she has had to unlearn
Asked what has been hardest to unlearn, Kameka points to her own directness, compounded, she says, by having ADHD. She used to react immediately and bluntly to situations she found frustrating. Learning to pause, tell someone she will call them back once she has thought something through, and respond diplomatically rather than instinctively, has been a deliberate and ongoing piece of self-work.
