Introduction
Denise Myers can trace her own sense of possibility back to a specific trip to Jamaica at seven years old, watching people who looked like her behind every counter, in every shop, at every level. Decades later, that same instinct, that representation changes what people believe is possible, became the entire premise of the Black Talent Awards. Her path there ran through twenty years in recruitment, a business built on nine months of careful preparation, and a decision that her own MD's new Jaguar forced her to finally make.
Confidence found on a different continent
Myers describes an unmistakable shift between who she was at seven and who she was at eight, after a Christmas trip to Jamaica with an older cousin. Stepping off the plane and seeing people who looked like her working in the airport, driving, running shops, staffing the post office and the bank, gave her a confidence she carried straight back into the classroom. She traces the same feeling to a later trip to New York, walking into a Chase Bank branch with Black staff behind the counter and a Black manager, something she had never once witnessed in a UK bank as a teenager.
That early gap between what she saw abroad and what she saw at home shaped her adolescent ambitions directly. She devoured Ebony magazine as a teenager, drawn to images of Black women in corporate roles she couldn't picture existing for her in Britain at the time, and seriously considered moving to America because she believed, then, that this was the only place it happened.
Falling into a career that became a calling
Myers didn't plan a career in recruitment. Like many in the industry, she walked into an agency as a mature graduate, torn between marketing and HR, and a sharp consultant reframed recruitment for her as a blend of both. What was meant to be a temporary cover role became a twenty-year career, not because she planned it that way, but because she discovered something most people don't expect from the job: you can genuinely love going to work.
What kept her in it long-term was recognising the weight of what recruitment actually does. Placing someone in the wrong job, she says plainly, can damage their whole life, especially when they're a family's sole breadwinner or on the edge of a career breakthrough. She treats every placement as a responsibility that goes well beyond a fee, which meant interrogating employers as rigorously as she interviewed candidates, rather than optimising for the fastest match.
Trust as a working practice, not a default
One of the hardest lessons from two decades in the industry, Myers says, is that people don't always mean what they say. Her response wasn't to become guarded. She operates on a deliberate default of trust, taking people at their word until they prove otherwise, because the alternative, constantly second-guessing intentions, is exhausting and slows everything down. Alongside that, she leans on an instinct she attributes to her Caribbean upbringing, a sense of when someone's spirit doesn't sit right, which she treats as information worth respecting even without being able to explain it.
The Jaguar that changed everything
The decision to start her own agency arrived in a single moment outside her workplace in early 2014, watching her MD glide up the driveway in a brand new Jaguar she had, in effect, helped pay for. At the time she was placing twenty engineering apprentices a quarter, generating roughly half a million pounds a year for the business, without any path to seeing that value reflected in her own income while employed.
What followed wasn't an impulsive leap. She spent close to nine months preparing before handing in her notice in January 2015, building enough of a financial buffer to go nine months without a single placement if needed. She made her first placement, and got paid for it, within six weeks. The fear that had kept her from starting sooner wasn't about her ability to do the work, she was confident in that, it was the unfamiliar territory of running a business. Recognising she had a proven skill to fall back on if it failed removed enough of that fear to finally act.
The awards that almost didn't happen
The idea for the Black Talent Awards came from a conversation with her friend Joseph Bailey, who runs Noir, an events business for Black professionals, during the early days of building Evenfields. He pointed out that awards existed for Black entrepreneurs and business owners, but nothing recognised Black employees. Myers, Bailey and Cheryl Miller worked out what it could look like during lockdown, then the idea went quiet, because it had no home and no clear purpose to hang itself on.
That changed once Evenfields Community, the CIC arm of her business focused on employability and mindset for 18 to 30 year olds, was already running programmes. The awards became the missing piece: a funding mechanism for that work and a stage for the young people coming through it. Myers is candid that the pause wasn't wasted time. Waiting for the idea to find its proper home, rather than forcing it out before it had one, is part of what made it work.
What the Black Talent Awards actually delivers
The brief for the first ceremony had three deliberate aims: make people feel inspired, make them feel less alone in a business world that often overlooks them, and create genuine joy in the room, whether or not someone actually won. Myers describes nominees who couldn't believe they'd been noticed at all, having never seen their own everyday work as remarkable.
The wider purpose sits alongside the personal one. Myers is explicit that part of the point is correcting a narrative she hears constantly in her recruitment work, that Black talent is somehow hard to find or hard to reach, by putting a room full of thriving, high-achieving Black professionals directly in front of the UK business world. No one involved in running the awards is paid. Proceeds go back into funding the employability and mindset programmes the awards were built to support.
Joy as a discipline, not a mood
Myers is unusually direct about how central joy is to her, describing it as something she protects deliberately rather than something that simply happens to her. She names her faith, a quiet daily practice of prayer before sending a CV or walking into a meeting, as one source of that steadiness, alongside a conscious refusal to let circumstances outside her control dictate how she feels for long. She's clear this isn't naivety about hardship. It's a decision she keeps making, repeatedly, about where to place her attention.
What parenting has taught her about fear and patience
Asked about the lessons of parenthood, Myers describes learning a selfless love with her son that reordered her priorities for the first time in her life. She's equally honest about the fear that comes with raising a Black son in Britain: describing an incident where he was pulled over and removed from his car by armed police late at night because the vehicle matched a description, an experience she says could have ended very differently. With her daughter, the lesson has been patience, and trusting that the foundations she has laid will hold even when a teenager has to find her own way rather than take her mother's word for it.
When asked to define leadership, Myers keeps it simple: people follow leaders who are honest, authentic and consistent between what they say and what they do, who can articulate a clear vision, and who understand that different people on the same team need different things from them.
