Our Approach to Hiring Leadership
Middleton Executive has evolved alongside the businesses we support. As their challenges have become more complex, so has our role.
The firm was founded on deep experience in product and technology recruitment. Over time, as clients moved through funding, growth, and increasing organisational complexity, it became clear that traditional recruitment models were no longer designed for the hiring decisions leaders were facing.
Senior hiring decisions shape culture, delivery, and reputation. They require accountability, perspective, and the confidence to slow down when needed. When they’re wrong, the cost is long-term, not just operational.
Middleton Executive brings senior judgement into the room at the moments where decisions matter most — not as an external advisor, but as a trusted partner embedded in the business and accountable for executive outcomes.
Today we operate as a fractional extension of the leadership team, embedded where it matters most, supporting organisations through hiring decisions end-to-end — from role definition through to final decision-making.
Our work is grounded in senior hiring judgement, commercial realism, and a people-first, risk-aware approach. We partner closely with founders, executives, and boards who value clarity over volume and outcomes over activity.
Automation supports execution. Senior leadership protects outcomes.
Introducing Jade Bennett
Founder & Director, Middleton executive
Middleton Executive is led by Jade Bennett, a senior talent leader with 20 years’ experience hiring product and technology professionals across high-growth and complex environments.
London-born and globally raised, Jade now calls Melbourne home — what began as a six-week stay evolved into a life, a family, and the foundation of Middleton Executive.
With more than 20 years’ experience across recruitment and human resources, Jade has partnered with start-ups, scale-ups, pre-IPO, private equity–backed and enterprise organisations navigating digital transformation, growth and complexity. After beginning her career in recruitment, she moved into Human Resources, undertaking a Master’s in HR before relocating to Australia — a dual lens that continues to shape her approach to hiring today.
Jade is a trusted adviser to founders, executives and boards, sought out for her strategic insight, commercial judgement and deep expertise in product and technology hiring. She supports leaders through periods of growth, transformation and leadership transition, helping them make confident hiring decisions when the cost of getting it wrong is high.
Her work is grounded in a clear belief: modern hiring requires both advanced systems and experienced human judgement. In an increasingly AI-enabled hiring environment, Jade’s role is to bring senior judgement into the process, translating business context into decisions, calibrating risk beyond skills and experience, and protecting outcomes long after the hire is made. She embeds where it matters, owns hiring outcomes end-to-end, and operates as a true extension of the leadership team.
Jade also brings extensive experience navigating hiring during uncertainty, where judgement, not process, determines success.
Alongside her professional work, Jade is a working mother. That perspective has deeply shaped how she leads, hires and advocates. She cares deeply about creating workplaces where women don’t have to choose between ambition and family, designing hiring models that reflect modern life, and supporting working parents, particularly mothers — to return, grow and lead with confidence.
These values are not optional. They show up in how she partners with clients, how candidates are treated, and how teams are built, because hiring decisions shape culture, opportunity and trust long after a role is filled.
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