Charlie O'Loughlin

An MBA Disguised as a London Desk

Before the household names, there was an agency in London and a new business development desk. O'Loughlin points to it as the place where he learned his craft, and he is precise about why. It was a fast-paced environment, the team was having a lot of fun, and the real education was structural. He had to generate the business himself, work out what the customer was actually looking for, deliver the person, and then earn repeat business through the service and the value he provided to the organization.

He describes that stretch as "a fantastic MBA" in financing, branding, profit margins, supply and demand, and customers. The lesson stuck. Recruiting, in his reading, has many facets, and the operators who thrive are the ones who find all of them interesting rather than picking one and hiding inside it. "There's so many different facets to recruiting that I've just found completely fascinating," he says, "and have continued to lean into that throughout my entire career." The scope of those learnings, he adds, has only grown with each company he has joined.

Three Managers, Three Disciplines

Asked to name the people who shaped him, O'Loughlin does not hesitate; he says the three most impactful managers he has had are easy to pick. Jim Miller hired him as a sourcer at Google in London in 2011 and became, in his words, a formative manager. What Miller taught him about recruiting, about how to think about candidate pipeline and about how to think about operational metrics, is something he says has carried with him to today. Miller is now at Ashby.

Jim Dighton managed him in Ireland, where O'Loughlin worked on site reliability engineering and technical infrastructure. Dighton, he says, had such an influence on his thinking about processes, workflows and data that it has helped him keep growing and provide immense value through data ever since. He describes Dighton as foundational.

Then there was Jenna Adorno, his manager in the United States while he worked on Google Ads. She was so customer focused and so relationship oriented, he says, that "she was able to get outcomes that other people couldn't get," because she could leverage that influence and those relationships. It is the mentor lesson he returns to most often in his own partnerships with hiring leaders. Between them, the three shaped different facets of the job: operational metrics and running your desk, data and the influence it makes possible, and the relationships that produce great outcomes. "I think they're all really intrinsic parts to being a great recruiter," he says.

Google, CZI, Databricks, SandboxAQ

O'Loughlin describes Google as the most profound and transformative opportunity he has ever had in his life. It took him through three different countries, from the UK all the way to the United States, and put him alongside people he still describes as incredible, doing work he still describes as amazing. Leaving surprised his family. He went to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which he explains as the Zuckerbergs' equivalent of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he considers it one of the rarest things a recruiter ever gets to do: to put professional talents to the good of the world for a while. He remains openly grateful to have participated in it.

Databricks came next, and he describes it as the most amazing rocket ship, an education in velocity and in what it takes to contribute to really ambitious goals inside compressed timeframes. That appetite led him to SandboxAQ, which he characterizes as an extremely high velocity, high slope AI lab and startup doing transformative work. Just over a year in, his assessment is unambiguous: he has done the work of his life, and he is grateful for the access to do career defining work. His advice to anyone who recognizes that moment is equally direct. When it comes along, seize it with both hands.

What AI Actually Buys a Recruiter

On artificial intelligence, O'Loughlin is measured rather than evangelical. The primary value he has seen is decreasing the manual labor required across a variety of tasks, which returns recruiter hours to the higher value work and the more critical dependencies in a process. Augment application review with AI and you spend less time working through the buckets of applicants, which means more time talking with candidates, negotiating with them and closing them. Hand scheduling to agentic solutions and you spend that time with hiring managers instead, helping them craft the right way to bring a role to market.

That reallocation matters more than ever, he notes, because talent teams are increasingly asked to do more with less. But he draws a firm boundary around what the technology will not do. "AI is never going to be able to replace the influence and the dealing with the unexpected that a really great recruiter can," he says. The logic follows cleanly from there: the more time the technology frees up for the highest value human activity, the more valuable that technology becomes, which is why he treats AI as something additive to the recruiter rather than a substitute for one.

Enablement, and the Work of Their Lives

Ask O'Loughlin to distill everything into advice and he offers two rules. Treat candidates how you would want to be treated. And treat the leaders you support from a business enablement perspective, always asking how you can help them achieve their goals. Sometimes that means educating them through data, sometimes it means coaching them through different scenarios, and sometimes it simply means execution and being a terrific partner to them. The method changes; the orientation never does. "Always treat your customers in a way that enables their success," he says.

He reserves his last point for management. Leadership, as he practices it, begins with helping people understand what success looks like in their role and then helping them achieve it, which means giving them a genuine opportunity to get there. He goes further than that. Treat people as though they have the opportunity to do the work of their life, he argues, and it engenders a higher level of engagement to the team and to the work, with their own growth turbocharged as a result. "I really believe in giving people the opportunity to be successful," he says. Coming from someone who believes he is doing exactly that work right now, it reads less like management theory and more like a report from the field.