Charlotte Pattison

A Skills-Based Hire, Long Before It Was a Trend

Pattison came into recruitment the way many of the best people do, which is to say sideways. Fresh out of university and looking to earn, she was pointed toward a local recruitment agency by someone who thought she would suit it. She was offered the job relatively quickly. She stayed eight years, working across both permanent and temporary recruitment throughout the UK.

She is candid that she arrived with no formal credential in the field. Her degree was in business management with human resources, not recruitment. "It was more of a skills based recruitment versus any degree or any prior knowledge," she says, which is a useful thing for a global talent leader to have experienced personally: she was assessed on what she could do rather than on what she had already been certified to do. Those eight agency years gave her something she still draws on daily. Her leaders there taught her the foundation stones, the discipline of a good process, and what excellence actually looks like when a search is run properly. She remains, in her words, incredibly grateful to them.

The Contract That Became a Decade

The move to Reckitt was a deliberate gamble. Pattison met an HR director at the company, and the role on offer was a fixed-term contract. She left permanent employment anyway. His business acumen and his fluency in the agility space became, as she describes it, a platform that unleashed her. Nine months became ten years, and the fixed-term contract became a global leadership seat.

She counts a second Reckitt mentor with equal weight. One of her long-standing partners in the business showed her that a woman could lead with force and with softness at the same time. Pattison admits she had spent years caught in a familiar trap: the belief that she had to be hard, and therefore slightly inauthentic, to be taken seriously. Her mentor dismantled that. She gave Pattison permission to let her natural self come through and still be a formidable leader, and the empowerment stuck.

Technology as Co-Pilot

Pattison has watched the function turn over several times. She remembers the Rolodex era and the arrival of early applicant tracking systems, she watched job boards rise and recede, and she has now landed squarely in the age of AI. Her read on all of it is unsentimental. Talent acquisition, she argues, is one of the few functions genuinely on the pulse of the business, with a real ability to move it, and staying there requires embracing change rather than resisting it.

Her framing for AI is precise. "The way I look at technology is that it's a co-pilot," she says. It is there to co-drive, to strip out inefficiency, to make the process better. What it will never replace is the human moment. Talking a candidate through the company, hearing their concerns, understanding why they are considering leaving where they are: that is a personal exchange, and technology should enhance it rather than replace it. Her advice to peers heading further into 2026 is simple. Embrace it, enjoy it, and keep asking one question above all others: where can we use it for good?

That thinking has a practical edge. Alongside Reckitt's Head of Talent Acquisition for Emerging Markets, Pattison has led significant work on tech stack review and efficiency, and she considers it some of the most valuable work a talent leader can do right now. Her counsel to others is to make sure the systems actually work from an efficiency perspective before layering anything new on top of them. She is equally quick to credit colleagues such as Reckitt's Head of Talent Acquisition for Europe, whose work she rates highly.

Leading Human First

Ask Pattison who has shaped her and she runs past the limit of the question. After naming her agency leaders and her Reckitt mentors, she asks to add a fourth: her team. It is not a courtesy. It is the thing she is proudest of.

"They all lead human first," she says of the group she has built. "We all lead with care." Delivering excellence while refusing to become transactional about it is, in her view, the harder version of the job, and the one worth doing. When she talks about legacy, she does not reach for headcount figures or time-to-hire charts. She reaches for character. If the people on her team leave as kind and good people who also happen to be excellent at what they do, she says, that is the best compliment anyone could give her.

It is a fitting through line for a leader who was once hired on potential rather than pedigree, who traded certainty for a mentor, and who now sits at the top of a global function still insisting that the human moment is the part of recruitment worth protecting.