Emma Paterson

From Fashion to the Claims Desk

After interviewing with several firms, Paterson joined Oliver James, a name she describes as "a pretty big name back in the UK," at its New York City headquarters. She arrived as the second hire on the claims team, which meant an unusually sharp mandate: pick a market, learn it properly, and build. It clicked almost immediately.

The realisation that followed has shaped how she has coached people ever since. Instincts she had never labelled as professional competencies, the ability to read a room, to build rapport quickly, to hold a relationship over years rather than transactions, turned out to be exactly the skill set talent acquisition rewards. "A lot of things that come very naturally to me that maybe I'd never counted as a skill are actually a skill in talent acquisition," she says. Once she understood that, the career took on momentum. Five and a half years on, she leads a team covering claims and in-house legal, two markets where the candidate pool is narrow, the hiring managers are exacting, and reputation travels fast.

AI as Leverage, Not Threat

Ask Paterson about AI and she splits the answer into what is happening now and what is coming. The immediate gains, she argues, are unglamorous and enormously useful: job descriptions, outbound messaging, and the administrative scaffolding of a recruiting desk can now be handled far faster, which frees capacity. Her framing of the benefit is telling. The real win is not novelty, it is "organization and accountability," staying on top of your own time so that more of the work that actually requires a human gets done.

The longer arc is bigger and, in her markets, unavoidable. Claims and in-house legal are precisely the disciplines where automation will change the composition of the work itself. "It's going to have a massive impact on those specific markets themselves and kind of change the job landscape, which therefore changes the TA landscape," she says. A recruiter who does not track what AI is doing to the roles they fill will, sooner or later, be selling a map of a country that has moved.

Her advice to other talent leaders is built on that logic and delivered without hedging: use AI to your own benefit rather than fighting it. She acknowledges that the fear is understandable, but is unconvinced by it. She keeps her own team current on the trends and on the practical use of tools such as ChatGPT, on the view that the positives outrank the anxieties. "There are a lot more positive impacts to it than kind of people are talking about at the minute."