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.

The Mentors Who Bet on Her

Paterson is unusually precise about who helped her, and what each of them actually taught her. First is Sunil Talati, her direct manager at Oliver James and now Senior Vice President of Claims Recruitment. He took a risk hiring someone with no industry experience, and then did something rarer: he shared everything. "He goes above and beyond other leaders in sharing his experience of talent acquisition," she says, openly walking her through what had worked in his own career and what had not. Her read on why that matters is clear eyed. Plenty of leaders hold back on best practice because they want to remain the standout performer. Talati did the opposite, and taught her how to build meaningful relationships across multiple companies rather than transactional ones inside a single account. He has been doing it for five and a half years and, in her words, does not look like he is going to stop anytime soon.

Second is Tony Chimera, Head of HR at Westfield Specialty, whom she met early in her career. What began as a client relationship, Paterson helping him and his team hire, has become a standing peer forum: the two meet every few weeks or every couple of months, in person or online, to compare notes on the industry and trade best practice. She is candid about why she values it. "It's rare to find someone that cares so much when they don't have to," she says, noting that his interest has extended well beyond her specific desk at Oliver James to her career as a whole.

Third is Stuart Cherry, the director of her office, who also backed her when she came from an unrelated background. No longer in a recruiting seat himself but leading the business, Cherry has pushed her to think outside the box at every stage, and Paterson credits him with an investment that runs in two directions at once: in her career, and in the shape of the talent acquisition profession more broadly.

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."

Paying the Ladder Back Down

The people Paterson chooses to champion say as much about her standards as her own record does. She points to Sunil Talati as "the ultimate professional" at influencing clients and candidates, someone who wins buy in, then delivers exactly what he promised, then gets his team to work the same way. She names Declan Frith, AVP of Recruitment at Oliver James, for the wealth of expertise and outsized personality he brings to the legal space, and for the balance he strikes between pushing back and persuading, on both sides of a search. She highlights Janice Scibilia at Axis Capital, who knows the TA and recruitment space inside out yet has stayed relentlessly upbeat, able to guide candidates while holding hiring managers to account, and, Paterson adds, "honestly just a joy to work with." And she singles out Jalissa Gopaul, VP of Recruitment at Oliver James, for succeeding in genuinely niche and difficult markets and then teaching other members of the TA team how to do the same.

The common thread is unmistakable. Every leader Paterson admires is someone who gave away what they knew. Having been the outsider who was handed the playbook, she now measures leadership by how freely it is passed on.