Julia Markell

A Remit at the Top of the House

Today Markell is Executive Talent Leader at Haleon, based in the United Kingdom, where her remit sits squarely in executive talent acquisition. Search, in other words. It is a discipline with its own physics, and she is careful to say so rather than generalize about talent acquisition as a whole. The volumes are smaller, the stakes per hire are larger, the relationships run longer, and the dynamic, as she puts it, is simply different from more mainstream TA.

That specificity is itself a mark of her seniority. Markell networks extensively with in-house executive search functions across the market, and she has developed a clear-eyed read on where each one actually sits rather than where it claims to sit. Some are genuinely leading edge, running CRMs with layered AI capability that compress talent mapping and market mapping into a fraction of the time they once took and generate prospect pipelines at speed. Others are at a more foundational stage, getting fluent with Copilot or their company's internal version of ChatGPT to sharpen reporting and make candidate reports fit for purpose. Both are legitimate positions on the journey. What matters, she argues, is knowing honestly which one you occupy.

Maturity Before Machinery

Markell's central argument about artificial intelligence cuts against the prevailing rush. Most organizations, she observes, look at the technology and conclude they need to get integrated, get fluent, get conversant, and get there quickly. She thinks the sequencing is backwards. The first question is not which tool to buy but whether the organization is mature enough to adopt and embed what it buys.

"Make sure that your organisational maturity is ready to adopt it and to embed it," she says. The risk otherwise is a familiar and expensive one: a stack of impressive platforms that nobody genuinely uses, unlocking none of the efficiency that justified the investment in the first place. Capability level, not license count, is the variable that determines whether value is actually created.

None of which makes her a skeptic. Markell is openly enthusiastic about what the technology can already do, particularly in market mapping research and candidate insight, where she sees platforms capable of meaningfully accelerating the work. Her framing is about where human attention should land. AI is very capable of absorbing the manual heavy lift. That frees practitioners to concentrate on the value-add elements of the process, which in executive search means judgment, insight, and relationships. She expects the pace of change only to accelerate. "AI 10 years ago was not really something we were massively contemplating," she notes. "AI today is absolutely something that is end-to-end integrated into everything that we do."

The People Who Shaped the Path

Ask Markell about influence and she names three people, then immediately apologizes for the many she is leaving out.

Jen Candy hired her into Mondelez, an opening she describes as one of the great turns of her career. It gave her the in-house search practice at Mondelez, which remains her favorite role to date. "I wouldn't even call it a job," she says. "It just was a brilliant opportunity."

Jonathan Harper, global consumer practice leader at Spencer Stuart, has been the constant. Markell has known him for more than ten years, and worked alongside him after moving from Mondelez to Spencer Stuart. He has been a supporter and proponent throughout, and a source of wise counsel both inside the firm and outside it.

Brooke Finlayson is the third, and the collaboration has now come full circle. The two worked together for five years at Mondelez, where Finlayson was leading other areas of talent and organizational effectiveness, and Markell describes the partnership as one of the most valuable of her career: insightful, wide-ranging, informed by experience across many different elements of HR. Finlayson is now Chief Talent Officer at Haleon, which means the two are colleagues again. "That's always a nice outcome, right? When you get an opportunity to work with someone again."

Two Pieces of Advice, and Only Two

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders, Markell deliberately narrows the field. There are, she acknowledges, countless things one could discuss. She offers two.

The first is to immerse yourself in AI. Understand its capabilities as fully as you can, and understand its limitations just as clearly, then think hard about how it can augment the way your team operates. Her reasoning is not narrowly about recruiting. The technology is now a critical element of every part of an organization and every part of society, and leaders who are not sufficiently skilled or informed will find that gap landing on their teams.

The second is the counterweight. "We talk about AI as this sort of silver bullet in terms of what it's going to do for us," she says, "but at the end of the day an organization doesn't exist without its people." That, she insists, remains true no matter how far the technology advances over the next five or ten years. So be clear about how you support your team's development. Understand their ambition and their long-term goals, and work with them to unlock the opportunities that get them there.

Underneath both pieces of advice sits a conviction about succession that reads like the through-line of her own career. Leaders carry a responsibility to develop the people coming up behind them, so that those people arrive equipped and skilled and ready for challenges that will look nothing like today's. Markell has been on the receiving end of that generosity. A sister's suggestion. A hiring manager who created an opportunity. A practice leader who has advocated for her across a decade. Her advice is simply the same debt, paid forward.