Karen Chummun

From Crime Scenes to National Recruitment

As she moved into more senior roles at the Forensic Science Service, Chummun took on progressively more leadership and management responsibility, including running her own HR activity. The selection centre project was the turning point. After the pivot, one of her major roles took her to the London Deanery, the structure responsible for the training and development of junior doctors, now known in the UK as residents.

That post led her into recruitment at a scale few practitioners ever touch. Her team ran 44 percent of national recruitment for resident doctors in England. It was an extraordinary proving ground: high volume, high stakes, nationally scrutinised, with the quality of a country's future medical workforce riding on the design of the process.

Chummun describes her trajectory as starting in a deep area of specialism and then broadening out into generalism. Today she works with senior leaders on talent pipelines and talent acquisition for chief executives, chairs, non executive directors and aspirant executive directors. It is the most consequential end of the market, where a single appointment can reshape an organisation, and she is unambiguous about how she feels about it. "I thoroughly love it," she says.

The People Who Shaped Her

Two names come up when Chummun talks about the people who made her career possible. The first is Gary Waltham, now Chief Executive of one of the faculties of occupational medicine, who backed her during the years she was running national recruitment processes. He trusted her, championed her, sponsored her and supported her in doing that work, and the effect was formative. Sponsorship, not just encouragement, is what allowed a former forensic scientist to run recruitment at national scale.

The second is Julie Screaton, formerly Chief People Officer at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital Trust in London, who was Regional Director of Health Education England in London when the two first met. For Chummun she remains the model of what senior people leadership should look like: people orientated, expert, collegiate, and above all a genuinely compassionate leader. Between the two of them, Chummun learned the twin lessons that define her own practice: back people before they have proved themselves, and lead with compassion once they have.

The Middle Ground on AI

Chummun has little patience for the polarised debate around artificial intelligence in hiring. In some quarters, she notes, AI is pictured as the saviour of processes and ways of working. In others it is treated purely as a risk. Her own position is deliberately located between the two. It can be a genuinely helpful tool and enabler, she argues, provided organisations adopt it intentionally, with purpose, and mindfully.

She reserves her sharpest observation for a contradiction she sees playing out across the market. Many organisations have noticed that applications are increasingly AI generated and beginning to look alike, and some have responded by refusing to accept AI written CVs. Those, she points out, are often the very same organisations using AI to streamline their own processes. "So it's OK for us as an organisation to use it, but it's not OK for the individual to use it," she says, and the asymmetry does not survive scrutiny.

Her prediction is that AI will settle into hiring the way word processing did. It already checks grammar, examines structure and offers tools, and in time it will simply be integrated into everyone's ways of working. The question then becomes how to use it well. For candidates, her counsel is practical and generous: use it, but do not let it flatten you. AI makes an application generic, she warns, and "we lose the flavour of you." Bring yourself back into the application, because that is what wins the job.

Advice for Talent Leaders

Asked what she would tell her peers, Chummun starts with a warning about inertia. There is a real war for talent underway in a genuinely difficult marketplace, and the old traditional approaches will no longer serve. The shift she wants to see is away from the same old same old and toward a much more open reading of talent: hiring for potential rather than filtering against narrow, traditional criteria. She believes that shift will be the key differentiator for organisations that succeed.

Her second point concerns attraction and retention, and it is grounded in demographics rather than sentiment. The workforce is changing profoundly. Older generations are working longer, into their 60s and 70s. Newer generations are weighing purpose, values and quality of life in ways that traditional employment models were never designed to accommodate. Those models, she says plainly, are not going to hold going forward. Talent leaders have to be innovative in both acquisition and retention, and they have to reckon with the fact that talent itself is now far more discerning.

Chummun is generous about the peers she admires. She points to DP Turner-Kang of the NHS Leadership Academy for her strategic understanding of the landscape and her political awareness, and to Zoe Birch of NHS England for an insightful, person centred approach that shows up in everything she does. It is a telling pair of endorsements from someone whose own career has been built on exactly that combination: system level rigour in service of individual people.