Karen Hutchison

A Transformation Project That Became a Career

The origin story starts inside Barclays, where Hutchison was part of a change and transformation function within wealth operations. She was asked to help with a project: incorporating a resourcing function into a change management team. It was a small taste of the work, and it caught. "I really liked the interaction with people," she says. "I liked finding out their stories." What hooked her was the double obligation of the job, making sure individuals had the right fit for their skills to develop as professionals while ensuring they were genuinely adding value to the organisation.

After almost ten years at Barclays, she left for high street agency recruitment, and the transition was jarring. Coming from a corporate, structured environment, the administration and temporary recruitment world felt a poor fit. The breakthrough came when she moved into outsourcing, working both buy side and sell side, placing very senior day rate contractors into financial services technology functions in the City. That is where the value she could add came into focus, for organisations and candidates alike. She then moved in house with the IT services and consulting organisation Wipro, where she managed the entire contract workforce across the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "From there," she says, "it's gone from strength to strength."

The People Who Shaped the Thinking

Ask Hutchison who shaped her and the first name is Emma Jones. They worked together at HCL and again at Wipro, and over twelve or thirteen years the relationship has cycled through every configuration a professional relationship can take: colleagues, then client and supplier, then coach and friend. Jones was the first person in recruitment to fundamentally change how Hutchison thought about the discipline and how she approached her own career.

The second set of influences came from outside recruitment entirely. As Global Head of Talent at Scandit, a VC backed global B2B SaaS startup headquartered in Zurich and now part of the Google Ventures portfolio following its Series C investment, Hutchison sat on the executive leadership team and grew the company from roughly 45 FTE to around 200 FTE by the time she left. The people who shaped that period were CEO Samuel and co-founders Christoph and Christian, all PhDs from ETH Zurich, all formidably clever, and all passionate in completely different ways. They shattered her preconceived expectations of what a founding team looked like and how one worked together.

The lesson she carried out of Zurich has become the operating principle of every team she has built since. "You don't have to have a team of all perfect people that all look and sound and feel and act the same," she says. Diversity of thought matters, but so does diversity of skills, approaches and mindsets. Today, when she assembles a function, she maps who does what and which capabilities complement each other, and she credits those complementary skill sets as one of the key contributing factors behind a high performing global talent function.

Two Camps, One Answer

AI in recruitment, Hutchison acknowledges, is a divisive and almost polarising topic. She has watched very experienced talent leaders sort themselves into two camps over the past year: those who resisted, worried at a basic level that AI would take recruiters' jobs, and those who adopted it as part of the future of work, the evolution of talent and a new way of working. Her observation is unsentimental. It is the early adopters she has seen go from strength to strength professionally, because they understood the core dynamic. "It's the people that learn how to use the tools that will be valued, as opposed to the tools themselves."

She counts herself firmly among them, an early adopter both personally and professionally, and describes a long standing passion for technology at the cutting edge. She frames the imperative through a digital reading of Red Queen evolutionary theory: forward motion is not optional, because the ground itself is moving. That mindset is precisely what allowed her, at a company that builds software and provides services, to partner with her own engineering colleagues rather than wait for a vendor. The result has been value added services for internal stakeholders and external clients, and a role that has visibly expanded. Hutchison now finds herself looking at product development and commercial impact, territory most talent leaders never touch.

Get With the Programme

Her advice to peers is delivered without hedging. "Get with the programme," she says, "and understand that the change isn't coming, the change is already here." The upside, as she frames it, is not survival but expansion: the opportunities for change and transformation will broaden the skill sets of talent leaders and open new doors. The downside of hesitation is equally clear to her. "What you do about it now will have a significant impact on the trajectory of your career over the next five to ten years, because the pace of change is exponential."

There is a quieter standard underneath all of it, one that shows up in how she talks about her profession. Hutchison is careful about whose work she endorses, noting that she does not recommend people lightheartedly. She has seen a real shift in recent years between the talent leaders who are having genuine impact and those going through the motions. Her own answer to that distinction has been to keep building, keep adopting, and keep proving that the talent function can generate value that reaches all the way to the client and the balance sheet.