Kathryn Bremner

A Career Chosen, Not Stumbled Into

Her first proper role in recruiting was at PSD Group, where she spent five years in HR recruitment. The appeal was structural as much as emotional. Agency work put her on both sides of the table at once, managing candidates and clients simultaneously, and that dual vantage point taught her something in-house teams often learn the hard way: a hiring process has two customers, and neglecting either one shows up in the results.

After those five years she made the jump in-house, and the perspective travelled with her. She had already learned to read a market, to sell an opportunity honestly, and to hold a hiring manager accountable for their part of the process. Later, at the cloud consultancy Cloudreach, she would experience the corporate life cycle from the inside as the business was acquired and absorbed into what is now Atos, a period of sustained change that tested every assumption a talent function can hold.

The Three Who Shaped Her

Ask Bremner who made her, and she names people before she names milestones. The first is Stuart Rowland, the boss who hired her into PSD Group. She describes him as engaging, supportive and extremely knowledgeable, the person who helped her embed into both the role and the company, and who gave her what she calls the thirst for recruiting and the buzz it could give you. Plenty of careers hinge on whether the first manager bothers. Rowland bothered.

The second is Lee Bennion, the HR director of one of the businesses Bremner supported in-house. What made that partnership work, in Bremner's telling, was that Bennion genuinely understood the value of talent acquisition and what it could bring to her business. That is rarer than it should be. When a senior HR leader treats TA as a strategic lever rather than an administrative function, the recruiter in the room grows accordingly, and Bremner says she learned a great deal from her.

The third is Tara Tapper, the senior people and culture leader she worked for at Cloudreach. Bremner encountered her during the acquisition, at exactly the moment when organisations reveal their real character. Change was everywhere. Tapper, she says, was so professional, so knowledgeable, and simply did things the right way. The word Bremner keeps returning to is decency. Watching a senior leader behave decently and competently at the same time, under genuine pressure, was its own kind of masterclass, and it left a durable mark on how she leads.

A Clear Eyed Read on AI

Asked how artificial intelligence has reshaped recruiting, Bremner declines the easy enthusiasm and the easy alarm alike. Her first observation is about velocity. There is an overwhelming volume of information, products and platforms arriving at a speed she calls phenomenal, and that speed is frightening people, both those sitting in a TA seat and those sitting on the candidate side of the table.

She is careful to distinguish cosmetic adoption from the real thing. Running a job specification or an email through a chatbot is not what she means. She is talking about proper AI automation, deployed at scale and at quality, and she is honest that the industry does not yet know how that story ends. The direction of travel is clear enough: more streamlined processes, and probably a more cost effective resourcing model. The open question is results. Bremner believes the verdict will only arrive in a few years, once companies are genuinely established in how they use these tools, and she frames the central issue with unusual precision: the impact of removing the human, and what that produces from a results perspective and from an experience perspective both.

It is a leader's question rather than a technologist's. Efficiency is measurable now. Consequence is measurable later. Bremner is unwilling to declare victory on the first while the second remains unknown.

Stop and Breathe

Her advice to other talent leaders is deceptively simple, and she delivers it with the calm of someone who has watched several cycles of change come and go. Stop and breathe. Take a pause. Do the research, on products, platforms and tools, but also on the business itself.

That second half is the part most teams skip. Bremner's counsel is to listen to the business, understand its priorities, and bring stakeholders along rather than presenting them with a finished decision. Every change should be able to survive three questions: why, what is the rationale, and what is the business case. Anything that cannot answer all three is not an improvement, whatever the vendor deck says.

It is a discipline that protects against buying technology for its own sake, and it is the same instinct that made her choose this profession deliberately in the first place rather than waiting to be swept into it. Bremner's career has been an argument for asking the question before making the move, and in a market moving faster than its own evidence, that argument has rarely been more useful.