Laura Scott

A Sales Instinct That Found Its Home

Scott's first ambition was sales, and she pursued it properly, rising to sales manager with a team of her own.

That role carried a thread of recruitment inside it, enough that an agency headhunted her into the industry outright.

Her first specialism was architecture and interior design, a market that put her in the room with world-famous designers such as Kelly Hoppen and gave her an early education in managing demanding stakeholders at every level.

"It gave me an insight into how recruitment actually worked," she says of those years.

When the design market proved quieter than her appetite for it, she moved into engineering recruitment and spent several years in agency, eventually partnering with Checkatrade to fill its roles.

The relationship worked so well that Checkatrade made her an offer that is, in its own way, the highest compliment a client can pay a recruiter: come and do this from the inside.

She joined as a talent partner in 2022, progressed to senior talent partner, then lead talent partner, and now leads the team as Senior Talent Lead.

The People Who Shaped The Practice

Ask Scott who shaped her, and she names craft before charisma.

The first is Greg Savage, the well-known recruitment figure whose work centres on the core skill of the job — stakeholder management, candidate journey, business development, closing.

"It was everything foundational that now, when you're advanced in recruitment, seems really easy," she says — and then notes how many people never get taught it at all.

The second influence is closer to home: Checkatrade's chief executive, who arrived with a background that includes Uber and led the company's transformation from a lead-generation business into a full marketplace.

Under that leadership, Scott's remit widened beyond recruitment technique into commercial fluency — business impact, revenue, return on investment.

She credits that support with turning talent acquisition at Checkatrade into a genuinely data-driven function, and with pushing her own thinking well past the boundaries of the recruiting playbook.

Building AI That Earns Its Place

Scott is an unapologetic enthusiast for AI, and an unusually disciplined one.

Her first test is diagnostic rather than technological: is this a process problem or an efficiency problem?

"If it's a process problem, AI is never going to solve that," she says — you have to go back and fix why the process isn't working.

Once that question is settled, her team builds.

They have created their own tools on Claude, integrated with their applicant tracking system, Ashby, and given the flagship one a name in keeping with the company's cat logo: Tabitha.

Tabitha takes a report of a recruiter's open roles and returns a full read on where they stand — how long each has been open, where the bottlenecks sit, which candidates risk a poor experience because they have been waiting on feedback, and what to raise with each hiring manager.

It solved a problem Scott had watched go unaddressed for years: teams looking at hiring data at face value without knowing how to turn it into actionable insight, or how to bring it credibly to stakeholders.

Her team has also built an agent that answers questions from the company's playbook and processes, and another that generates screening questions tailored to the individual candidate's CV rather than the surface-level prompts a job spec alone produces.

The result is a lean function operating at a scale that would ordinarily require several times the headcount.

Protecting The Human Moments

For all the automation, Scott draws a firm line around the parts of hiring that belong to people.

Contracts can be generated automatically once the parameters are set; offers cannot.

"That human touch will never go away," she says — when you are making the offer and building a candidate's excitement, someone from the business has to be there.

Her view is that efficiency exists to buy back exactly those moments, not to replace them.

Getting The Basics Right Before Anything Else

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders heading into the year ahead, Scott does not reach for a trend.

Fix the basics first, she says, before layering on a million tools, technologies and new processes.

By basics she means something specific and demanding: taking a genuinely solid intake form, selling a role well, understanding how the business is structured and where it is going over the next one to five years, and holding relationships with stakeholders strong enough that feedback flows honestly in both directions.

When those needs go unmet, she argues, the consequences are entirely predictable — poor time to hire, poor candidate experience, eroded trust, and ultimately attrition that lands on other functions.

She is careful to say this is not an argument against speed or against innovation.

"You can still run at a million miles per hour," she says, "but you can't do that if your basics are failing."

It sounds obvious, she admits — which is precisely why so few teams do it well, and why hers does.