Lucy Atkinson

Choosing the Second Job on Purpose

Plenty of people take a first recruitment role by chance. Fewer treat the second one as a strategic decision. Atkinson chose her next company specifically on the strength of what the temping experience had taught her, and she went looking for a sector she actually cared about. That turned out to be retail and consumer.

The move put her into fashion headhunting, with clients including Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry among the large fashion houses, and it concentrated her early years in buying and merchandising, one of the most commercially exposed and personality driven disciplines in retail. She describes the passion arriving fast, and the curiosity that followed it never really switching off. She traces both back to where she started: she has always been interested in people, she says, a creative type who likes to hear people's stories, and she connects that directly to her music background.

It is a useful reminder that the instincts recruiters spend careers refining rarely originate inside recruitment. Atkinson brought hers in from somewhere else and found the job had been waiting for them.

Building a Function, Not Filling a Seat

The signature project of her early years was a team build for John Lewis, constructing the homewares buying and merchandising function that is now a familiar and established part of the retailer. Projects of that scale are a different discipline from single placements. They require a view of how a function fits together, how personalities balance against one another, and how a group of hires will perform as a unit rather than as a stack of strong CVs.

That kind of work also changes a recruiter's relationship with a client. Once you have built a team from nothing, you are no longer receiving briefs. You are helping shape what the brief should say.

Inside a 40 Million Pound Account

Atkinson was headhunted into Korn Ferry's RPO business in its early days, an arrival she recounts with some satisfaction, because Korn Ferry had long been the firm she wanted to work for. Back in her boutique executive search days, she and her colleagues used to describe themselves as the Korn Ferry of their own niche. Joining the real thing closed a loop.

She landed on one of the business's biggest accounts at the time, Vodafone, worth more than 40 million a year. Her mandate had two halves. The first was to spearhead executive search across three UK divisions: group commercial, group corporate and group technology, leading on senior roles paying up to 250,000 or 300,000. The second was more entrepreneurial. She was there to grow the Korn Ferry account from within, building relationships and demonstrating value across the client's board and business, operating as a stakeholder advisor rather than a supplier waiting on requisitions.

In practice that meant widening the conversation well beyond hiring. Atkinson brought Korn Ferry's broader capability into play with the client group, including assessment, talent development and the tools the firm was then building around new capability development. It is a model of account leadership many talent professionals describe and comparatively few execute: becoming the person the business calls before a job description exists. The team, she notes, eventually grew the account pretty substantially.

Full Circle

One small detail says a great deal about how Atkinson works. Among the entries in her diary this month is a conversation with one of the very first leaders she worked with, a relationship that has outlasted the companies, the sectors and the job titles. She calls it full circle, and in an industry known for churn and for relationships that expire with the contract, it is not a small thing.

The Curiosity Advantage

The through line in Atkinson's career is not a sector or a methodology. It is a refusal to be incurious. She left construction recruitment for fashion because she wanted to work somewhere she felt something. She moved from boutique search into a global firm because she wanted to see the discipline operate at scale. Inside a major account she pushed past search into assessment and capability development, because the interesting question was never only who to hire but what the business would need to be able to do next.

For anyone who arrived in the profession by accident, as she did, the lesson embedded in her path is worth taking seriously. The first job may be luck. Everything after it is a choice about which problems you want to solve and which rooms you want to be in. Atkinson started making those choices early and deliberately, and a career later they still look like the right ones.