Rebecca Foden

Four Months in Agency, Two Decades In-House

Foden arrived at university against the odds, having come through a school that offered its students very little in the way of runway. Her first proper job after graduating was with an engineering recruitment agency, a role she held for roughly four months before moving to another firm specialising in technical and IT recruitment, an organisation that is still standing today.

It was there that she engineered the pivot that defined everything after it. Rather than waiting to be moved, she built a relationship with a client, an internet service provider, strong enough that she was placed with them directly. "I managed to outsource myself to one of our clients," she says, "and that's how I started my in-house journey." That was over twenty years ago. "I went in-house and I haven't looked back since."

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Agency teaches speed, market coverage and the discipline of closing. In-house teaches something slower and harder: how hiring sits inside workforce planning, employer brand, diversity strategy and the politics of a leadership team. Foden's career has run through organisations where those questions are not academic, including Transport for London, an employer whose scale and public visibility make every hiring decision a matter of institutional reputation as well as headcount.

The Trailblazer Who Asked the Bigger Question

Foden is emphatic that the people who shaped her have not all sat inside talent acquisition. Several of the most formative came from the broader HR arena, which is part of why her view of the function is so unwilling to be boxed in.

Stanton Brown, hired at Transport for London as chief talent and diversity officer, is the one she describes as a trailblazer. He came from a humble background and worked his way into the highest echelons of the profession, which is precisely why his standards carried weight with her. She thought of him as a North Star, one of the small percentage of leaders who reach the C-suite and keep climbing toward the apex. He pushed her outside her boundaries, consistently, and she remains grateful for it. The purpose question was the sharpest example: not a management technique but a genuine challenge to think about legacy rather than logistics.

The Women Who Set the Standard

Her second North Star is Jen Candy, the talent leader and VP at Mondelez who has more recently moved into fractional consulting. Foden points first to the craft: Candy's expertise in employer brand and employee value propositions is, in her view, genuinely best in class. But the reason she has looked up to her for years is broader than technical excellence. Candy is collegiate. She shows up for other people, and she consistently supports women working in talent acquisition, a habit that costs time and returns nothing obvious to the person doing it.

The third is Nerida, whom Foden has watched speak on stage at the In-House Recruitment Network and who she describes as amazing at what she does. What stands out is the combination of energy and reach: a brilliant rapport with the wider profession, and a transformational instinct as a leader rather than an administrative one. It is a telling shortlist. None of the three are admired primarily for filling roles. All three are admired for what they did with the platform that talent gave them.

What Twenty Years Teaches

Read together, Foden's influences describe a coherent philosophy. Talent acquisition is not a service desk. It is the function that decides who an organisation becomes, and the people worth learning from are the ones who treat it that way: leaders who ask about purpose, who build propositions rather than job adverts, who lift other people while they climb.

Her own path makes the same argument without needing to say it out loud. A young graduate from a disadvantaged school who reached university against the odds, spotted within months that the real work happened in-house, and created the opportunity herself rather than waiting for it. Two decades later she is still inside the profession, still crediting the people who pushed her past her own boundaries, and still, by her own account, lucky to have worked for great people. The gratitude is genuine. So is the record it sits on top of.