Steven Dilworth

From Dental Sciences to the Life Sciences Frontline

Dilworth studied dental sciences, and the path it was opening for him was not the one he wanted. What stayed with him was the subject matter itself: science, life sciences, human health. The question was how to bridge the gap into the sector without the credential that normally buys the ticket.

The answer came through personality as much as planning. His first role was direct, customer facing agency recruitment, the kind of work that rewards people who like people and thrive on variety. From there he moved in-house at a clinical research organization, and that single opportunity became the foundation of everything since. Colleagues around him who had worked in the sector and in HR gave him the confidence to make the leap. "I found my calling, for want of a better phrase, by working in the pharmaceutical industry," he says. Two decades of context in clinical research now sits underneath every hiring conversation he has, which in an industry this technical is not a soft advantage.

Three Leaders, Three Lessons

Dilworth is quick to credit the leaders who shaped how he works, and each taught him something different.

Kaushik Pankania, known to colleagues as KP, gave him his first opportunity in the clinical research sector, and together they built out the in-house recruiting function at Chiltern. What Dilworth absorbed there was discipline. KP was meticulous and coordinated to a degree that reset expectations: notes on every single candidate he spoke to, hiring manager preferences documented, vendor engagements tracked. "He set the bar in terms of your own organizational capabilities," Dilworth says, and that bar became a habit of ownership and accountability that he carries still.

Scott Page, whom he worked under at Labcorp, brought a different education. Page had run his own executive search agency and arrived with strong financial acumen and an established leadership presence. From him Dilworth learned stakeholder management, how a business actually operates financially, and how a talent leader should show up in front of it.

Dave Cooper, whom Dilworth reports to today, gave him his first opportunity to run talent acquisition for Fortrea and then kept widening the remit across the wider people experience: learning and development, talent management, capability building. Cooper also modeled something less easily taught, what Dilworth describes as a genuinely human and inspirational way to lead teams. Three very different leaders, one composite result: "They all made an impact on how I operate today."

Building AI Into the Team, Not Around It

Dilworth works remotely inside a meeting heavy, email heavy business, and he is candid about what AI has done for the shape of his day. It functions as a sounding board that is always in the room, whether the problem is an operational transformation, a large scale recruitment initiative, or workforce planning. That framing is deliberate. He does not treat the technology as a better search box.

Inside his talent strategy group, adoption is being driven by design rather than hope. Individuals across the group serve as AI champions, largely on Copilot, carrying a remit alongside their day jobs to help colleagues actually use the tools. The team has also built its own agents internally: market insights agents that ingest intelligence and formulate reports for the business, plus support for customer conversations and business proposals. The point is not speed for its own sake. It is that recruiters here are accountable for the headcount solution, and their job is more than that. Push the market intel in, get consultative insight out, and let it work around the clock when the team is offline.

He is equally clear on the limits. There is a great deal of noise about what AI can and cannot do, and early enthusiasm centered on whether it could automate interviews, record and prompt them, and generate packs for hiring managers. Much of that is technically possible. The compliance dimension, he cautions, is a reason to stay wary rather than dazzled, and the hype itself can become a distraction.

The Thing Recruiters Cannot Afford to Lose

Dilworth's advice to other talent leaders lands on a tension he has already watched play out. Some recruitment professionals, he has observed, are becoming a little more insular because of the technology. That is the failure mode nobody puts in a business case.

"There's tried and tested traditional techniques that made you such a good recruiter in the first place and made you memorable with candidates," he says. "You can't lose that because you suddenly got this tool that does a lot of the work for you." His prescription is balance: use the technology to level up stakeholder engagement and to buy back the time that makes a recruiter consultative rather than transactional, and spend that time on people. In a sector where pipelines are built by hand and reputation travels through networks, the recruiter who remains memorable is still the one who wins.