Susan Jackson

The Accidental Technologist

At the recruiting agency where she landed after that career fair, Jackson discovered two things almost simultaneously. The first was that she loved recruiting. The second was that she had an instinct for machines. She became, in short order, the most technical person on the floor. If something needed doing with a computer, she was the one who did it.

After a couple of years of building experience on the agency side, she moved in house and became an HR generalist in the truest sense of the phrase. Benefits. Employee relations. Payroll. Recruiting. "Everything under the sun in the HR arena," as she puts it. Recruiting became her area of expertise, but the technology pull never went away. At a small company with a real help desk and real IT staff, Jackson was still the person setting up the time and attendance system and still the person a colleague turned to when a computer stopped cooperating. She did not treat that as a distraction from her HR career. She treated it as the other half of it.

That instinct turned out to be the most valuable thing about her. Two competencies that most professionals keep in separate lanes, deep functional HR knowledge and genuine technical fluency, were converging in the same person. The rest of her career is what happened when the market caught up to that combination.

Brussels, and the Deployment She Had Never Done Before

Her move into HR technology took her to Coca-Cola Enterprises, where she was responsible for analytics and for the company's recruitment system. She moved up quickly, and then came the assignment that reframed what she believed she was capable of: deploying the applicant tracking system globally.

She had never done it before. She had no prior experience with a global deployment of that scale. She had a small team, and she fully managed the implementation herself. It worked seamlessly. Along the way she found herself commuting back and forth to Brussels on what became her first international business trip, and somewhere in that rhythm of transatlantic flights and go-live dates, she discovered what she actually wanted her career to be.

"I quickly fell in love with working for large global companies and doing large scale implementation," she says. It was not a passing enthusiasm. Every role since Coca-Cola has been at a large, global, complex organization. The pattern was set: walk into the enterprise, understand how the people function actually operates, and rebuild the technology and the org structure underneath it so the whole thing works better than it did before.

The People Who Took the Chance

Ask Jackson who shaped her, and she does not reach for famous names. She reaches for the two people who trusted her before the resume justified it.

The first is Lisa Tyler, who hired Jackson out of the recruitment agency into her first corporate HR role. "She really shaped me into the HR professional that I am today," Jackson says. Tyler took a chance on someone with no prior experience across most of the HR spectrum and then, critically, gave her room to do all of it: to grow, to learn, to take on functions she had never touched. Jackson does not soften the weight of that decision. If Tyler had not hired her, she says, she does not know where she would be today.

The second is Bob, a leader at AIG. Jackson was brand new to the company when he sent her on a two week trip to Asia with the organization's senior HR executives. It was an extraordinary vote of confidence in a new hire, and she has never forgotten it. But the trip also became an education. She learned enormously from watching him operate, from the way he carried himself and moved through the company. Between the two of them, Tyler and Bob, Jackson credits the professional she became.

The through line is unmistakable, and it shows up in how she leads. Both mentors extended trust ahead of proof. Both gave her hard things to do before anyone could be certain she would succeed at them. Jackson's own career is the argument for that management philosophy, and the global ATS deployment she had never attempted before is Exhibit A.

Built for the Moment the Industry Is In

Every company in the market is now racing to figure out what technology means for how they find, assess, and hire people. It is the dominant conversation in talent acquisition, and it is one Jackson has been having, in one form or another, since she was the person at a small company quietly configuring the time and attendance system on top of her HR day job.

That is the advantage of a career built the way hers was. She did not learn talent acquisition and then bolt technology onto it, and she did not come from systems and then try to understand people. She grew both at once, from the agency floor to the generalist desk to global enterprise implementations, which is why she can sit in a room with executives and translate in both directions.

Her passion, in her own framing, is transforming organizations. Not just installing software into them. The distinction matters, and it is why the org design work always travels with the technology work when she does it. Systems change how people work whether anyone plans for it or not. Jackson plans for it. That is the expertise, and after a career spent inside the most complex global companies in the world, it is also the thing she says she loves most.