About Us
Creating a new future for aspirational women
We have worked hard to create a culture that is inclusive, building a workplace that offers balance, challenge, and reward.
Scoutess was formed to offer women with executive capability and colour a career advancing pathway, providing access to senior roles, a powerful network of like-minded professionals and career sponsorship opportunities.
Our ability to engage with 98% of the women we head hunt proves that we are trusted; seen as genuine career partners for those looking to progress in the workplace.
With 100% retention at functional leadership level, our candidate relationships are purposeful, with us helping them to navigate the cultural workplace challenges, whilst building deeper connections with their colleagues and peers.
Our Team
Coming from talent acquisition, organisational design and commercial leadership backgrounds, we collectively use our knowledge and skills to offer the most transformative talent solutions to our clients across the retail and consumer markets. Our lived experience as a diverse team enables us to quickly identify organisational recruitment barriers, those roadblocks that exclude candidates from progressing in a process, or not being onboarded successfully once hired.
We have an innate ability to find the rarest of talent during senior leadership and executive searches, with an ability to connect on a deeper level with our candidates, forming thoughtful relationships, building trust and instilling a collective need to drive equity.
Supporting future Leaders
Working at the senior end of leadership has not stopped us supporting and developing those women career transitioning, whether that be at the start or at the mid career point. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients in helping them to reach and build engagement within targeted diverse groups, across both the UK and globally, with us being Ambassadors within the Retail and Consumer industry for those future leaders.
Our future as Women In Recruitment
Using our power and privilege we are shaping a generation of professional female recruiters, those who will transform the recruitment industry, enabling us to accelerate equity in the workplace. 77% of recruiters in the UK continue to be white, british males, which demonstrates the need for the recruitment industry to seriously challenge how it attracts, retains and develops it’s people. Female recruitment founders are also under-represented with less than 5% of recruitment agencies being founded by a female with a headcount of more than 10 consultants.
Women In Recruitment is the community that will drive change, by elevating the industry as a career of choice for women, providing economic empowerment through career advancement for those in the industry, and sponsoring those who are looking to start their boutique senior search agencies.
Karen Orton
@ Founder
I’ve seen how businesses transform when you get the people, culture, and strategy right, being humbled and proud to have placed leaders that do just that.
My career has also enabled me to build award winning global teams, with many now leading the most successful recruitment brands, or starting their own as true founders.
Transforming businesses through inclusive hiring, was where I found my purpose and so after a successful senior leadership career, I started my next career adventure, as the founder of Scoutess back in 2017.
I know the challenges that women face as executives and the power that those in dominant “power” groups have to remove these, which is why we are doing more to “challenge the recruitment norm, provoke action and change the lives of those most underrepresented in the workplace” our vision.
I met Karen whilst at a crossroads in my career and she inspired me to explore the world of recruitment with her infectious enthusiasm and unfaltering passion.
She was a fantastic manager, who constantly encouraged me to stretch myself, offering constructive guidance along the way. She was approachable and enormously supportive, always on hand with a listening ear and advice.
As a character in the office, she was a continuously positive, bright and energetic character, lifting the atmosphere during any stressful moments.
I would jump at the chance to work alongside Karen again in any capacity.
Lucy, Talent Manager
Karen gave me the opportunity to work in a specialist recruitment capacity. She managed me very effectively and developed me into a true specialist recruiter.
John, EMEA Finance Senior Partner
Rachel and Karen helped me to balance both my parenting and my career. I had been in recruitment for years but was disillusioned with the industry and couldn’t make the hours work, but then I found Scoutess. A magical environment one that offers purpose, meaning and joy.
Shereen, Divisional Manager
Discover more about how we can make an impact in your business
The roles we fill:
Head of Technology
Strategy Lead
Chief Sustainability Officer
Global Head of Reward
Managing Director
Trading Director
Head of Product
Chief of Staff
Organisational Design Lead
Head of PR
Marketing Director
Sales Director
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5 Brayford Square
LONDON
E1 0SG
