“The Market Is Still Human”– Talent Acquisition Insights from Charlie Oscar’s Sian Fisher

Continuing Silverdrum’s interview series, we’re speaking to some of the most respected Talent Acquisition leaders across the digital media and agency world to understand what really drives great hiring.

Next up is Sian Fisher, Talent Acquisition Lead at Charlie Oscar, one of the UK’s most progressive independent agencies.

Across 15 years in talent acquisition, Sian has built her reputation on relationships, candidate experience and taking a genuinely human approach to hiring. Her views on AI, employer brand and what candidates need to do to stand out are refreshingly honest and highly relevant to today’s market.

From hiring emerging AI talent to challenging the overuse of automation, Sian’s answers reinforce an important point: while the tools may evolve, recruitment remains a people business.

Here’s the conversation, unedited and in her own words. 👇

Q1. From your experience, what’s the most rewarding part of working in talent acquisition?

For me, it’s the relationships. I feel really lucky to build connections with people from that very first conversation and throughout the whole interview process, taking the time to understand what motivates them, what they value, and guiding them along the way. Over the last 15–16 years, I’ve been fortunate enough to place and stay connected with people across different stages of their careers. By the time someone joins us, I often feel like I already know them, and getting to then watch them grow and support them through their journey is definitely the most rewarding part of talent acquisition for me.

Q2. What impact do you think AI will have on the future of TA, for better or worse?

AI is really exciting for TA and I think it’ll make us better at the job – interview notes, post-interview write-ups, reporting, headhunting, all the stuff that eats up time. But there’s a line, and it matters. TA is a relationship led function at its core. The moment you automate the human connection, you lose the thing that makes it work. So it’s about being intentional – use AI where it creates efficiency, and protect the spaces where real conversation happens.

The candidate side is equally interesting. Interview prep has never been more polished, but a lot of it is AI-generated and you can tell. I’ve read cover letters recently where five candidates used almost identical phrasing, it’s an immediate red flag. The skill now is knowing how to get past the rehearsed version and find out who someone actually is.

Q3. What’s one piece of advice you’d give to job seekers navigating today’s market?

Stay relevant, and show it. Know what’s happening in your space – platforms, trends, shifts in the industry, and be able to speak to it naturally in a conversation. Don’t outsource your job search to AI!! A tailored message to someone you’ve actually spoken to will always beat a perfectly optimised CV. Go to events, meet people, have coffee. The market is competitive but it’s still human, act like it.

Q4. What’s the hardest role you’ve ever had to hire for and how did you crack it?

The hardest wasn’t actually hard in the traditional sense, it was just completely new territory. We recently hired a Head of AI Ops at Charlie Oscar, and it was the first AI-focused role I’d ever recruited for. The brief was to make CO a AI-native agency, which meant this person needed to be the most knowledgeable person in the building on the topic. We were essentially learning from candidates as we went, which is a weird and brilliant position to be in. We had to really listen, ask better questions, and trust what we were hearing. We met some genuinely brilliant people and made a great hire pretty quickly. It reminded me that the best processes are the ones where you stay curious.

Q5. How do you measure the success of your TA function beyond just ‘time to hire’?

Time to hire has never been my north star. At CO, we’d always take longer to find the right person over moving fast on the wrong one. The metric I actually care about is how people talk about us after the process, even if they didn’t get the job. Some of our best introductions and referrals have come from candidates who weren’t the right fit but had a great experience. That’s your TA function working. Employer brand isn’t built on job ads, it’s built on every conversation you have with someone.

And ultimately, the real proof is in what happens after someone joins. If a hire thrives in the role, that tells you the interview and assessment process did its job. A great TA function should be accountable to that, not just getting someone through the door, but getting the right person through it.