Meet Charlie

High performance starts before day one

Through his leadership of global talent acquisition and transformation, Charlie shapes how Checkout.com attracts talent, how teams define the strengths they need and how candidates experience the company before making the decision to join.

That early experience matters because hiring is a two-way decision. Ambitious people are assessing Checkout.com just as carefully as Checkout.com is assessing them. They want to understand whether this is a place where their ideas will be heard, their judgement will be trusted and their ambition will have room to grow.

“Great talent is looking for more than a role. People want to understand whether an environment will stretch them, surround them with exceptional colleagues and give them the opportunity to make a visible difference.”

Talent acquisition is therefore not a service sitting at the edge of performance. Every hire changes what a team can do, how it thinks and the standard it creates around the work. That makes hiring one of the earliest and most consequential performance decisions a company makes.

“Every hiring decision is a performance decision. We are not filling a seat. We are deciding what new strength, perspective and possibility we are bringing into the company.”

The starting point is not simply a job description or a list of tasks. It is the outcome the team needs to create and the contribution that will help move the business forward.

“The best hiring begins with a simple question: what should be possible because this person joined us?”

That question encourages teams to think beyond immediate capacity. It creates space to consider the expertise, energy and perspective that will help Checkout.com continue to grow.

Attraction built on truth

Charlie sees Employer Brand as our promise about the experience people can expect and that promise only matters if it remains true after someone joins. Attraction is not about creating universal appeal. It is about helping the right people recognise an environment in which they can contribute, grow and do meaningful work.

“We should never present a version of Checkout.com that disappears on day one. The story has to be true in the work, in the team and in the expectations.”

That means being open about both the opportunity and the demands of the environment. The scale of the problems, the pace of the work and the ownership people are given can be deeply motivating, but only when candidates understand them clearly.

For someone with ambition, the appeal is not that the work will always be comfortable. It is that the work will matter. There is an opportunity to solve complex problems, learn alongside people with deep expertise and take on responsibility that can accelerate a career.

“Our job is not to make this place sound right for everyone. It is to make it clear enough that people with the appetite to learn, the ambition to make an impact and the confidence to take ownership can recognise what is possible here.”

The most compelling stories are therefore specific. They show the problems people are solving, the decisions they are trusted to make, the colleagues they can learn from and the impact their work can have.

“The most powerful reason to join is not a list of claims about the company. It is a clear view of the problems you can help solve, the people you will solve them with and the responsibility you will be trusted to take.”

Employer brand becomes strongest when it replaces polish with proof. Candidates should be able to see the reality of the opportunity and decide whether it matches the way they want to work and grow.

Looking beyond familiar signals

“A CV is an important source of evidence, but it is not the verdict. It cannot fully tell you how quickly someone learns, how they respond when the answer is unclear or what standard they create around them.”

For Charlie, hiring for potential means looking for evidence in a broader and more deliberate way. How has someone made sense of complexity? How have they responded when the evidence changed? How do they approach challenges? What do they do when the outcome matters but the route towards it is not obvious?

“We are looking for evidence of what someone can contribute now, but also for the curiosity and learning velocity that will allow their contribution to keep growing.”

Charlie is equally clear that joining a high performance environment does not mean arriving with every answer. The people Checkout.com wants to attract are often those who remain ambitious about how much further they can develop.

“We are not looking for finished products. We are looking for people who have real expertise, but who still have the ambition and humility to keep learning.”

Confidence matters, but so does curiosity. Experience is valuable, but so is the willingness to have your thinking tested by people who bring a different perspective.

Hiring people who strengthen the team

“The strongest hire is not always the person with the most impressive answer in the room. It is often the person who makes the whole room think better.”

That can show up in different ways. Some people bring deep technical or functional expertise. Others connect ideas across teams, create clarity in ambiguity or help move a group from discussion to decision. The common thread is that their contribution extends beyond their own output.

“Talent is not only what someone produces individually. It is the judgement, confidence and momentum they help create around them.”

This is why Charlie looks at what someone will add, rather than simply whether they resemble people who have succeeded before. Each new colleague should bring strength the team can use, whether that is a different perspective, a harder question, a new capability or a better way to solve a problem.

“The question is not only, ‘Can this person succeed here?’ It is, ‘What will this team be able to do because they are here?’”

For the right candidate, the strength of the people already at Checkout.com is part of the attraction. Ambitious people often want to work alongside colleagues who care deeply about their craft, ask thoughtful questions and expect one another to keep improving.

“For the right person, high expectations are not something to be afraid of. They are part of the appeal. They mean you will be surrounded by people who care about the quality of the work and who will challenge you to be better everyday”

High performers do not only raise their own standard. They increase what becomes possible for the people around them.

A two-way decision

The strongest candidates are making an important decision too. They want to understand the reality of the role, the quality of the team, the expectations they will be held to and whether the work will make meaningful use of their ambition.

“A good hiring process creates evidence and conviction on both sides. We are deciding whether someone can thrive here and they are deciding whether this is where they want to do their best work.”

That makes transparency essential. Candidates should be able to ask direct questions, meet people who can speak honestly about the work and understand what success will require.

“The aim is not simply to reach a yes. It is to create the honesty and clarity both sides need to make the right decision, even when the right decision is no.”

The interview itself should reveal more than rehearsed examples. Charlie is interested in how someone thinks, what they notice, how they exercise judgement when the answer is not obvious and how they adapt when new information changes the problem.

“We are less interested in a perfect answer than in how someone gets to it, what they challenge and what they do when the information is incomplete.”

That is where assessment becomes more meaningful. It moves beyond whether someone can describe high performance and begins to show how they might practise it.

The experience is the evidence

Candidates should not have to wait until they join to understand how Checkout.com works. The hiring experience is one of the first opportunities to demonstrate the clarity, pace, challenge and respect the company expects internally.

“People should feel our culture in the quality of the brief, the standard of the conversation, the pace of the decision and the respect we show for their time.”

That does not mean every process should look identical. Different roles require different evidence and different conversations. It means every stage should have a purpose, every interviewer should understand what they are assessing and every candidate should know what happens next.

“Employer brand is not only what we publish. It is the sum of the moments in which someone decides whether to believe us.”

For Charlie, that makes the candidate experience a shared responsibility. Recruiters, hiring managers and interviewers all influence whether the process reflects the standards the company wants to be known for.

“The candidate does not experience our organisational structure. They experience one Checkout.com. Every person involved in the process contributes to that impression.”

That experience should leave candidates with greater clarity than they had at the beginning. They should understand the opportunity, the expectations and the contribution they could make.

Transforming hiring around what matters

As Checkout.com evolves, the way it attracts and hires people has to evolve with it. Charlie’s transformation remit is focused on making the process clearer, more consistent and easier to navigate, while removing unnecessary complexity and friction.

“A better process is not one with more stages. It is one where every stage has a purpose, every interviewer knows what evidence they are looking for and the candidate always knows what happens next.”

Technology and data can remove friction, reveal where decisions slow down and create greater consistency across teams. Their value is not in replacing the human judgement at the centre of hiring, but in creating more time for it.

“Technology should create more space for human judgement, not less. The more friction we remove, the more time our people can spend understanding capability, motivation and potential.”

Transformation also means being willing to challenge habits that no longer serve the outcome. A process can be familiar without being effective.

For Charlie, the test is whether it helps the business make better decisions at the right pace while giving candidates a clearer, more human experience.

“Speed does not come from rushing the decision. It comes from removing the things that do not improve it.”

That requires clarity from the beginning. Teams need to understand why they are hiring, what evidence will inform the decision and who is accountable for moving it forward. When those foundations are strong, pace and quality can reinforce one another.

One standard, many routes

The strength of Checkout.com comes from people who can meet a high bar through different experiences, perspectives and ways of thinking.

For Charlie, global talent acquisition means holding the core expectations steady while understanding the context in which people have built their careers. Capability can look different across markets and disciplines. The role of a strong hiring process is to recognise the evidence without placing every candidate into the same mold.

This principle applies to our employer brand too. The story should be coherent wherever a candidate encounters it, but it should leave space for people to see how their own experience and perspective could contribute.

“We are building one company, not one profile. Shared standards make us stronger and different perspectives help us see more of the problem.”

This is how attracting new talent becomes part of building performance at scale. The aim is not simply to add capacity. It is to bring in people who expand what the company can understand, challenge and deliver.

Building strength from the start

Charlie’s perspective brings high performance into focus before the first day of work. It starts with an honest story, a clear understanding of the contribution a team needs and a hiring process that looks for evidence of capability, potential and impact.

It also depends on mutual choice. The right people should understand the opportunity, the expectations and the responsibility they will be trusted with. Our process is designed to go beyond what they have done before, and establish what new strength they can bring and what they have the potential to become.

“People may first be attracted by the opportunity, but they commit when they can see the contribution they will make. Our role is to make both visible.”

For ambitious people, Checkout.com offers more than progression measured by title or tenure. It offers the opportunity to work on complex, meaningful problems, learn alongside people who will challenge their thinking and take ownership of work with visible impact.

“If you have the hunger to keep learning, the ambition to make a difference and the humility to be challenged, this is an environment where you can grow quickly and do work you are genuinely proud of.”

The offer is not the end of that promise. Talent acquisition can open the door, but the culture has to keep proving that the challenge, trust and opportunity candidates were shown are real.

“We do not hire high performance as a finished product. We bring in people with the capability and motivation to strengthen Checkout.com, then give that potential meaningful work in which to grow.”

For people who are energised by meaningful problems, ambitious colleagues and the chance to make the people around them better, the hiring journey is only the beginning. Once they join, high performance becomes something they can feel in the decisions they own, the standards they help set and the impact they create.