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About

Fifteen years making the call. Now I help you make yours.

Agency search, in-house, leading the team and partnering with the Management Board. I've done executive hiring from every seat there is, and I bring all of it into how I coach and advise.

Kate Schofield
My Route to This Work
Why I
coach

Who an organisation hires has a direct impact on its bottom line, and for the person making the move, it's one of the biggest decisions they'll make in their career. I started coaching people through that decision almost by accident, because it was part of doing the job properly. I quickly realised how much I enjoyed it, and how much clarity and better decision-making I could bring by coaching and advising people through those moments, not just processing them through a pipeline.

Cut forward to the last couple of years. I was offered coaching myself, and it transformed my whole career. It was the same kind of rigorous, honest thinking I'd spent years learning to offer other people, and experiencing it properly, from the other side, made the decision for me. That's the actual reason I do this now.

I left corporate in January 2026 to do that work directly, rather than staffing the process from the outside. I'm currently completing my executive coaching training at ACT, Brown University and building the kind of hiring-informed coaching I wish I'd had access to earlier myself.

I'm not a career coach who has read about hiring, or one who coaches without ever having been coached. I ran the process at scale inside the companies making the decisions, and I've been coached myself, at a real inflection point. That's the difference in the room.

How I Coach
My
coaching philosophy

Four things that stay constant, whatever the client or the challenge.

01
Empathy-led
The work starts with genuinely understanding where you are, not where you should be. No judgement about how you got here.
02
Direct questioning
I ask the question that's actually in the room, not the comfortable one. Clarity comes from being willing to look at the real thing.
03
A thought partner
You already have the answer more often than you think. My job is to help you find it faster, not hand you mine.
04
Accountability
Insight without follow-through is just an interesting conversation. Every session ends with something concrete, and I check whether it happened.
Breadth of Experience
A wider lens
than most coaches or consultants have

I've hired and advised founders directly on their own leadership teams and run searches and built functions across Benelux, CEE, the Nordics and UK&I, with further reach into APAC and MENA, spanning EMEA end to end. I've also worked cross-sector, from fast-growth tech to traditional corporates figuring out how to compete for talent. That range means I've seen more versions of what actually works than a coach or consultant working inside one company, one region, or one sector ever will.

Founder Dynamics
Zero to scale
Advised founders directly on building their own leadership teams, not just filling roles beneath them.
Geographic Scope
Benelux · CEE · Nordics · UK&I · APAC · MENA
Executive hiring across EMEA end to end, with further reach into APAC and MENA. Not a single-market view of talent.
Cross-Sector Hiring
Tech to traditional corporate
From fast-growth technology businesses to established corporates rethinking how they compete for senior talent.
Beyond the CV
Get to
know me

I'm British, and spent a decade in London before moving to Berlin. I didn't come for a job, I came because I'd fallen in love with the city, and I still get a small thrill every time my German improves by one verb tense.

I studied Anthropology at Durham, which sounds like an odd start for a career in executive recruiting, but understanding why people do what they do turned out to be most of the job. I spent the next fifteen-odd years doing exactly that: CFO search at Odgers Berndtson, then Google, then running Executive Recruiting at Zalando, where I ended up leading the whole function.

Somewhere in those fifteen years I'd quietly become the person people came to for career advice anyway, over coffee, in the corridor before a board meeting. So in January 2026 I decided to make it official.

I'm the eldest of four, and the only girl, which either explains a lot about how I work or nothing at all, depending who you ask. I've been backpacking on and off since I was sixteen, and travel is still the thing I'll rearrange my calendar for. Closer to home, you'll usually find me in a Pilates class (I trained as an instructor), sweating through a Barry's session, a few chapters into a novel, or hunting down the best coffee and the best food wherever I happen to be. I'm also a sucker for a good contemporary gallery and find any excuse to look at interiors inspiration.

Let's talk

Ready to start?

Let's have the conversation.

A 30-minute call. No pitch, no obligation, just a conversation about where you are and whether there's a way to work together.

All enquiries treated in confidence · Typical response within 24 hours · Connect on LinkedIn