Rebecca Foden is the Head of Executive Recruitment function and recruitment diversity lead for Transport for London, one of the World’s leading transport companies with an £11bn budget, a capital investment of around £2bn each year and over 27,000 employees.

Rebecca helps to deliver a forward thinking and highly inclusive talent strategy to support TfL’s purpose to keep London moving, working and growing. Rebecca implemented the executive sourcing model for TfL in 2014 which has subsequently won an industry award in recognition of being best in class for innovation as well as gender diversity delivering 51% leadership women hires in 2018 and cost avoidance of over £2m.

Rebecca has held a dual role also acting as Head of Early Careers recruitment at TfL and launched a diversity TA strategy to encourage greater youth mobility across London in the most socially deprived boroughs. In 2017, Rebecca’s TA team took home the prestigious European Diversity Award for the best social mobility initiative at the EDA, which was seen as highly pioneering having a transformative impact across London. She’s really proud of this achievement demonstrating how a seed of an idea and vision can quickly flourish with a great team and make a positive impact.

Among other projects, Rebecca also delivers TfL’s broader talent strategy around succession planning, talent development and was selected as the TfL functional lead for the Mayor’s Our Time women in sponsorship project. A project that is the first of its’ kind sponsoring women into leadership roles across London.

Previously, Rebecca’s background spans 18 years of corporate Talent and HR experience across a breadth of industries from banking, telecommunications and technology. Rebecca is a regular speaker at industry events and is passionate about driving the diversity agenda for Women, BAME and underrepresented groups including STEM, as well as creating sustainable solutions to address future talent challenges, recruitment transformation, EVP, digital innovation and disruption of talent strategies to drive and accelerate talent development.

When she’s not working, she spends all of her time with her girl/boy twins (aged 7) who are totally cute and “mini me’s”. They are obviously her social experiment on systemic gender stereotypes helping her see through some of the barriers that already pre exist for employers! – maybe one day she’ll write a book about this….

Rebecca is also a military spouse, which is great as she is currently leading on the military programme at TfL, allowing her to bring great insight into some of the barriers facing ex-service leavers.