Seija Costley-Wood: Building Elite Global Talent Functions Through Discipline, Culture, and Human Leadership
Seija Costley-Wood is a senior talent leader based in London whose career reflects a rare blend of operational rigour, people-first values, and long-term discipline. As Head of Talent Acquisition at RED Global, she has progressed through every internal TA level, helping scale teams, shape culture, and expand capability across the UK and Europe.
Seija Costley-Wood Age
Seija Costley-Wood has not publicly disclosed her age. Public posts indicate her birthday falls on 26 June, but no birth year is shared, making her exact age unconfirmed.
Current Role and Leadership Scope
Head of Talent Acquisition at RED Global
In August 2025, Seija Costley-Wood stepped into the role of Head of Talent Acquisition at RED Global. Operating from London in a hybrid model, she oversees hiring strategy across the UK while also supporting new regional footprints in the Netherlands and Poland. Her remit spans workforce planning, regional scaling, senior stakeholder alignment, and the development of consistent, high-quality hiring standards across markets.
Strategic Responsibilities
Her leadership portfolio includes global human resources management, new-hire training frameworks, negotiation, and end-to-end global talent acquisition. The role demands a balance between speed and quality—ensuring teams scale without diluting culture—alongside a strong focus on candidate experience and internal mobility.
Career Progression Inside RED Global
Talent Acquisition Manager (2022–2025)
Prior to her current position, she served as Talent Acquisition Manager, leading delivery teams and embedding repeatable hiring processes. This period was marked by consolidation and growth, aligning recruitment operations with business objectives in highly competitive technology markets.
Talent Acquisition Specialist (2019–2022)
Her journey at RED Global began as a Talent Acquisition Specialist, where she developed deep domain knowledge across SAP, business applications, data and analytics, cloud and infrastructure, software development, and cyber security. The hands-on foundation gained here later informed her leadership decisions, ensuring policy was grounded in practical delivery.
Understanding RED Global’s Hiring Environment
RED Global is a long-established international recruitment business specialising in SAP and technology disciplines. The organisation is known for significant investment in people and infrastructure, including advanced internal databases, specialist resourcing teams, and structured training delivered by experienced industry professionals.
Employee Experience and Culture
The firm promotes an inclusive, mature environment with hybrid working, strong benefits, and a culture that values wellbeing and performance in equal measure. These conditions provide the backdrop against which Seija Costley-Wood has built and led talent functions focused on sustainability rather than short-term hiring spikes.
External Recruitment Experience
Recruitment Consultant at Engage PSG
Before joining RED Global, she worked as a Recruitment Consultant at Engage PSG, covering the UK and European markets. Her specialism lay in commercially focused roles within Risk Solutions and RegTech, including AML, fraud prevention, governance, risk and compliance, identity verification, KYC, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Operating in the City of London, she delivered search-led assignments for global enterprises and fast-growing businesses, strengthening her ability to position employer brands and secure senior-level talent in complex markets.
Consultant at Hays
Earlier, Seija Costley-Wood held a Consultant role at Hays in London. Her work focused on career transition support services, including one-to-one coaching, workshop facilitation, redeployment programmes, and change management. This experience sharpened her understanding of candidate psychology, organisational change, and the human impact of workforce decisions.
Foundations in Banking and Retail Leadership
Personal Banking Advisor at Lloyds Banking Group
Her early professional years were spent at Lloyds Banking Group, where she served as a Personal Banking Advisor in Bedfordshire. Responsibilities included business development, risk management, data analysis, customer service performance, and audit readiness. She also supported grievance processes and developed KPIs for new recruits, laying a strong analytical and compliance-driven foundation.
Retail Management at The Body Shop
Before banking, she built leadership experience in retail with The Body Shop, progressing to Manager. Here, she recruited and developed high-performing teams, led audits, delivered appraisals, planned business strategy, and managed franchise-to-company transitions. These roles instilled commercial awareness and people management skills that later translated seamlessly into recruitment leadership.
Sabbatical and Global Perspective
In 2016, during her time with Lloyds, she took a six-month sabbatical to travel across South America, South-East Asia, and Europe. This period broadened her cultural awareness and resilience—qualities that now inform her approach to global hiring and cross-border team leadership.
Personal Discipline and Professional Philosophy
Fitness, Endurance, and Consistency
Public posts reveal a long-standing commitment to fitness and endurance, including weight training over many years and participation in bikini fitness competitions. She has also completed extreme walking challenges—covering 100,000 steps in a single day and even 100 kilometres in under 24 hours. These pursuits reflect discipline, consistency, and mental resilience.
Travel, Exploration, and Reflection
An avid hiker and explorer, she has travelled extensively, including completing the Everest Base Camp trek. Her reflections often focus on mindset, personal accountability, and continuous improvement—values she explicitly links to professional conduct and leadership effectiveness.
Leadership Values in Talent Acquisition
Seija Costley-Wood’s public commentary consistently highlights the belief that personal habits reveal professional character. Passion, grit, patience, and the ability to see goals through are qualities she values in candidates and colleagues alike. This philosophy underpins her approach to hiring: assessing not just technical skill, but the behaviours that sustain performance over time.
Culture-Led Hiring
Rather than treating recruitment as a transactional function, her work emphasises long-term cultural fit, growth mindset, and authenticity. This approach supports employer branding while ensuring teams are built to last in fast-moving technology markets.
Reputation and Professional Presence
Operating at senior level within a competitive global firm, she maintains a professional presence that balances openness with discretion. She shares insights on mindset, growth, and career development while keeping private matters out of the public domain—an approach aligned with senior leadership norms in the UK recruitment sector.
Conclusion
Seija Costley-Wood’s career illustrates how disciplined personal values can translate into effective organisational leadership. From retail and banking to specialist recruitment and global talent strategy, she has built a progression defined by consistency, cultural awareness, and people-centred decision-making. As Head of Talent Acquisition at RED Global, she continues to shape hiring functions that prioritise quality, resilience, and long-term success—demonstrating that the strongest recruitment leaders are those who understand both people and performance at depth.
FAQs
1. Who is Seija Costley-Wood?
Seija Costley-Wood is a UK-based recruitment leader and Head of Talent Acquisition at RED Global, specialising in global hiring strategy, employer branding, and building high-performing technology recruitment teams.
2. How old is Seija Costley-Wood?
Her exact age is not publicly disclosed. While she celebrates her birthday on 26 June, no birth year has been shared, so her precise age cannot be confirmed from public sources.
3. What is Seija Costley-Wood’s Instagram?
She is active on Instagram under the handle @seijacostley, where she shares content related to fitness, nature, travel, photography, and lifestyle, reflecting her interests outside professional life.
4. Is Seija Costley-Wood active on social media?
Yes. She is active on LinkedIn for professional insights on recruitment and mindset, and on Instagram for personal interests, maintaining a clear balance between professional branding and private life.
