Why I Built Charlotte and What Eighteen Years of Running a Screening Company Has to Do With It

April 27, 2026

I spent a significant part of those 18 years in training rooms.

Not training my own teams, though I did plenty of that. Training the people responsible for compliance inside the organisations we screened for. HR managers. Operations directors. Compliance leads. People who had been running their own screening processes for years before I walked in.

What I found, almost without exception, was that the confidence people brought into those rooms did not match what they actually knew. Not because they were careless. Not because they did not take compliance seriously. Because nobody had ever given them the real picture.

They had read the guidance. They had a process in place. They thought they understood what they were doing.

But the guidance does not tell you what to do when the candidate's passport photograph does not quite match the face in front of you. It does not tell you how to handle a statutory declaration from someone with no documentary evidence of a five-year employment gap. It does not explain how to make a defensible DBS disclosure decision under the time pressure a busy hiring manager is actually working under.

That gap, between what the materials say and what needs to happen when a real situation lands on a real desk, is where organisations get into trouble. And I saw it, in room after room, across nearly two decades of doing this work.

Eighteen Years of Doing This Work Every Day

I ran National Vetting Solutions for over 18 years. During that time my teams processed hundreds of thousands of vetting files. We screened people for the security sector, healthcare, financial services, education, government contracting and aviation. We handled right to work checks, identity verification, employment history verification, DBS applications, sanctions screening, adverse media checks, credit checks, overseas criminal records and everything in between.

We defended client audits under BS7858, BPSS, FCA, CQC and DfT Airside standards. We trained our own teams to process files correctly and make defensible decisions under real operational pressure. We trained our clients to understand what their compliance obligations actually required, not what they assumed those obligations to be.

I was not reading about employment screening. I was doing it at scale every day. That distinction matters.

The knowledge that comes from processing hundreds of thousands of real vetting files is not the same knowledge that comes from reading guidance documents. When you have sat in an audit room explaining exactly how a decision was made and why it was the right one, you understand compliance differently. When you have trained a team of screeners to handle every edge case that comes up in a busy operation, you understand the gap between what the guidance says in theory and what actually happens on the ground.

What I saw, year after year, was a consistent and serious problem. Not a shortage of organisations that cared about compliance. Almost everyone we worked with cared. The problem was the gap between how complex compliance actually is and how difficult it remains for most organisations to access the expertise they need to get it right.

The Gap That Nobody Was Solving

UK employment screening and vetting covers 68 distinct specialist topic areas. Right to work. Identity verification. DBS checks. Sanctions and global watchlist screening. BS7858. BPSS. FCA screening obligations. CQC compliance. GDPR. Data retention. Adverse information decisions. Overseas criminal records. Counter-terrorist checks. The list goes on and every item on it carries real consequences when organisations get it wrong.

Civil penalties of up to £60,000 per illegal worker for right to work failures. Criminal prosecution under the Immigration Act. Tribunal claims under the Equality Act 2010 for decisions that cannot be justified. Audit failure, contract loss and negligent hiring liability for organisations that cannot show how their screening decisions were made and why.

The people responsible for navigating all of that, in most organisations, are HR managers and compliance officers doing it alongside everything else their role demands. They are not screening specialists. They were never hired as screening specialists. They are trying to do the right thing under time pressure, without specialist support and without a reliable place to get fast, accurate, expert answers when those answers are needed.

When those answers were needed, the options available were poor. Search online and hope what came up was accurate and current. Email a lawyer and wait days for an expensive response. Call a screening company, where there was always a commercial interest shaping the advice. Or guess and move on and hope nothing came of it.

I watched that play out for nearly two decades. And I built Charlotte because none of those options are good enough for organisations trying to do this properly.

Why I Closed National Vetting Solutions

In 2024 I closed National Vetting Solutions. People sometimes ask whether that was a hard decision. It was not, in the way they might expect. It was the right decision for where I wanted to take the expertise I had spent 18 years building.

Running a screening company for that long gives you a very specific kind of knowledge. It cannot be assembled from websites or guidance documents. It comes from doing the work, from training others to do it correctly, from defending decisions in audit rooms, from handling the edge cases and the difficult situations where the right answer is not obvious and someone needs to work it out carefully and document what they did and why.

I wanted that knowledge to be accessible. Not through a consulting arrangement where only certain organisations could afford it. Not through a company with a commercial interest in the screening process itself. I wanted it available to every HR manager, every compliance officer, every business owner trying to navigate employment screening correctly, every hour of every day, at the exact point a decision needs to be made.

That is what Charlotte is.

What Charlotte Is and How She Works

Charlotte is my AI knowledge twin. That is the most accurate description I have.

She is built entirely on 18 years of real operational experience in UK employment screening and vetting. Not on publicly available websites. Not on guidance documents scraped from the internet. On the knowledge that comes from doing this work, at scale, day after day, for nearly two decades.

She covers 68 specialist topic areas across pre-employment screening, vetting compliance, governance and risk. Right to work. Identity verification. DBS checks. BS7858. BPSS. FCA screening. CQC compliance. GDPR. Sanctions screening. Adverse information. Overseas records. Counter-terrorist checks. Applicant rights. Decision making and override governance. Every area where organisations face real compliance questions and have traditionally had nowhere fast and accurate to turn.

The way Charlotte works is straightforward. You ask her a question. A real question, the kind that comes up in the middle of a busy working day when a decision needs to be made. She gives you a clear, practical, expert answer based on real operational experience. Not a summary of what the guidance says in general terms. Not a list of links to read later. An answer that reflects what actually matters for the situation you are describing, at the point you need it.

She is not a search engine. She is not a generic AI tool. She is the closest thing to having 18 years of specialist screening and vetting expertise available to your organisation every hour of every day.

She does not have a diary. She does not have a billing rate. She does not have a commercial interest in the answer she gives you. She just knows the work.

Charlotte in Action

To give you a sense of what Charlotte can do, here is the question I put to her and the answer she came back with.

Question put to Charlotte: We screen candidates for security roles under BS7858. One of our applicants has a six-month gap in their employment history that they say was spent travelling. How should we handle that?

Charlotte's answer: Under BS7858, all employment gaps across the screening period must be accounted for and documented. A gap described as travelling is not automatically disqualifying, but it must be evidenced and recorded. Ask the candidate to provide supporting documentation for the period: bank statements, travel bookings, passport entry stamps or a statutory declaration where no other evidence is available. Record what was provided, what steps you took to verify it and the reasoning behind your decision to accept it. Your audit position depends on being able to show that you treated the gap seriously, sought evidence and made a reasoned judgement. The gap itself is rarely the problem. The absence of documentation showing how you handled it is where organisations become vulnerable.

Charlotte provides expert guidance based on 18 years of real operational experience in UK employment screening and vetting. She does not provide legal advice. For legal matters specific to your organisation, always consult a qualified solicitor.

Who Charlotte Is For

Charlotte is built for anyone who carries responsibility for employment screening decisions and needs expert guidance at the point those decisions are being made.

For HR managers managing recruitment compliance across multiple roles, she is the expert available at any hour who can answer a right to work question in the morning and a DBS disclosure question in the afternoon, without a wait and without a fee.

For compliance officers responsible for audit readiness under BS7858, BPSS, FCA, CQC or any other standard, she is the reference point that reflects operational reality, not just what the guidance document says in ideal conditions.

For business owners running organisations without dedicated compliance resource, she is the support structure that larger organisations take for granted.

For software platforms, Charlotte offers something different again. She is designed to be installed into existing platforms and company systems as a standalone AI chat agent. If you are building or operating a platform your clients use for HR, recruitment, compliance or workforce management, you can embed specialist screening and vetting guidance directly into your product. Your clients get expert answers at the exact point decisions are being made, without leaving the tools they already use and without you having to build that capability from scratch.

Both organisations and platforms access the same Charlotte. The same 18 years of operational knowledge. The same 68 specialist topic areas. The same quality of guidance, available every hour of every day.

Start Your Seven-Day Free Trial

The best way to understand what Charlotte can do for your organisation or platform is to ask her a real question.

Not a test question. Not a hypothetical. A question that has actually come up in your work this week. Something you have had to search for, guess at or put aside because you did not have time to find a proper answer.

The seven-day free trial at https://vettinghub.co.uk/trial gives you full access to Charlotte for seven days. You can ask her anything across all 68 specialist topic areas. You can see how she handles the questions your team actually faces and judge for yourself whether her guidance is the kind you would trust in your organisation or platform.

There is nothing to cancel if Charlotte is not right for you. No commitment required. Zero risk.

For organisations and platforms ready to go further, the setup is straightforward. A one-time configuration cost of £500 covers the secure deployment of Charlotte, including setting up controlled access and ensuring she is available only to the people who need her. Ongoing monthly access is £895. Multiple authorised users can access Charlotte across your organisation or platform with no per user or per seat charges. Access runs month to month with no long-term contractual commitment.

That is £895 a month for expert guidance across 68 specialist topic areas, available every hour of every day, at the exact point the decision needs to be made. No waiting. No billing rate. No commercial interest shaping the answer.

I spent 18 years building the knowledge Charlotte runs on. The trial costs nothing. Start there.

Start your seven-day free trial: https://vettinghub.co.uk/trial