Catherine Petersen started waiting tables at a Shoney’s in Birmingham, Alabama, when she was 14, and spent the next 15 years working her way up through restaurant management. The part of the job she loved most was helping people grow, but restaurants back then had almost no room for HR. So in her late 20s she walked away, enrolled in night classes, and started over at a staffing agency hiring tempsCatherine is now the Vice President of Talent at Groundworks, North America’s leading foundation repair and water management company, where she leads talent acquisition and talent development for more than 7,500 employees. In this episode, she explains why she checks the company’s sales numbers before she looks at yesterday’s offers, how a COO who started as an installer changed the way her team approaches every interview, and why she expects AI to put her recruiters on the phone more often.
You’ll also hear:
- Why she calls TA “the fun side of HR”
- The weekly check-in calls she makes that deliberately avoid talking about work
- What it means that Groundworks renamed its corporate office the “field support center”
- The single KPI she uses to measure her entire team
Connect with Catherine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-petersen-550a789b/
Learn more about Groundworks: https://www.groundworks.com
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