Leading TA for the first time: How to drive the car while building it!

What you will get from this session:

- Learn from those who have 'been there, done that'

- Inspiration for how to deal with common challenges when leading a TA function for the first time

- A deeper understanding of how other TA leaders have dealt with being thrown in the deep end and advice along the way

Speakers:

Kevin Kwoka, Director Talent Acquisition, GRIN

Kevin Kwoka is a Sacramento, CA native with 10 years of experience in recruiting and organizational development. He has a passion for building high performing teams centered around a strong alignment to core values and a shared vision. Kevin, like most recruiters, fell into recruiting because of his “always say ‘yes’” attitude and quickly found joy in combining sales with connecting with people. After three years of in-house and agency recruiting experience,

Kevin joined GRIN in 2019 as employee 20, taking over recruiting from the Founders and building the talent acquisition function from scratch. Following a $110m Series B fundraise in late 2021, GRIN jumped into hyper-growth mode and in 2022 Kevin lead a Talent Acquisition team of 9 to hire 225 external hires, reaching 470 employees in November 2022.

Kevin is a passionate Green Bay Packers fan and spends as much time as he can outdoors with his 2-year-old daughter and wife of 4 years.

Paddy Lambros, Talent Director, Atomico.

Paddy has spent the last eight years working with founders and start-ups solving all manner of people and talent challenges. These include finding exceptional people, international expansion, crafting company culture and building executive teams. He began his startup career with Improbable, helping to scale their engineering teams, first in London but then in San Francisco and Washington DC.

After that, he joined Sensat to lead the People and Talent functions, growing the team from 20 to 90 employees whilst the business more than tripled its revenues and customer base. Alongside this, he has supported a dozen or more Seed and Series A businesses across performance management, salary benchmarking, manager training and coaching leaders. Paddy is currently a Talent Director at Atomico where he works to build exceptional, diverse teams helping to solve meaningful world problems.

Collette Zaro, VP of People, Moxion Power

Collette has 15+ years of experience in HR and talent acquisition. She is the VP of People for Moxion Power, a rapidly growing climate tech manufacturer of all-electric mobile power units to replace diesel generators. Collette came from her recruiting consultancy, Bliss Talent, which specialises in supporting early-stage tech startups to develop a foundational HR and talent strategy to scale their teams. Before founding Bliss Talent, she was a Senior Director at Russell Tobin, where she spent eight years as a recruiting partner to many enterprise tech companies in the Bay Area and the US. Collette led high-volume staffing programs scaling her partners' full-time and contingent workforces and grew her delivery team from 2-40 people globally. She understands the multifaceted challenges of building a people team from the ground up while attracting, hiring, and retaining talent across the US, New Zealand, and India.