About Tamara Cooksey

Tamara Cooksey’s first role was as a Sales Recruiter with ProSearch Associates where she focused on searching for qualified sales and marketing candidates to fill high-priority positions for multiple technology companies in the Bay Area and New York. From there, she transitioned into a in-house Lead Recruiter role with Badgeville Inc. Her responsibilities expanded to running the entire recruiting process and candidate experience for all departments within the company. Major initiatives included implementing an ATS system, developing the employee brand and creating a seamless hiring process to grow the company from 20-100 employees. These early recruitment-intensive positions opened her eyes to the many facets along an employee’s journey with a company. Recruitment was a starting point for many that spend the majority of their career with those companies and she wanted to follow along on the employee journey. This led Tamara to explore more options related to people operations so she could play a more integral part of the many stages in her hirees careers.

Tamara Cooksey followed up her time with recruiting as the Vice President of People Operations for a performance management company, of which she was one of the founding members. As an early employee, Cooksey took on a variety of different tasks to ensure the growing company’s success in both the California and New York Offices.

As a strategic leader, she was responsible for the developing and implementing critical people and culture programs around company values, employee engagement and performance management. Cooksey rolled out career leveling, career paths and titling company-wide, drove employee experience within on and offboarding, coordinated multiple off-sites and company events and organized diversity and inclusion programs. She also coached the leadership and management team through employee relations and performance issues. This wide variety of experiences better prepared her for a longterm career in people operations.

Among other responsibilities, Cooksey also handled more conventional human resources roles like day-to-day inquiries, managing benefits, payroll, and compliance, and hiring targets, and reported back to the board of directors with Key Performance Indicators.

Through this invaluable experience, Tamara Cooksey equipped herself with essential skills for a Head of People Operations position at Grabr Inc. At Grabr, Cooksey focused on developing a strong company culture within their team of employees and assisted in aligning the staff for long-term success at the tech startup. She is currently the Vice President of People Operations at Rescale. 

Tamara Cooksey understands that setting up a staff of the right people is the first step in making a name in the technology sector, but in order to maintain that success, you also need to satisfy your staff and help them grow alongside the company. Cooksey prides herself on making that symbiotic relationship possible. 

Cooksey has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication and a minor in Psychology. In addition to her degree, she is certified in MAP Leadership Training and as in process of completing her Senior Professional Human Resources (SPHR) certification. She is a proven results-driven Human Resources leader who emphasizes relationship-building skills and creative problem-solving. Tamara Cooksey remains passionate about talent acquisition, creating a harmonious, productive company culture, and not only keeping employees engaged but helping them reach their full potential.

In her spare time, Tamara enjoys traveling and leading an active lifestyle. She blogs about her pastimes at TamaraCooksey.net.

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