Shelly Kirkpatrick
HR Director | 15 Years of HR Experience | Salt Lake City, Utah
The Bio
Shelly Kirkpatrick is an experienced HR leader who helps founder-led and privately owned companies navigate growth, change, and increasing organizational complexity. With 15 years of experience—including nearly a decade supporting a global digital agency—she brings a practical, business-minded approach to people challenges, helping leaders make thoughtful decisions around organizational structure, talent, performance, employee relations, and risk. Shelly is particularly effective when the path forward is unclear, bringing steady judgment and clarity to complex situations while balancing the needs of the business with the impact on employees. Her goal is simple: to help leaders spend less time managing people problems and more time leading the business.
What Shelly Does Best
Builds the people infrastructure needed for growth
As companies grow, informal processes and practices can quickly become sources of friction or risk. Shelly helps organizations put the right infrastructure in place for their next stage, including practical policies, HR systems, compensation structures, onboarding, performance processes, and scalable ways of working—without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
Navigates the people side of organizational change
When a business needs to restructure, reduce costs, enter a new market, or rethink how work gets done, Shelly helps leaders translate the business decision into a thoughtful people strategy. She evaluates organizational structure, roles, talent, institutional knowledge, employee impact, and risk, then helps leadership move through the transition with clarity and intention.
Helps managers become stronger leaders
Shelly works with organizations where talented individual contributors have stepped into management roles but haven’t yet developed the tools and confidence to lead effectively. She helps managers set clearer expectations, address performance issues, give meaningful feedback, navigate difficult conversations, and build stronger, more accountable teams.
How Shelly Works
Shelly is at her best when the problem isn’t obvious and there isn’t a simple playbook to follow. She brings a calm, steady presence to situations that may otherwise feel messy or urgent, quickly assessing what is happening and identifying the people implications of business decisions.
She is also willing to say what leaders may not want to hear. Shelly challenges thinking without creating additional complexity, making tradeoffs clear and offering practical recommendations that balance business needs, employee impact, and organizational risk.
Her approach is grounded in a simple philosophy: HR should not build process for the sake of process. The right level of infrastructure depends on the business, its size, its risks, and where it is going. Sometimes leaders don’t need another process—they need an experienced partner who can give them an honest read, help them understand their options, and move forward with confidence.
Experience
Shelly brings deep experience from her 10-year tenure at R/GA, a global digital agency, where she progressed through increasingly senior HR and talent leadership roles and supported the organization through significant business change, including a private equity separation and office closure.
Most recently, as Associate Director, Talent (APAC), Shelly led talent operations across Australia, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia. She managed a team of eight across HR business partnering, talent acquisition, talent experience, and resource management, reported to the APAC CEO, and served on the regional leadership team.
Previously, as HR Manager, Shelly directed two HR business partners supporting approximately 150 employees while personally partnering with the CTO, CSO, and CMO. She led a Data department reorganization, developed a competency matrix and promotion criteria for a 125-person technology organization, and oversaw stay interviews, handbook redesign, promotion processes, merit and review cycles, and annual compliance.
Earlier in her R/GA career, Shelly served as a Senior HR Business Partner, providing embedded HR support to teams working on major technology accounts, including Google and Nike. Her work included complex employee relations, leadership coaching, manager development, talent acquisition, and training for newly hired client-services teams.
What Leaders Say
Shelly’s approach has consistently earned the trust of senior leaders:
“In an industry that thrives on urgency and noise, you had a remarkable ability to cut through the frantic energy and provide steady clarity.”
A Chief Strategy Officer described Shelly as a “secret weapon,” noting her ability to see possibilities within challenging situations, find a path forward, and take problems off the leadership team’s plate rather than adding to them.
A senior operations leader described her as a “steady partner, collaborator, and sounding board,” highlighting her judgment, support, and calm, thoughtful approach.
Her experience has also been tested in high-stakes situations. As regional CEO, one leader trusted Shelly to manage both a 16-person office closure and an AI capability build in the same year, while the organization was navigating a private equity sale. The office closure was completed on time with no claims filed, while high-performing employees were retained. The CEO’s assessment was that Shelly wasn’t simply representing HR—she understood the business and contributed as a member of the leadership team.
Education
M.B.A., Brigham Young University, 2026
B.S. Business Administration, Utah Valley University, 2010
Outside of Work
Shelly lives in the Salt Lake City area. She met her husband while hiking Kilimanjaro, and weekends often involve exploring the Utah mountains with their dog, Baxter, planning their next adventure, and finding new ways to work an unreasonable amount of New Mexico green chile into whatever they’re eating.