Meet Elizabeth "Liz" McCurdy

Elizabeth McCurdy, CHRL, has spent close to twenty years in HR across the private and public sectors, in organizations ranging from early-stage startups to enterprises with tens of thousands of employees, union and non-union, spanning technology, fintech, telecommunications, transportation, and managed services — practicing across Canada, the US, and Asia. Her track record over that time includes consecutive top-performer ratings across nearly the entirety of her career, spanning half a dozen different leaders, a standard she holds herself to before she asks it of anyone else.

She didn't start in HR. She started as a call center agent in operations and worked her way through nearly every role the business had to offer before being promoted into HR — where she started over completely, building a second career from the ground up the same way she'd built the first. None of that came easy or fast. Some of the sharpest lessons in this book happened in those first few years back at the bottom, with no HR authority, no track record, and no choice but to learn the job the hard way — one underprepared termination, one failed project, one broken trust at a time. She's done the work at every level, on both sides of the function, which is part of why this book insists HR can't be understood from inside HR alone. The credentials came later. The lessons came first.

She built and scaled a global HR function from a small founding team to a multi-thousand-person workforce in under three years while based overseas, sustaining hundreds of hires every month without losing engagement or control of the culture. Earlier in her career, she designed and deployed an AI-enabled performance management system — the one this book keeps returning to — that drove leadership compliance into the high nineties and cut severance costs by roughly a third through more consistent performance decisions. 

She later led the enterprise talent strategy for an organization with several thousand employees through a major technology and corporate transformation, improving service delivery ratings by more than half and materially increasing execution speed. She currently serves as a Head of HR in the fintech sector, after several years advising high-growth technology companies as a principal consultant.

She's built her career the way her book "Everyone Hates HR" tells you to build yours: by treating every corner of HR as a performance function, not a paperwork function.