People Processes

People Processes


People Process Interviews: Amber Hurdle

April 14, 2020

And today, we are interviewing Amber Hurdle. Amber hurdle is the CEO of Amber Hurdle Consulting. It's a multi-award winning talent optimization firm. They pioneers using both science and marketing principles to strengthen customers' brands from the inside out. She really helps with costly business problems like ineffective recruiting turnover, under performance, declining morale, leadership gaps, and we are so excited to have her in the show today. 

Before we dive too deep, I want to ask you real quick, please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, pretty much any pod catcher of your choice. And you can subscribe at peopleprocesses.com which will give you exclusive subscriber only content. Last week for example, we sent out sample furlough letters and updated policies around the Family's First Coronavirus Relief Act. This is recorded 3-23. Our subscribers had sample policies 24 hours after the law passed. 

Now let's dive in. Amber, thank you so much for being on the show. 

Thanks for having me, Rhamy. 

Well, I am just ecstatic to have you in. There's a lot going on in the country right now. Like I said, this is a March 23 recording. This probably won't come out until mid April. We have no idea what the situation is going to look like out there. So we'll try to keep our coronavirus info to the minimum and instead focusing on the things that you have accomplished. Now, Amber, not many little girls and boys dress up as leadership and HR consultants when they're eight years old to go trick or treating. How on earth did you wind up in this very strange field? That's pretty dang busy right now.

Well as someone who dressed up like Janis Joplin for I don't even know how many years in a row.

You know what, she inspires people, it's leadership. There we go.

That's right. Yeah. I think and I talked about this a lot when we talk about personal branding is, that there are breadcrumbs that you can follow if you look back on your history and see how you chose to show up in various situations, whether that's professionally or in your family or in your social settings or volunteerism, or whatever. And you can see that there are some very specific gifts that keep popping up as something that you feel led to share with other people. And so the gifts that I have from a vantage point of really being able to see somebody for who they are or a situation for what it is.

Being a very quick thinker, being able to really put chaos into a strategic streamlined process to work through. I can create common chaos very quickly and then buy people into that solution. And then connecting people. So engagement and communication have always been things that have served. I've used to serve other people. And it just made sense in the end, to do that in a professional setting because I can impact more people by going into an organization or into an audience than trying to do it otherwise.

That's very self aware, Amber, and that's awesome to hear. But what I want to hear is you have a pretty unusual way though, right? Because if I remember from your bio, you were a teen mom. I'm kind of on a very different path than consulting with international celebrities and fortune 100 companies.

Knocking on my door back then.

Give me that story. How did you get from, you know, I don't know. I can't imagine the place you were in there to kind of now grown kids and rocking out all over the world.

Well, good question. I credit a lot of what I've learned in life to that experience. And I wasn't like a bad girl. I was actually very involved. I mean, not to marginalize any teen mom, but I'm just saying like, I wasn't a troubled youth. I didn't have a troubled childhood. None of that, like I was very normal. I was on channel for news at Six and 10 for a week. Like, just weeks before I found out I was pregnant because they were featuring me and about a dozen other...