If it’s broken, fix it. If it’s not broken, break it anyway – and make it better. Unafraid to rock the boat and challenge the “I’ve always done it that way” mentality, Kim Kelley is changing how we view our working world.

As the visionary co-founder & CEO of pepelwerk, Kim makes it possible to build our future workforce.  She focuses on leveraging tech and the best of humanity to solve “the unsolvable” problems associated with social equity, “isms”, educ., job fit and economic health. The first college graduate of her family graduating from the University of Arizona in Business. Before starting pepelwerk, she had an adventurous 25-year career in executive leadership at Wal-Mart, Mercer and PFSweb. Her career, education and personal interests have led her to explore many different countries and create functional working relationships between people, tech, business, and government to accomplish amazing things.

 She has traversed all corners of the HR globe – from operations to consulting – to gain a 360-degree perspective about all aspects of workforce building, operations, talent acquisition, organizational psychology, policy and law, technology and more.

Kim’s solution oriented, socially conscious entrepreneurial spirit had its first opportunity to flourish when she was a student at the University of Arizona as a member of Students in Free Enterprise (now Enactus). As part of this group, she found herself leading a team of fellow college students in the creation of a salsa business using hydroponic tomatoes the university was throwing away.  This wantcha-prenuer startup business lead to a presentation in front of an executive at Walmart, who gave Kim an invitation to work for the company. What started in customer service led to a 10-year management and HR career. There was no better place to learn business ops and the importance of great people management.

Eager for new challenges, Kim entered the HR consulting arena, including an executive international role for Mercer, the world’s largest human capital consulting firm. Kim exceled as a valued Intraprenuer at Mercer, where she ideated strategic approaches and tactical solutions to meet her clients’ unique needs. She was fortunate enough to work with great companies such as Alibaba for international growth strategies and US Airways/American Airlines merger activities, to name a few. After almost four years at Mercer, Kim joined Alliant Insurance Services in a similar executive role where she continued her consulting career. Prior to launching pepelwerk, Kim served as the senior vice president of People and Culture at PFSweb, a global e-commerce operations provider with more than 2,600 employees worldwide.

In her personal life, Kim is a dedicated mom, news junkie, tech geek, fitness fanatic and does life with the greater good in mind.