Meet the team: Conchita Lopez
Meet the team members who are helping create the best producer-to-consumer outcomes for a more sustainable future. Conchita Lopez drives talent acquisition for TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods.
Conchita Lopez works well with people. As Talent Acquisition Manager for Recruitment, this quality has come in handy. Charged with finding the right person for every role, it’s important to her that potential hires are set up for success from day one. This means hiring for not only talent and expertise but helping ensure candidates embody our values and help further our goal of enabling the most efficient and sustainable food and consumer goods production. Conchita has 22 years of experience in recruitment, operations support and HR Management, is a certified Professional in Human Resources (PHR) and is a member of professional organizations such as the Society for Human Resource Management and the Central California Society for Human Resource Management. She lives in Fresno, California, and enjoys spending time with her husband, their adult children and extended family including three grandkids and her dogs, Luna and Brodie. She loves watching movies, travel and food, which is part of the reason she chose to work in agriculture.
What is your role?
I’m part of the People and Culture leadership team. I get to manage how we recruit our talented people through initiatives like our referral program and how they’ll work with the rest of the TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods team once they join. We cover all areas of business and our team members have such a huge variety of skills, from things like customer success to coding to data science; seeing it all helps me understand how to build a team that can collaborate smoothly and bring useful and exciting solutions to market. I love getting to meet amazing and talented people from all over the world. We’re solving problems that affect absolutely everyone, everywhere, so it’s not just our physical offices that make us a global company, but the goals and perspectives of everyone here. I’m always checking in to make sure the way we all work together, the structure of the whole organization, is as good as it can be to help our people do what they do best. Building trust, confidence and comfort, making sure everyone is in the right place to succeed – that’s a big part of my job.
What drew you to this business?
My career started in recruitment. I did that at a Fortune 500 company for seven years. During that time, I got to see a lot of what happens in human resources, which really piqued my interest, so I decided to pursue HR as a career. It took a lot of hard work, discipline and family support, but I eventually achieved my PHR certification and I haven’t looked back since. After I got my PHR certificate, I spent nine years as a Human Resources manager for a firm that did manufacturing for agriculture. I absolutely fell in love with the people and the passion they bring to agriculture. Everything felt like a labour of love. It wasn’t until a bit later that I was introduced to ag software. Technology and agriculture together? I was even more in love with my job. It’s meaningful, it’s exciting and I couldn’t ask for better people to work with.
What career advice do you have to offer?
Find what you’re passionate about and reach for it. If you don’t know where to start, ask someone. If they don’t know, ask someone else. Be curious and be ready to work. Don’t hope for something to happen. You have to commit to doing it and eventually, you’ll achieve it. You can’t control everything, either professionally or personally, but anything that happens – good, bad or ugly – you can learn from it. What inspires your work?
For me, our inclusive, people and customer-first culture is a big inspiration. It’s important that I’m able to be my authentic self at work and align with my company’s values. Being passionate about what we do is key, but helping people is what’s most important to me. I treat team members, potential recruits and the communities we serve like a customer I’m trying to help and ultimately, the work I do helps put our customers first.
Also, seeing what our work and technology contribute to every day in grocery stores, farms or at home is pretty great. Focusing on that help makes it easy to understand the good that my work does and inspires me to continuously innovate and grow.
Since we’re talking about food and agriculture, what do you like to eat?
Everything, anywhere. I love all food. When I go on a trip or take a vacation, I plan everything around good places to eat.
