Skip to main content
Popular insights
Employee Scheduling Software HRMS For Small Business Employee Management Systems
Join Community
Add as a preferred source on Google Opens new window Join Community Join the Community

Josh Barker

If you’ve ever tried to scale a team while simultaneously juggling an HRIS migration, upcoming performance cycles and a refresh of your onboarding process, you already know how busy HR can feel. That’s why I’ve spent the last several years building infrastructure that makes team growth actually work.

I’m the People Operations Manager at Black & White Zebra (BWZ) in Vancouver, where I oversee the full employee life cycle from talent acquisition and onboarding through to performance management, employee engagement, and people operations systems. I leverage data from initial application through the employee lifecycle to identify organizational bottlenecks and drive performance-focused improvements.

Before stepping into the People Ops function I’m in today, I built BWZ’s recruitment framework from the ground up—taking the business from an unstructured interview methodology organised in spreadsheets to a structured, evidence-based approach, with talent pooled with the Lever ATS system and various recruitment dashboards.

Prior to my experience with BWZ I developed my knowledge of Talent Acquisition in a variety of technical recruitment roles ranging from recruitment agencies to SaaS tech. I spent nearly two years at GitLab as a Technical Recruiter during a period of significant growth, leading full-cycle hiring for the Infrastructure Department. Earlier, at Aequilibrium, I was directly responsible for 60% employee headcount growth and recruitment-led work that contributed to 80% revenue growth in 2020/21.

I hold a Black Belt in Internet Recruitment and a Bachelor’s degree in Human Geography from the University of Portsmouth.

My Areas of Expertise:

  • Recruitment and talent sourcing
  • Performance management
  • Employee engagement
  • Process design and people insights

More About Me:

Outside of work I’m an active member of my local Rugby team, avid cyclist and love to take any opportunity I can to make the most of the mountains for hiking, skiing and camping.

Through the years I’ve owned three separate camper vans and lived and worked in 5 different countries but am pleased to have called Vancouver, Canada home for the past 7 years.

What’s in My Tech Stack:

  • HRIS & EOR: Rippling
  • ATS: Lever
  • Recruitment tools: LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, Metaview
  • AI tools: Claude, ChatGPT
Josh Barker

290+ published articles on People Managing People