Fresha: Where People and Passion Drive Performance

After just 10 or 15 minutes of speaking with Sharee Campbell and Kiran Taylor, I’m sold. I, like the many others joining the rapidly scaling business, also really want to work at Fresha. The fact their ‘sell’ is that easy is both a mark of the incredible way the pair have collectively shaped talent, culture and hiring at the world’s leading beauty and wellness platform, and their infectious passion for their work.

Which, when it comes to HR, is exactly how it should be. It’s likely why that, in just three years, Sharee and Kiran have transformed the way Fresha approaches talent acquisition and performance, reimagined organisational culture as a strategic system that supports rapid scaling, deployed new technologies across key processes, and set the leadership standard for a high-performance environment in which people thrive. 

“From when I was young, I always loved building relationships, seeing the best in people and cheerleading them when they succeed,” says Sharee of the formative years in her native New Zealand that still influence her approach to her Chief People Officer position at Fresha.

“Nothing sets my heart alight more than seeing the achievements of others and watching them be rewarded and recognised for hard work,” she says. “Businesses don’t exist without people and good leadership is about setting the standard, motivation and inspiring teams to grow. It’s something I care so deeply about that, realistically, there was never going to be any other job I ever took.”

Sharee joined Fresha to transform its approach to people and culture, bringing in Kiran to the role of Global Head of Talent having recognised both a kindred spirit in terms of shared values and passion, and a highly experienced recruitment and hiring leader. 

“I take the job so seriously,” says Kiran. “We spend so much of our lives at work and, as a hiring leader, you have a real responsibility for the happiness, career and lives of the people you’re hiring.  I think we’re both very fortunate to have a role that lets us create such value and really help transform lives.”

The evolution of HR, talent and technology

The pair bring more than two decades’ experience to Fresha – Sharee joined at the beginning of 2023 from global advertising agency Dentsu, having spent well over a decade working through key senior HR roles. Kiran has 10 years’ experience in hiring and talent across both agency and internal leadership roles. 

Over this time, the role and remit of HR and talent functions has evolved significantly. “The biggest change is in the pace,” says Sharee, “the speed that businesses like Fresha move and scale accelerates every aspect of our work. My role now encompasses people strategy, organisation and operational leadership, market and growth strategy, partnering with senior managers to build the business and more.”

“If you look at talent as a whole,” Kiran continues, “when I began my career in recruitment there was no real internal talent function for businesses. Instead, companies relied on agencies, but that often leads to a fundamental disconnect. Agencies will never live and breathe your culture or values the way an internal leader or function does, and business recognising that has been the biggest shift in my career.”

Technology, particularly AI, has also changed how HR leaders operate. Both Sharee and Kiran point to the growing use of AI solutions at Fresha across key areas including automating processes and bringing efficiency to interviewing and hiring. 

“We use AI sourcing tools in the applications process, solutions to help us interview so that we as leaders can be fully engaged with the candidate, tools to take up a lot of our admin work so we’re able to focus more strategically, and operationally to analyse data and improve our decision-making,” says Kiran. 

While highly beneficial across the entire people and talent function, the rapid pace of AI adoption and broader technology innovation also allows leaders to spend more time on leading, says Sharee. 

“We either have to fully lean into it or we’re going to get left behind,” she notes. “Succeeding with AI and innovation is about finding where it can be best applied so we can focus our energy on what’s really important. Fresha is a fast-paced and rapidly scaling company, so we have to use tools that allow us to remain strategic instead of becoming buried in day-to-day operational tasks.”

High-performance culture at Fresha

At Fresha, the ‘day-to-day’ is more than enough to keep Sharee, Kiran and their teams busy. Originally founded in 2015 by current CEO William Zeqiri and Chief Product Officer Nick Miller, the business is scaling rapidly across its global footprint, merchant network and financial services. 

As the world’s leading marketplace platform for the beauty, wellness and self-care industries, the company is trusted by millions of consumers and more than 120,000+ businesses in over 120 countries worldwide. This growth has seen revenues and transaction volumes surge in recent years, with the company expanding both its global presence and headcount to meet this pace – Fresha has opened new regional offices in Madrid, Paris and the Netherlands to accelerate its European presence and is growing its teams in key US and Canadian markets. 

Sharee was brought on board in January 2023 to develop and build a high-performing and engaged culture that would support continued growth. This work has involved fundamental changes, she says, including resetting culture, cementing trust into the workplace to drive performance, repositioning Fresha’s talent as a core competitive advantage, and reinforcing leadership as a true scaling lever.

“I began with the basics,” she recalls. “The first few months it was essential to visit all our offices to understand the behaviours and cultures in each. There was a lack of standardisation – even some disconnect – across our regions, so I began by bringing everyone together, reminding them of the ambition, the common mission and objectives and why we’re here in the first place.” 

“For me, culture goes way beyond free drinks, workplace perks or a certain vibe. It’s an operating system on which everything else relies,” Sharee says. “ It’s about creating a sense of belonging, understanding what people really need and how they perform, as well as what they want from a workplace.”

Several key initiatives helped Sharee cement this winning culture, including real and transparent engagement with teams and talent, making senior leadership from the CEO down available and engaged – each new starter at Fresha meets CEO William personally to discuss the company’s mission and vision, and their role in achieving it.

Transforming hiring and recruitment

Hiring was also critical. “I had to build my team,” says Sharee. “My job was to solve problems, and here at Fresha, you have to do that quickly. Six months and several key hires in, I felt I was making progress: we had great engagement across the business, some strong cultural sessions in place, our performance metrics were shooting up and I had hired some exceptional leaders who were brave, bold and unapologetically clear on what they expected. You get that leadership right, and it has an incredible cascading effect.”

Sharee cites Kiran’s joining Fresha as a key example of this effect. The pace of scaling at the business combined with the sheer headcount required to deliver on ambition, made getting recruitment right critical.

“When I joined, we outsourced all our recruitment,” Sharee explains. “We were moving at supersonic speed, but still seeing huge churn. One of my first messages to William was that we had to hire our own internal recruitment function, led by someone like Kiran with the kind of deep specialisation and right cultural fit. 

“And it’s worked: our turnover is lower, our engagement higher, our performance is accelerating and our revenue continues to grow,” she says. “None of this is by accident. Getting hiring right is one of the most fundamental parts of any high-performing strategy.”

Kiran hit the ground running: “I start with a healthcheck, speaking with teams, senior stakeholders, leaders and just embedding myself in the culture – only by having that level of immersion can you really get out there and build a function that’s going to reflect and strengthen what you’re trying to do as a business.

“Then it was about processes and removing any misalignment to ensure we were focused on very intentional hiring,” he says. “There’s key things you need to address there: what problems are the business trying to solve, what skills do we need and what will raise the bar from a competency perspective. But you also have to identify the individuals, mindsets, attitudes and behaviours that you need to lift the team which, in most cases, are even more important than skills.”

Supercharging people and performance

With these metrics established, Kiran and team designed cohesive processes, supported by measurable data points, scorecards and key metrics, that can be deployed at scale. The result, says Sharee, is a recruitment function at Fresha that “runs like a well-oiled commercial machine”. 

 “How we recruit has changed significantly,” Kiran reports. “We now hire more - and consistently higher-quality - people in less time, leading to stronger teams, faster execution, and better business outcomes.”

The results speak for themselves. Retention and engagement is higher than ever at Fresha, which saw 92 internal promotions last year. “I love it,” says Sharee, “especially when you see great people come into the business in relatively junior roles and you get to see their journey, watch them add value and get promoted. Fresha is purposely designed to be a high reward culture and, if we have outstanding people, we absolutely want them to grow in the business.”

“It's a great selling point when you have a business that promotes from within and develops people – candidates see vision, connect to the mission and recognise a fruitful career path. When something's clearly laid out, as long as people bring what they need, show up, they work hard, are curious, brave and bold, then we’ll make it happen for them.”

Partnerships, collaboration and the future

Alongside people, processes and strategy, Sharee, Kiran and the team have also embraced technology to support Fresha’s rapid global growth. The business has a close partnership with AI-powered HR platform HiBob. For scaling companies, HiBob provides a crucial strategic infrastructure layer that enables a data-driven single source of truth across entire HR operations. 

“We have a really deep partnership and a real appreciation of how well the platform supports us on our mission,” Sharee says. “We use it across all our workflows, our reporting, analytics and hiring metrics. It’s been an incredible partnership that is evolving as we continue to grow and HiBob continuously updates its features and capabilities. We have a fundamental mutual respect for each other and there’s real, genuine passion on both sides that means we’re growing together.”

HiBob excels in high growth environments where fragmentation, manual processes and a lack of overarching visibility can impact the ability to scale. In Fresha’s case, using HiBob creates crucial centralisation, providing one trusted source of data with global visibility. Its automation and standardisation have improved areas like onboarding across regions, governance and risk management, and workflows. 

The platform also has reporting and analytics capabilities, giving the kinds of real-time workforce insight and strategic workforce planning critical to businesses with rapidly growing headcount. 

“The dashboards and insights that we get are invaluable,” says Kiran. “We’re able to analyse why people are leaving in the business and common patterns or trends we can funnel into the way we hire and manage. It’s a great partnership.”

Fresha is the number one beauty and wellness platform globally and shows no sign of slowing down. For Sharee, Kiran and their teams, the key challenge is to deliver on that growth while maintaining the culture, transparency and psychologically safe environment that sets the business apart. 

“My focus is enabling more growth and just constantly raising the bar, pushing the boundaries and looking to be real innovators in our approach, particularly when it comes to leaning into technologies like AI,” says Kiran. “There’s no question that talent will evolve, which means we have to consistently think outside the box to make sure we’re hiring the very best people in an increasingly competitive market.”

“We’re seeing a tonne of growth,” adds Sharee. “Our biggest challenge is to keep an anchored culture with the same adherence to the mission, while not diluting our communication or messaging. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s a hard environment to be in when you’re consistently trying to elevate and showcase value, but ultimately it’s exciting; we really do love every day.”