Our workplaces are being revamped faster than ever. Today’s most forward-thinking HR leaders are playing a central role in guiding that change. They are reimagining how organizations build culture, support employees, and prepare teams for a more digital and constantly evolving world of work. By bringing a balance in people’s priorities within the process of business transformation, these leaders are introducing smarter talent strategies and stronger employee experiences. Among these leaders is Amanda Gill, Chief People Officer, Dataprise, who is a dedicated professional to shoulder the people policy of the organization. It is safe to say she is a strategic voice for the organization.
Being a people-centric leader, she is known for nurturing strong teams. She shapes talent strategies and creates workplace cultures where people learn, grow, and thrive. She leads initiatives across hiring, retention, leadership development, and organizational growth, while working closely with business leaders to align people with strategy for aiming towards long-term goals.
Her experience spans talent acquisition, M&A integration, employer branding, process improvement, and workforce transformation, with a strong focus on using technology to create better employee and candidate experiences. She is also passionate about mentoring teams and developing future leaders.
Digital Excellence
Founded in 1995, Dataprise has grown into a trusted managed services and cybersecurity partner for organizations across the United States. Built on the belief that technology should help businesses perform at their very best, the company works closely with CIOs and IT leaders to deliver secure, reliable, and future-ready IT solutions. Its services span managed cybersecurity, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), cloud, infrastructure, mobility, and end-user support, all crafted to improve business performance.
With 24/7 monitoring, certified experts, offices nationwide, and a team of over 500 professionals, Dataprise today supports more than 2,000 clients in navigating an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Collective Growth
As a Chief People Officer, Amanda places a strong focus on growth and development at every level of the organization. This also comprises leadership. She believes learning should be practical, relevant, and connected to real business challenges.
Programs like mentorship, shadowing, and high-potential initiatives are designed to support internal mobility and long-term growth. Amanda also values open and honest communication, ensuring employees understand both successes and challenges. Success is a collective effort of the team for her, which takes the organization to newer heights.
Aligning Talent
Having dealt with talent across entrepreneurial, enterprise, and global environments, Amanda believes success is shaped as much by mindset and cultural fit as by capability. Her experience has given her insight that even highly talented people can struggle in the wrong environment.
To her, great talent is about motivation, alignment, and finding the right environment where people can truly thrive.
Cultural Integration
Amanda believes the success of M&A integration depends far more on cultural alignment than financial logic alone. She has seen acquisitions driven mainly by IP, customers, or talent, where culture was overlooked. It often leads to difficult and short-lived integrations. While some teams adapt successfully, many struggle to sustain long-term success.
At Dataprise, a PE and VC-backed firm, cultural fit is a key factor in every acquisition. She sees successful deployment as critical to the company’s continued growth. While the process is never easy, the organization continues to refine its approach by focusing on strong support systems, transparency, and shared accountability to help teams succeed together.
People-centric Innovation
Similar to other sectors, as HR too becomes tech-enabled, Amanda approaches innovation with a simple question in mind: Does it genuinely make work easier and better for employees, or does it simply add more complications? She recently led a full review of Human Resource’s technology landscape, consolidating systems and reducing the number of tools and platforms wherever possible as contracts expired, all to create a smoother experience to enable associates and managers alike.
She, along with her team at Dataprise, has automated every process they reasonably can while also reworking workflows that felt inefficient or difficult to scale. The team takes user experience seriously, consistently gathering feedback from managers and associates and applying it where it creates the most meaningful impact. She also believes in having honest conversations about what is no longer working, letting go of outdated practices in favor of better solutions, and following through on those decisions across the organization with consistency.
Accountable Leadership
She believes one of the biggest barriers organizations still overlook when attracting and retaining top-tier talent is hiring someone who simply is not the right cultural fit. In her experience, problems often arise when individuals lack the drive to stay hands-on in a fast-moving environment or are unwilling to step in and help when course correction is needed. She has also seen challenges from both extremes, whether leaders delegate everything or hold on too tightly instead of properly guiding, developing, and growing their teams.
Accountability matters just as much as capability. She believes that when a team struggles, leadership shares that responsibility. Mistakes are inevitable, but true accountability com
es from adapting quickly, learning through obstacles, and continuing to move the team toward success together despite the challenges along the way.
Leadership Evolution
Amanda’s transition into a broader CPO role was shaped by years spent working within large, global organizations where, although she did not oversee the full HR function, she was deeply connected to nearly every part of it. Anything related to attracting, hiring, retaining, developing, or moving talent internally had a direct impact on her team’s work each day. Her experience leading M&A integrations for talent acquisition across multiple companies and employee groups also gave her a strong foundation that naturally carried into her current responsibilities. She also developed a deep appreciation for strategy, change management, evaluating tools and processes, and, most importantly, nurturing strong teams.
She adds, “My talent acquisition and executive search experience play into everything I do regularly. It is all about having the right people in the right place at the right time to continually grow a company.”
She is especially passionate about developing talent early in their careers, creating opportunities for people to grow, and helping shape future leaders along the way. She believes great leadership also requires learning to see challenges through different perspectives, listening to experts, and building real alignment through partnerships and feedback. With significant growth opportunities still ahead, she remains genuinely excited about what the future holds for both the company and its people.
Authentic Alignment
She believes authentic employer branding begins by connecting a company’s mission with its core values and competencies, then aligning those principles with strategic initiatives and measuring progress. She sees measuring progress as the most important part of the process. Amanda also recognizes that this work happens within an environment that is constantly evolving. Even through change, she believes staying true to core values matters. She feels customer experience and associate experience are interconnected.
Skills Forward
In this robust, fast-paced sector, like cybersecurity and cloud services, she approaches workforce planning knowing the future skills landscape is always shifting. She leans on strong leadership at Dataprise, whose networks help her identify and attract talent pools. She has seen that many people are drawn to leaders who they trust and who genuinely invest in their growth and skill-building.
She states, “We invest in ongoing certifications and education by providing training and we sponsor certifications allowing our technical talent to learn more continually.”
Career pathing is a key focus across most roles for her. Helping people develop in ways that feel meaningful to them is key to her. She also supports internal shadowing and mentorship programs, including clear pathways into incident response roles for those who qualify and complete the required training and certifications.
Cultural Alignment
Looking back at Amanda’s early years in executive search, she continues to believe that cultural fit and genuine desire are just as important as experience. While she often sees highly qualified and talented individuals with strong track records of success, she feels that the real difference lies in finding the right cultural alignment, the right level of drive, and clear alignment with the company’s mission and objectives. These factors together are what ultimately set people up for long-term success.
Provide the Right Support
Employee retention, in today’s competitive era, is not solely focused on compensation or progression. Amanda believes transparency in the corporate objectives and how organizations track employees is crucial. She also shifts attention to having clear and attainable objectives, where employees foresee triumph with having accountability and strategic leadership for showing a path, which is of utmost importance.
She adds, “Creating an environment where our associates feel we have their backs, support them for the hard work they do, and hear their concerns; try to solve issues and enable them appropriately; empower them to make a difference.”
Key to retention is career pathing-providing opportunities for growth and enabling them to step up when the right opportunity presents.
Culture Foundations
As she foresees the future, she believes enduring organizational success is shaped by a culture built on strong leadership, clear objectives, and accountability with well-defined ownership, visibility, and metrics to track progress. She also places importance on enabling and empowering teams to identify, address, and resolve barriers that stand in their way.
She shares about Dataprise’s core values, saying, “Our core values-Passionate, Respectful, Ownership, Unified, Decisive- are not just words or an acronym (PROUD); they are how we treat others and how we want to be treated as we go about our business every day; how we treat our customers.”
Also Read: –CIO Times Magazine for more information
