Chief People/HR Officer: Renee Gartelos

PUBLISHED JANUARY 2024

Finding talent. Recruiting it. Scheduling interviews, travel, hotels. Offer letters. Terms of employment. Benefits selections. Employment-law compliance. Data analytics. Evaluations and training. 

Think about all that goes into onboarding a single employee. Now think about orchestrating all of that nearly 15,000 times.

Welcome to Renee Gartelos’ world as director of human resources for what just might be the No. 1 hiring company in Kansas City over the past decade. And among the biggest in that metric over the course of her 25 years with the region’s biggest engineering-design-construction company.

And get this: All of that, she says, has been the “fun” part of her career.  

“Absolutely; I’ve been part of the fun here my whole career,” she says. “Where we were when I started, about 1,500 employees, and where we are now, close to 16,000, I consider myself lucky from the standpoint of timing. And to have the leaders I was working with—their themes of constant innovation and continuous improvement through my time here, people trying new things, listening to ideas I had or others, how to do this better or get better at what we were doing.”

On her rise to the top of the HR hill, she had opportunities to stand up new processes, implement tech as it was emerging—particularly in the HR space—and help the firm become not just bigger but leaner and more efficient as an enterprise, she says. Because she was granted leeway to try new things, Gartelos says, “that laid a good foundation in a lot of ways to be positioned to experience that growth. I try to keep that going with our team now. It’s a lot of fun”—there’s that word again—“and it makes things fun to build a strong team, get people in the right spots to execute on our goals, align people around the goals, be able to execute and communicate, coordinate all the moving pieces, collaborate not just with HR, but across the enterprise.”

For her ability not only to steer the talent ship at Burns & Mac but also to find the fun amid the frenzy, Gartelos is our choice for 2024 HR Executive of the Year. The traits she brings to the south Kansas City headquarters campus came straight out of Waterloo, Iowa, where she was exposed in her youth to many of the qualities she has embraced in her leadership trek.

She was one of three children to a machinist in key roles for John Deere and a nurse at the local hospital, both of whom emphasized hard work and a commitment to service. “In hindsight, yes, that was an influence,” Gartelos says. “I think as a child, understanding what a parent’s job was when they said they supervised people at their work, and trying to understand all of that, hearing stories and life lessons, ultimately it did influence me when I decided to go down a business track in college.”

HR, though, wasn’t first on the list when she started at the University of Iowa. “I was thinking something in the health-care space, but quickly decided that was not the avenue for me,” she says. She looked next to business, and rather than make a choice between HR management and marketing, she studied both, finishing with a double major. That potential flexibility guided her post-collegiate job search, which didn’t last long before Burns & Mac came calling.

“I wanted to try a new place, so I started looking in Kansas City,” she says. “I didn’t have any ties to this place; I just wanted to spread my wings a little.” Mission accomplished: “I found a Burns & Mac job opening and sent in my resume, not knowing anything about the company, and got the call that brought me to Kansas City. They took a bit of a chance on me, bringing me here for an entry-level position.” Still early in the firm’s transition to an ESOP, she was sold on the concept of employee ownership and what it could mean for her. 

Her biggest strength, she says, is “the focus on the people and helping make sure they have meaningful careers.” Would her charges agree? “I think they might say it’s authenticity, valuing honesty and people being genuine,” she says. “A large part of it is caring about and being interested in people, their goals and aspirations and aligning people around that sense of purpose for the company and themselves. Being able to bring people together to make great things happen.”