James Williamson

Experience

• 

  Alief Independent School District

  Jul 2010 - Dec 2016

  Lead Teacher
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  Target

  Jan 2017 - Nov 2018

  Senior Human Resources Specialist

  Streamlined communicating techniques and training programs for employee compensation and benefit.Managed 1 HR Coordinator.Provided support to Human Resources in interfacing with operational and functional leadership across employee benefits and payroll administration.Utilized HRIS system (Workday) in monitoring employee performance to determine strengths, weaknesses and potential managerial gaps in the business organization.Implemented appropriate hiring and termination procedures and policies to ensure compliance with federal, state, and local employment laws and regulations, and recommended best practices. Resolved conflicts between employees and their direct leaders in order to create a more productive environment.Accomplishments:Led a multi-department turnaround from ranking lowest in the district to one of the top 2 stores in the district for HR metrics. Show less

• 

  Lucas Group

  Nov 2018 - Feb 2020

  Executive Recruiter

  Successfully placed over 30 qualified candidates in key positions in the IT, Software Development, and Software Sales fieldsResearched and provided benchmarked data to all hiring managers, resulting in a reduction of 11% in time-to-hire and a cost-per-hire of 3% under company targets

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  Target

  Mar 2020 - Jun 2021

  Human Resources Manager

  Coached regional leadership on people strategy, including team structure (organizational design), strategic hiring, performance management, compensation, recognition, and learning and development, to improve employee retention and engagement by 10%Managed a team of six HR Generalists responsible for organizational development, including coaching and counseling, and performance management for a group of 700+ employees by listening to their concerns, brainstorming solutions, and planning strategies to improve relationsMy team created learning and development programs and initiatives specifically around safety, which led to a 77% reduction in safety-related instances in my district, leading to our team winning the regional award for safetyMy team reduced employee turnover by 10% by revising company policies and procedures, conducting in-person interviews for all new hires, and leading employee disciplinary meetings, terminations, and investigationsProvided expert support and guidance to HR generalists, management, and staff on complex and sensitive employee relations issues, ensuring that each situation was handled professionally resulting in a 23% reduction in overall issue escalations to the internal anonymous employee complaint hotline for my regionProvided HR support, guidance, and coaching to regional leadership (VP level) around employee relations issues while ensuring profitability Show less

• 

  HCSS

  Jan 2021 - Jan 2022

  Talent Acquisition Manager

  Developed, designed, implemented, and executed a strategic recruiting plan to support company growth, leading to 42 employees being hired in the first 6 months on board.Built and managed a team of 5 TA professionals (3 technical recruiters, and 2 recruiting coordinators).Built and led all early career recruiting efforts resulting in the most successful intern hiring and intern-FT conversion in company history (32 interns, 10 of which converted to FT)Reduced time to fill from 72 to 38 days and reduced hire costs from $4,200 to $3,400 by implementing sourcing software.Recruit exempt, leadership-level employees across all business units with a focus on software development (Software Development Supervisors, Managers, Directors, and Principal Developers).Negotiate salary with all new hires, negotiated rate cards for vendors, and educated hiring managers on current market rates and their internal equity; this resulted in an average savings of $13,500 per hire and increased hiring manager retention by 10%.Drove salary improvement initiatives for my organization by utilizing iMercer and Payscale which led to a positive 5-12% salary adjustment across the organization for all technical roles leading to an over 10% reduction in turnover.Conduct thorough market research and analysis to benchmark salary ranges and compensation trends within the industry.Initiate, negotiate, and manage working relationships with vendors and external business partners to facilitate the generation of high-quality candidates, screening services, and talent acquisition.Improved interview to hire time from 41 days to 26 days and time in stage from 12 days to 5 days.Shopped and implemented a new ATS (Greenhouse) to automate the recruiting process more effectively, leading to a better candidate experience due to faster communication and a more organized system. Show less

• 

  IntelliBridge

  Jan 2022 - now

  Utilize a wide array of AWS services to support cloud infrastructure and application deployment, including IAM for access management, Lambda for serverless computing, CloudWatch for monitoring, CloudFormation for resource provisioning, EC2 and ECS for computing, S3 for storage and CRR and KMS for encryption.Created custom IAM and Trust Relationship policies that allowed customers the ability to deploy applications and services within their accounts speeding up time to productionLead the S3 Replication Service as the primary engineer, improving the service by integrating KMS encryption, re-writing the lambda function to incorporate encryption and bringing all documentation up to compliance thus enabling broader customer adoption, enhancing data security, and allowing outside engineers to navigate the service more effectively to support customersCustomized a new Instance Scheduler CloudFormation template, based on AWS documentation, tailored to meet the specific needs of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)Work with a team of engineers to develop automation to streamline data retrieval from a large SQL data warehouse, facilitating efficient governance for AWS BackupsSupport customer onboarding and resource management in Microsoft Azure Government (MAG), providing expert guidance during the onboarding process and assisting with the decommissioning of MAG resources to ensure a smooth transition.Led QA efforts for SMTP relay migration & encryption project, documenting Root and Intermediate CA Certificate import for FedRAMP compliance.Support engineers in troubleshooting/migrating their production-facing, non-encrypted SMTP applications to meet the encryption in transit requirement for Executive Order 14028, improving the nation's cybersecurityLeverage Linux proficiency to streamline system operations by extracting logs, creating directories, writing JSON scripts for SMTP configuration, and editing cron jobs for task automation Show less Drove TA process changes that saw the largest number of technical candidates hired (108) since the company was founded leading to an overall 133% increase in company sizeWorked with a variety of cross-functional teams to develop and implement company-wide interviewer trainingManaged a team of 4 technical recruiters and worked with each of them in bi-weekly 1:1's to develop their craft leading to a full reduction in recruitment agency expenditureMy team built trusting relationships across RVCM by ensuring that we provided a high level of service and consistent, high-quality communication to all members of the hiring teamsWorked in tandem with the People Operations leadership team to improve upon interview documentation helping to ensure equity among our candidates and employees Show less

  • DevSecOps Engineer

    Dec 2024 - now

  • Cloud Engineer

    Jan 2024 - Dec 2024

  • Talent Acquisition Manager

    Jan 2022 - Jan 2024
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  Level Up In Tech

  Sept 2023 - Apr 2024

  DevOps Engineer

  Built out a 3-Tier architecture in AWS with a Web Tier using two public subnets with an EC2 Autoscaling group, an Application Tier using private subnets and another EC2 Autoscaling group, as well as a Database Tier using a MySQL RDS database.Built out a custom VPC within AWS including attached public and private subnets, EC2 Instances, Internet Gateway, and a load balancer.Worked with Ubuntu to create bash scripts creating directories, groups, users, and assigning permissions to the users and groupsDeployed a 3-node swarm with the following applications: nginx, apache, redis, alpine, and ubuntu. Scaled them to three replicas.Deployed the applications via a Stack utilizing Docker Compose.Utilized Docker Compose to create a container with the Jenkins application with an attached persistent volume.Used IaC tool Terraform to create a Jenkins server with an attached security group Show less