# Sarah Halpenny Conroy

Sarah Halpenny Conroy works in HR, talent acquisition and people operations, and leads NEXT STEP SOLUTIONS. Conroy describes offering flexible, fractional HR, People Operations and COO support to help businesses find talent, set clear expectations and build stronger teams.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/sarah-halpenny-conroy/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-halpenny-conroy-connector
- LinkedIn followers: 15,181
- Topics: leadership, recruiting, hr, leadership-development, workplace-culture, employee-retention
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Most useful for people-focused content on workplace culture, hiring, flexible work and working-parent policy.

- Best for: A B2B HR technology vendor running thought leadership on employee experience, manager behaviour and working-parent policy.
- Not for: A vendor seeking guaranteed-reach paid sponsorship or technical product and implementation content.
- Check first: Ask for verified audience demographics, per-post engagement and whether they offer paid sponsorship.

### Takeaways

- A football final shows leaders must address bullying, taking credit and broken trust, not just performance.
- Summer childcare crunch makes flexible work a retention and burnout issue for working parents.
- NEXT STEP SOLUTIONS offers flexible, fractional HR, People Operations and COO support.

## Main ideas

- **Smaller businesses should be able to buy senior people support in fractional form**: Sarah Halpenny Conroy argues that the employer-employee relationship is “two sides of the same coin”: when expectations misalign, communication is poor, the hire is wrong or culture looks good on paper but feels different in practice, both sides pay. Businesses lose productivity, talent, time and money; employees lose motivation, confidence, trust and sometimes wellbeing. Rather than a full-time leadership hire, they offer flexible, fractional HR, People Operations and COO support to find the right talent, set clear expectations, build people-first cultures, develop stronger leadership and create scalable people and business operations.
- **Flexible work for parents is a retention and burnout issue, not a discretionary benefit**: Sarah Halpenny Conroy connects school-holiday childcare to HR decisions. Drawing on personal experience, they argue that annual leave rarely matches school holidays, so parents and employers rely on camps, tag-team schedules and flexibility. The cost shows up in burnout, lost experience and weaker retention, making flexibility an operational and talent issue rather than a nice-to-have.
- **Workplace culture should be measured by everyday behaviour, not by the loudest voice or results at any cost**: Sarah Halpenny Conroy uses a public sports event to argue that businesses should apply conduct standards to behaviours such as bullying or intimidation, publicly undermining a colleague, shouting over others in meetings, taking credit for someone else's work, breaking trust and ignoring company values when nobody is watching. The healthiest cultures are not those with the biggest personalities: leaders model integrity, respect, accountability, compassion and trust, and people perform because they feel safe, respected and trusted rather than afraid of mistakes.
- **People operations is human, varied and imperfect, and humour can carry the point**: This lighter post makes a related point: HR and People Operations involve conflict between very different personalities, difficult stakeholders, leadership coaching, diverse teams, constant change and culture protection. Sarah Halpenny Conroy does not claim the role can instantly solve everything, naming budgets, communication problems, employee engagement and AI anxiety as things outside a people-operations magic wand. The work is valuable, but practical and constrained.
- **Business growth comes through structured referral networks and genuine introductions**: Sarah Halpenny Conroy treats networking as a method, not an add-on. They say the strongest opportunities, partnerships, hires, introductions and business relationships in their work have often started with a genuine conversation. The BNI chapter is deliberately organised around clear roles, accountability, collaboration and members actively generating opportunities for one another on the givers-gain principle.

## Work to read

- [Two sides of the same coin: fractional HR for employers and employees](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-halpenny-conroy-connector_nextstepsolutions-peopleoperations-leadership-activity-7514001508280000513-Xixm)
- [What workplace red cards would reveal about leadership](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-halpenny-conroy-connector_leadership-hr-peopleoperations-activity-7484945254048067584-lUay)
- [The summer childcare maths that HR teams still have to solve](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-halpenny-conroy-connector_workingparents-leadership-hr-activity-7487398567058436096-7Vd3)
- [Why Sarah Halpenny Conroy took the BNI Sotogrande president role](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-halpenny-conroy-connector_bni-sotogrande-english-speaking-2026-activity-7497564086621167616-J_RO)
- [He-Man, Skeletor and the everyday work of People Operations](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-halpenny-conroy-connector_humanresources-peopleoperations-leadership-activity-7472182455643480064-1ZyQ)

## Brand relationships

- **NEXT STEP SOLUTIONS** (owned_business)
- **BNI** (affiliate)

## Partnerships

The posts do not say that Sarah Halpenny Conroy has a sponsorship or paid-partnership programme. They describe a service business: NEXT STEP SOLUTIONS, which offers flexible, fractional HR, People Operations and COO support to help companies find talent, set clear expectations and build stronger teams. Their commercial relationships are in business networking rather than brand sponsorship: they have joined and helped build a BNI chapter in Sotogrande, which they say comprises founders and local business professionals. They also describe introducing a vice president (Alberto Lora) and working alongside experienced BNI members. For a B2B HR technology company, a service or expert-collaboration arrangement—a consulting, advisory, content or speaking engagement paired with their people-operations work—may be a better fit than a standard ad-placement buy. Ask directly for a rate card, audience specification, details of past sponsored content, media kit, pricing, deliverables and audience reach.

## Alternatives

- Jeremy Sanford, MPA: Choose Sanford when the partnership targets hospitality employers — hotels, restaurants and other service operators — rather than small professional-services firms. Sanford's posts argue that retention, not recruiting, is becoming the strongest driver of service quality. They locate the fix in daily leadership habits: whether people are heard, developed and appreciated, and whether they can see a future. That gives a vendor event a tighter, more operational version of the manager-behaviour conversation its attendees need, along with a memorable line about why staff leave. Sanford also offers a lighter, personal register for a workplace-culture segment: the 'Chief Cuteness Officer' post shows a humour format that lands with a broad audience.
- John Kerkhoff, PMP, CPLC: Choose Kerkhoff when the buyer's problem is burnout and staffing instability in hourly, frontline or skilled-trades work, especially when the workforce includes veterans moving into civilian roles. Kerkhoff's posts distinguish professional commitment from self-sacrifice — answering every call, covering every gap, working through every vacation — and argue that an operation held together by continuous sacrifice isn't a high-performance culture. Another post contrasts perks with what employees actually value: pay, healthcare, retirement, predictable scheduling, paid time off, development and a path to advancement, with different priorities for younger employees, parents, trades professionals and veterans. That's a close fit for a benefits-and-retention agenda. For a vendor selling scheduling, benefits or retention tooling, Kerkhoff can discuss what employees value rather than what's easy to advertise.
- Nicole Lowry, PHR: Choose Lowry when the vendor needs someone who can speak credibly about HR technology implementation rather than people policy. Lowry's posts describe configuring and customising an HRIS, building workflows for referrals, onboarding, approvals and notifications, and making 'can we automate this?' the first response to a repetitive process. Lowry argues that the best HRIS adapts to how a company actually operates — a line a software buyer will remember, and a natural pairing with a demo or implementation session at a customer event. Lowry also offers culture content in a light register: the project-management post about pink boards and a colleague's expertise makes an easy workplace-culture segment.

---
AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/