OzHarvest protects its culture with a single hiring rule: "if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no." Sharon Gray, the charity's Chief People Officer and a 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 winner, has built this principle into every hiring decision across a workforce that spans drivers, warehouse teams, corporate staff, and 3,000 volunteers. In our latest HR Influence Awards conversation, she explained exactly how it works, why she went public after breaking her own rule, and what purpose-led people leadership actually looks like in practice.
What you'll learn from Sharon Gray's interview:
- OzHarvest uses a "hell yes or hell no" hiring rule across all roles, prioritising gut-feel cultural alignment over credentials alone.
- Sharon built a volunteer-to-paid pipeline that gives 3,000 volunteers first access to every new role before going to market.
- 93% of OzHarvest staff report feeling incredibly connected to the organisation's purpose, backed by twice-yearly psychological safety surveys scoring above 85%.
- Sharon's purpose activation programme gives every employee one day per year working in a different department to experience the organisation's impact firsthand.
Most people leaders will tell you hiring is part science, part art. Sharon takes that further. At OzHarvest, hiring managers are trained to trust their instincts, and if a candidate doesn't produce a genuine "hell yes" reaction, the answer is always no. Even if the CV is perfect.
"We don't call them drivers. They're ambassadors," Sharon says of the 187 van operators who rescue food across Australia daily. "The key reason we hire them is that they connect with our values, they are aligned with our purpose, they're getting out of bed every day to make a difference."
It's a high bar. But the data supports it. OzHarvest's most recent employee survey showed 93% of staff feel incredibly connected to the organisation's purpose. Those numbers trace directly back to who gets hired and who doesn't.
The approach mirrors what we see in organisations that treat culture assessment as a hiring input rather than an afterthought. When you measure cultural alignment before someone joins, you're protecting the team, not just filling a seat.
Sharon is unusually candid about the time she got it wrong. She made a bad hire into her own team, and instead of burying it, she shared the story across the organisation.
"It was very visible that the head of people and culture recruited the wrong person," she says. "The mistake I made was that I did not listen to my gut. I was a little maybe desperate or overly eager to fill the role."
She turned the failure into a learning moment. Other team members saw their CPO owning a mistake publicly, which reinforced the psychological safety she'd been working to build. OzHarvest now surveys psychological safety twice a year, with more than 85% of staff scoring the organisation as extremely safe.
That kind of openness takes years of deliberate work, and leaders willing to be imperfect in front of their teams.
One of Sharon's most referenced frameworks is the volunteer-to-paid pipeline. OzHarvest has around 3,000 active volunteers, and every new paid role is advertised to them before it goes to market.
"We're very committed that any position that becomes available is advertised internally to our people and our volunteers first," Sharon says. "We have 3,000 fabulous volunteers, so we advertise with them first."
The volunteer base is broad: retirees giving back, international students building local connections, friendship groups who now holiday together, and people deliberately volunteering with an eye on paid roles. Over the past 18 months, the team built a new app-based platform to make registration and shift booking simpler for volunteers.
It's HR operating as an opportunity centre rather than a cost centre. The pipeline turns community goodwill into a genuine talent acquisition advantage, where candidates already understand the culture because they've been living it.
When asked whether culture should align with business strategy, Sharon pushes back on the question itself.
"I actually say that the culture doesn't need to align with the strategy. The culture is part of the strategy," she says. "You don't create a strategy without consideration of the culture."
At OzHarvest, culture sits inside the strategic plan as a line item. Sharon also built a purpose activation programme where every employee takes one day a year to work in a different department. Last week, a finance team member spent the day in people and culture. Sharon herself was booked to sit with the food rescue coordinators who manage the logistics of 187 vans picking up and dropping off across the country.
"To me it seems like a dance," she says. "You go out empty, you come back empty, and you've rescued a thousand kilos of food."
For people leaders in corporate settings wanting to be more purpose-driven, Sharon's advice is practical: use the five whys. Keep asking why your organisation exists until you get past the surface. "Asking five whys about why you're here should certainly surface that it's not just about making money. That's just an outcome of what you do."
Sharon is honest that even at OzHarvest, some people still see HR as the team that answers questions and fills roles. She doesn't fight it. She uses it.
"The transactional work is really important because you are building relationships, trust, value and credibility when you do that work with your leaders," she says.
Her approach is to earn the right to be strategic by being excellent at the operational basics first. Once leaders trust your competence, you can start asking different questions: What's your strategy for the year? What do you want your team to feel at the end of it?
We see the same pattern in organisations using people and culture platforms well. The technology amplifies what's already working. Without the relationship underneath, even the best tools sit idle.
Sharon's full feature article covers her career path from operations to CPO, how she was hand-picked by OzHarvest founder Ronni Kahn, her approach to psychological safety, and the advice she'd give her younger self.
Read the full feature on the HR Influence Awards site
Watch the full conversation on YouTube
If you're relying on CVs and interviews alone to protect your culture, you're only seeing half the picture. Compono Hire gives you behavioural and cultural fit data before you make the call, so your gut feel has something to back it up.
Take a look at Compono Hire and see what your current process might be missing.
Rudy Crous is CEO at Compono and host of the HR Influence Awards interview series. The HR Influence Awards celebrate the people leaders across Australia and New Zealand who are reshaping how organisations think about culture, hiring, and employee experience.
Sharon Gray is Chief People Officer at OzHarvest, Sydney. She is a 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 ANZ, with recognition across AFR Best Places to Work (NFP), SEEK Employer of Choice (NFP), and HRD 5-Star Employer. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
OzHarvest uses a "hell yes or hell no" rule for every hire. If a hiring manager doesn't feel a strong, instinctive yes about a candidate, the answer is no, regardless of how good they look on paper. The rule is designed to protect the organisation's culture by ensuring every new hire is a genuine values fit.
A volunteer-to-paid pipeline is a structured pathway where volunteers gain experience within an organisation and get first access to paid roles before they are advertised externally. At OzHarvest, 3,000 active volunteers are notified of every new paid position before it goes to market, creating a talent pool of people who already understand the culture and mission.
The HR Influence Awards recognise the top people and culture leaders across Australia and New Zealand. Winners are selected based on evidence of impact, community contribution, and innovation in how they lead their people functions. The awards are presented by Compono.