Vivint Solar

Built HR Infrastructure from Scratch Scaling Vivint Solar to 4,000+ Employees for IPO

When I joined Vivint Solar, the company was scaling at a breakneck pace—hiring over 100 people a month as it expanded its footprint nationally—yet HR infrastructure was virtually nonexistent. We had just one recruiter and one HR coordinator, no reliable headcount data, and weren't even completing basic legal requirements like I-9 documentation. I was brought in with an ambitious mandate: get the company audit-ready and operationally sound in time to go public in six months. To meet this challenge, I built out the entire human capital function from the ground up. I hired a team of 15 recruiters along with key HR leadership—a recruiting and operations leader, a compensation design leader, and a senior human resources partner—to design and run the new function. Together, we implemented an integrated technology stack, including a new HR system, a recruiting and onboarding platform, and a learning management system, and we built the processes and compliance checks needed to ensure the company was legally compliant and audit-ready at scale. The results reshaped how the company operated. While the IPO took about two years rather than six months, Vivint Solar went public having scaled to over 4,000 employees with full I-9 and audit compliance, a solid compensation and titling infrastructure, and a recruiting pipeline built for sustained, organized growth. The onboarding system I led the design of cut new-hire ramp time from over 7 days down to just 24 hours—a critical advantage given our workforce was largely hard-to-hire, 100% commission sales reps. During a period when many competitors in the industry failed to survive rapid consolidation and intense "recruiting wars" for sales talent, this infrastructure gave Vivint Solar the resilience and organizational agility to adapt and keep growing.