I'm Adrienne.
I run KovaCo.

The work

KovaCo. is a talent strategy practice for founders making the hires that will define their company. I work with early- and growth-stage companies to design the recruitment systems they don't yet have, run the senior searches that matter most, and build hiring practices that compound over time.

My background spans executive recruitment, talent strategy, and founder-led company building. I’ve spent over fifteen years in human resources and recruitment across some of the most complex hiring environments in British Columbia — including public healthcare, post-secondary, and Indigenous-led organizations — while also building and launching a company of my own.

Alongside that work, I founded and built Locum Home Inc., a workforce housing platform serving healthcare professionals on temporary assignments. Building a company while advising others on hiring fundamentally changed how I think about recruitment, growth, and operational reality. KovaCo. is where those experiences converge.

The path here

After completing a university degree in dramatic arts, I found my way into recruitment almost unexpectedly through the Staff Finders program at the University of British Columbia. What started as an unexpected career turn quickly became work I genuinely loved — complex, human, strategic, and deeply operational all at once.

That experience led me back to school for a post-graduate diploma in Human Resources Management at Camosun College. From there, I moved into healthcare HR and spent nearly a decade learning the foundational mechanics of the field — disability management, attendance management, compensation analysis, and HR analytics — before moving fully into recruitment and executive search.

At Interior Health, I led recruitment for physicians and senior medical leaders across the entire region, including the International Medical Graduate program for the province. I sat on provincial committees shaping rural recruitment strategy, and I was recognized by the Interior Health Board of Directors for the creativity I brought to the work — a body of recruitment videos, animated content, and storytelling that turned a fairly traditional process into something people actually wanted to be part of.

From there I moved into a provincial role with the Health Employers Association of BC, then into the BC First Nations Justice Council where I built a recruitment strategy from the ground up to help rapidly stand up Indigenous Justice Centres across the province. Most recently, I led executive recruitment at Simon Fraser University as Associate Director, Talent Acquisition & Executive Recruitment.

How I think about the work

Hiring is the most consequential decision a company makes, repeated dozens of times. Weak hiring systems rarely fail immediately. They fail under scale — when inconsistent interviews, unclear decision-making, and reactive hiring begin compounding across teams.

The companies that get hiring right aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most clever job posts. They're the ones that build a real practice around it: a clear point of view about who they are, a fair and rigorous process, and the discipline to keep doing it well as they grow.

Most of my work is about helping companies become that. Sometimes that means stepping in and running a senior search myself. Most of the time it means designing the system, training the team, and leaving them better at hiring than they were before I arrived.