Bernadette Taddie
Bernadette Taddie is a dynamic executive recruiter and motivational entrepreneur with over 20 years of comprehensive experience in staffing, recruiting, and talent acquisition. She began her career in 1995 in Silicon Valley’s Greater Bay Area, where she built the professional foundation that has guided her ever since. Over the years, she has held a wide range of leadership roles including Branch Manager for Elwood Staffing in West Texas, District Manager, and Multi-Unit District Manager. She is widely recognized for her ability to step into challenging environments, stabilize operations, implement SOPs and playbooks, and rebuild teams and systems from the ground up.
Throughout her career, Bernadette has developed a strong reputation for building high-performing teams and coaching individuals to reach their full potential. Her leadership style is hands-on and deeply personal—she thrives on working directly with team members, providing mentorship, shadowing performance, and identifying opportunities for growth and improvement. She has consistently been trusted by organizations to transform underperforming operations into structured, efficient, and successful teams. In addition to her extensive recruiting background, she expanded her expertise into the fitness industry, serving as a District Fitness Manager and earning her NASM certification as a fitness nutrition coach.
Currently, Bernadette works remotely as a contract recruiter while also launching a new business venture aligned with her passion for service and impact. This next chapter focuses on creating tools and resources to support individuals in career development, healing, and life coaching. Her mission is deeply personal—centered on helping those who have experienced trauma in childhood and carried it into adulthood without healing. After nearly five decades of building her career and raising her family, she is now focused on co-creating a purpose-driven life dedicated to empowering others to achieve their goals, unlock their potential, and move forward with confidence and clarity.
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• High School Diploma
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would sit down and have a conversation with her to find out what's driving her passion to be a recruiter and what her past experience in communication is, because recruiting is really a service-driven industry. I'm very old school because I started before computers or even the internet came out. I would say there's a lot of benefits to being a recruiter, but it's also a juggling act. There's administration, there's customer service, there's sales, there's goals you have to hit. You have to understand job orders and your client's industry - you really need to have a desire to understand what their retention is, what everything about the industry is. And then you also have to be able to juggle the applicant side - who you're going to be interviewing, what they're about, if they're changing job careers, what experience they have, because it's truly a match that you want to have. When it comes to full cycle recruiting versus contract recruiting and pre-screening, I feel like that's a little bit different than more permanent recruiting. But I would say it's very beneficial, it's a juggling position. It's kind of a love-hate relationship at times. There's a lot of success in recruiting, absolutely.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Being the provider and the nurturer has been central to who I am. I was a single mom of two until I was 34, and being the driver in having to know that I've got myself and children to take care of definitely taught me a lot of life lessons. My past 49 years were focused on building a career and financially providing for myself and for my family - that was my driver in this life, or what I call my past life. Now I'm finally living my life for me, looking at myself because my kids are grown and I'm a single person. I'm on this journey of really, truly applying everything - all of my wisdom and all of everything I've learned - to what my passion truly is now. I'm co-creating a new life where I can balance my experience of surviving and living with what I'm passionate about, which is giving back and helping people. My true passion is truly giving back to especially children who have dealt with trauma and are growing into becoming adults and they've never healed from that. My drive is to support and help other people achieve what they want when they set a goal for themselves, and I feel a sense of achievement when I can coach them and shadow them into areas of improvement, giving them the opportunity to truly see their success.