Who’s behind Career Traction

I’m Sarah McLeod, a senior People & Culture practitioner based in Auckland. I’ve spent twenty years in the people side of organisations, six of them at Chief People Officer level, with board reporting, executive teams and full accountability for the people function.

In that time I’ve led restructures and redundancies from the organisation’s side of the table. I’ve also been through a search of my own, so I know what the weeks after an exit actually feel like: the admin sprawl, the silence after applications, the way motivation and confidence wobble in ways a spreadsheet never captures.

Career Traction is the tool I wanted on both sides of that table. Something an organisation can put in a leaver’s hands that says, credibly, “we want the next chapter to go well for you.” And something the person actually opens every day, because it makes the search feel manageable rather than monstrous.

How it’s built

Every feature traces back to the re-employment research: structured goal-setting, if‑then planning, social support and sustained routine are the interventions with the strongest evidence behind them. If a feature doesn’t earn its place in that evidence base, it stays out. The tool is also reviewed against accessibility, neurodiversity and equity lenses as a standing discipline, not a one-off audit.

And the commercial promise is deliberately simple: the employer pays, the employer never sees. No dashboards, no usage reports. That privacy line is what makes people trust the tool enough to be honest in it.

Questions, or want to talk about your organisation? Email sarah@smpc.nz or phone 021 273 3862.