Partnering for Leadership Success.
At PeopleWise, we specialize in finding leaders and key contributors who drive your business forward. Founded on a commitment to thoughtful, data-driven searches, we focus on understanding your organization, your culture, and your goals.
We measure our success by the success of your hire. Every decision we make is grounded in data, insight, and the goal of building teams that perform, lead, and grow together.
Our Approach.
From initial stakeholder meetings to crafting compelling offers, we guide you through every stage of the search. We clarify role expectations, create structured interview processes, engage top talent effectively, and support seamless onboarding. Hiring isn’t just a transaction, it’s the start of a new chapter for your business.
Meet Your Talent Advisors.
Chris Wessell and Amy Johnson bring together 50+ years of experience in talent management advisory to businesses ranging from startups to global enterprises. Chris and Amy each owned and operated firms for decades, and often collaborated on projects. During this time they found shared values and approaches, and were able to accomplish even more complex and rewarding projects when working together. This ultimately led to formalizing their relationship in a new firm, PeopleWise, in 2020. Chris and Amy look forward to bringing their expertise to your organization.
Chris Wessell
Chris Wessell is the founder of PeopleWise, a boutique search and advisory firm focused on high-stakes leadership and critical hires for growing organizations.
His work primarily involves helping small to mid-sized organizations navigate inflection-point hiring decisions, including leadership transitions, succession situations, first-of-their-kind hires, and other roles where the right decision can significantly shape the future of the business.
Chris partners with a limited number of clients at a time, allowing for a highly focused and consultative approach that often extends beyond candidate identification into role definition, stakeholder alignment, structured evaluation, and hiring process design.
Over the past 22 years, Chris has completed approximately 1,500 hires across more than 300 organizations throughout the Capital Region and beyond.
In addition to his client work, Chris serves as Vice Chair of Junior Achievement of Northeastern New York and teaches at the University at Albany School of Business, where he brings real-world hiring and organizational leadership perspectives into courses including Strategic Management, Human Resource Management, and Organizational Behavior.
These experiences provide a unique perspective across leadership, workforce development, and organizational growth, from emerging talent to executive leadership.
Amy Johnson
Amy brings over thirty years of leadership in technology commercialization, coaching and organizational development working with start-ups through Fortune 100 organizations. She partners with clients that are targeting accelerated growth, moving into new markets, or building highly productive teams through organizational assessment and development, leadership coaching, executive and technical retained search, behavioral analytics, succession planning and in aligning talent with business strategies. She has successfully completed more than 1700 projects, building, optimizing and coaching highly productive teams for regional, national and international organizations. She also currently serves as the EIR at the Biomedical Acceleration and Commercialization Center at Albany Medical Center.
Graduating from Union College in Schenectady, NY with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Amy leveraged her technical, business and communication skills into senior assignments in manufacturing and product engineering at Texas Instruments and as a very early employee at Apple Computer. During her tenure with Apple Computer, she was selected to lead the first team responsible for the transfer of Apple’s desktop systems manufacturing operations to Singapore.
In addition to her business pursuits, Amy has actively participated in the community serving on several boards including CDPHP, EYP, Sunmark Credit Union, Proctor’s Theater, and as an inaugural member on the Tech Valley High School Board. Professional recognition includes selection by the Small Business Council of New York State with the Entrepreneurial Enterprise Award, The Center for Economic Growth in for Technology Mentor of the Year, The Center for Economic Growth Jeff Lawrence Life Time Achievement Award and is a recipient of The Women of Excellence in Business Award by the Albany Business Review.
