Matthew Perez. Credit: John Kniss

By Allison Teegardin 

In October, Shalom Austin welcomed Matthew Perez to the executive leadership team as the new Chief People Officer. This is a newly created position developed to meet the needs of the growing team. As the Chief People Officer, Perez brings with him more than 15 years of experience working in human resources.

Perez got his first taste of human resources as a training manager and quickly realized he wanted to focus his career on being people centric. Flash forward to 2023, Perez said he saw the job posting on LinkedIn and felt the urge to investigate the role a bit more. “The more I read about the position, I knew it would be foolish for me not to apply,” said Perez. “It was exactly what I enjoy most about being an HR/people centric professional which is being able to help bridge the gap between a business’ needs and those of its employees.” What is more, Perez has long been attracted to the reward of seeing the impact of being involved with a non-profit organization.

About 20 years ago, Perez and fellow fraternity members came together to do something to honor a close friend who passed away from cancer at an early age. Within weeks, they formed a charity organization and put together a bar crawl to raise funds to go towards cancer research. In the first year, they raised $10,000. The organization is still in existence and continuing to raise money. “It was just amazing to see how people can take a sad situation and turn it into something so meaningful and make an impact on other individuals,” said Perez.

As for Shalom Austin, Perez has big goals for the future. “I want to help build a strong organization that can continue to be an incredible support system to the community it serves and help guide employees to achieve lofty goals,” said Perez. “Shalom Austin has a culture of continued education and am hoping to continue to build out our training platform to upskill our employees to give them the tools to be successful in the organization’s overall strategic plan.”