About Us

Leadership


+ Dr. Courtney McCashland | Chief Executive Officer
+ Christian N. Zoucha | Director of Client Relations
+ Orville O. Osbourne | Director of Internet Technology
+ Mary Santoro Dunlap | Director of Product Management
+ Mary Hayes | Director of Data Analytics
+ Dr. Camille Kraeplin | Director of Research


Dr. Courtney McCashland | Chief Executive Officer

Courtney McCashland is the founder and visionary of TalentMine®, a global, performance-based talent assessment and development company helping employers tap into the potential of their human capital. With over a decade of experience working with leading global organizations, Dr. McCashland has gained credibility as an industry expert in measuring and managing organizational effectiveness to impact business performance.

Dr. McCashland currently serves as the Managing Partner of Global Development for The Marcus Buckingham Company, an Alliance Partner of TalentMine®. The Marcus Buckingham Company
(TMBC - www.marcusbuckingham.com) is a leading provider of strengths-based training and development curriculum to help individuals become their best at home, at work and in life. In her position at TMBC, Dr. McCashland consults with companies in the design of strengths programs to turn talent into performance. TalentMine® serves as the research division of TMBC with its performance-based assessments and joint ownership of Strengths Research, LLC.

Prior to founding TalentMine, Dr. McCashland served as a senior executive for the Gallup Organization, where she developed and led a management consulting team. Dr. McCashland led Gallup's early research on employee engagement and worked as the lead consultant on Best Buy with Marcus Buckingham to empirically capture the management success factors for building an engaged service culture. Dr. McCashland's research with Best Buy, Nortel, 3M, Kodak and numerous other organizations was combined through a meta-analysis to uncover the consistent behaviors driving business performance and customer loyalty in the work place. Dr. McCashland worked with Marcus Buckingham to present the research findings, which are captured in Buckingham's Management Best Seller First Break All the Rules. Buckingham and McCashland have developed a Strengths Engagement Track (SET) to assist associates and managers in applying their individual strengths at work. The SET survey is featured in Marcus Buckingham’s latest best selling book Go Put Your Strengths to Work.

Throughout her career, Dr. McCashland has consistently focused on financial and healthcare service organizations to build sustained growth and competitive advantage through their people and culture practices. She completed her doctoral dissertation in explaining how manager talent affects an engaged work culture, customer loyalty and unit profitability within the healthcare industry and validated her findings with a leading provider of financial services.

Dr. McCashland received a Bachelors degree in Marketing and Journalism and a Masters in Qualitative and Quantitative Research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She completed her Doctorate in Organizational Leadership at the University of Southern California where she graduated first in her class.


Christian N. Zoucha | Director of Client Relations

Christian Zoucha serves as the head of Client Relations for TalentMine®. Demonstrating her commitment to superior service, Zoucha plays a hands-on role with TalentMine’s clients throughout all aspects of the relationship. Zoucha has helped clients establish and deliver best-practice programs for selecting, on-boarding and developing new hires for success on the job. Through these programs, Zoucha’s clients have substantially reduced turnover, improved customer satisfaction, and earned industry recognition in HR, including the honor of one of FORTUNE Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” in America, “Employer of Choice” by Employer of Choice, Inc., and the Grand Prize Winner of the “Excellence in HR” Award from The Society of Human Resource Management. During Zoucha’s tenure as head of Client Relations, TalentMine was named by one if its clients, as the “top service provider in terms of commitment, responsiveness, and quality of service.”

Zoucha also oversees client services supporting the TalentMine-built assessment tools that accompany books written by best-selling authors including Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham and The Survivors Club, by Ben Sherwood.

Prior to joining TalentMine, Zoucha managed the public relations and marketing department for Lydian Trust Company, a diversified financial services company and Inc 500’s 23rd fastest growing private company in America in 2004. During her tenure at Lydian Trust Company, Zoucha led a successful re-branding campaign and helped to establish Lydian as a leader in the financial services market. Zoucha also played a lead role in developing five new websites for the company and its subsidiaries and secured more than a dozen awards for the company including two years on the prestigious Inc. 500 list and Ernst’s & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” award.

Zoucha is a native of Nebraska and holds a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.


Orville O. Osbourne | Director of Internet Technology

Mr. Osbourne drives development of all technical online functionality related to the TalentMine Product Suite. Since joining the TalentMine team, Mr. Osbourne has played a lead role in creating custom, tailored solutions to meet client's specific business goals. Mr. Osbourne has excelled at authoring and delivering technical roadmaps to promote efficient, stream-lined, reliable applications as part of the applicant management flow. Mr. Osbourne's passion and dedication for implementing and integrating emerging technologies has placed TalentMine on the forefront of assessment development, hosting and administration.

With 12 years of experience designing, developing and implementing on-line systems, Mr. Osbourne has participated in the full development cycle in a variety of initiatives; ranging from innovative solutions to complex iterative projects. Orville's background includes industry experience in Healthcare, B-2-B, Retail Commerce, Financial Services, and Biometric Security; enabling Fortune 500 clients to automate transactions through implementation of robust on-line processing systems. Mr. Osbourne focuses on data security and reliability, throughout the development and implementation process.

Mr. Osbourne has gained real-world experience working with such companies as Levenger, Office Depot, Rexall Sundown, CrossMatch Technologies, Lydian Consulting and other Fortune 500 Companies. His extensive knowledge is not limited to the latest technologies, incorporating Microsoft .NET Framework using ASP.NET/VB.NET, SQL Server and HR-XML.

Mr. Osbourne is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University, and holds a BS degree in Computer Information Systems.


Mary Santoro Dunlap | Director of Product Management

Mary's core focus in design and management of the TalentMine product suite is simple and basic: design around the User. Her number one priority is to make sure that every TalentMine product must result in a compelling user experience that is simple, easy to use and educational. Good design in-practice reflects positively on the TalentMine client, through positive feedback of those using any one of the TalentMine products employed. Mary most enjoys using other's experiences and perceptions of the world around us to help shape user-centric applications that make sense.

Spanning nearly 12-years, Mary has has a proven track record of designing and delivering solutions that meet client strategic objectives. Her background includes a strong knowledge of user-interface design and architecture, application customization and product implementation. Through the business relationship, Mary excels at developing innovative conceptual designs and prototype development, as well as customizing existing solutions to meet client's needs.

Ms. Dunlap commenced her professional career at S1 Corporation in Atlanta, as an Interface Architect for the S1 online Investment and Banking product lines - formerly Security First Network Bank (SFNB), the world's first internet bank. Mary has applied her expertise in extensive development efforts at The Marcus Buckingham Company, ADP, Goldman Sachs, HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation, VirtualBank, Lydian Data Services, Lydian Wealth Management, Credit Suisse First Boston, Farmer's Insurance, Consolidated Credit Counseling Services, American Airlines and other Fortune 500 Companies.

Her latest TalentMine initiative, the Survivor ProfilerTM, a Survivor IQ Personality test, can be found in The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, a New York Times best-seller, by Ben Sherwood.

Ms. Dunlap is a graduate of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and holds a BS degree in MIS and Marketing.


Mary Hayes | Director of Data Analytics

Mary M. Hayes, serves as the Director of Data Analytics for TalentMine®. Hayes advises clients and provides expertise in data collection, data entry, data analysis and data management. Her experience includes several years in the field of data management in both education and business arenas.

Hayes received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Loyola University, Chicago, and graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a Master’s degree in Quantitative, Qualitative and Psychometric Methods from the Department of Educational Psychology. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in the same area of specialization at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In her doctoral program she has demonstrated her expertise in computer-assisted data collection and management programs. Her focus is on the development and analysis of assessment tools. Hayes’ thesis, which received an honorable mention for the Folsom Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award, examined the use of non-cognitive questions to understand the strengths of the nontraditional graduate student needed to succeed in graduate education not measured by the traditional means.

Hayes also currently provides instruction to undergraduate and graduate students in statistics. She also has served as a consultant for the NEAR (Nebraska Evaluation and Research) center for a variety of clients.

Hayes previous experience includes time at Creighton University as the Assessment Data Management Coordinator for the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions. During her tenure at Creighton, she served as the Data Coordinator for a FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education) grant.


Dr. Camille Kraeplin | Director of Research

As the Director of Research for TalentMine®, Dr. Camille Kraeplin conducts qualitative research and content analyses to oversee and recommend appropriate research designs for concurrent and predictive studies. With extensive experience in designing, conducting and publishing results from research studies, Dr. Kraeplin frames conceptual models and builds hypotheses for new assessment development through the analyses of focus groups and discovery interviews with key stakeholders as the initial step in the research process.

Dr. Kraeplin has conducted a composite job analysis of jobs in healthcare to understand the job demands and talents that contribute to performance per job family. For individual studies at TalentMine®, Dr. Kraeplin oversees the qualitative research methodology and analyses with high performers selected for the study, then partners with the TalentMine® Data Analytics team to validate or build a quantitative assessment that measure the talents that predict success for the target job family. Providing research leadership for over a decade, Dr. Kraeplin recently led the qualitative research and content analyses in the development of the Survivor ProfilerTM for Ben Sherwood’s book The Survivors Club featured on 20/20, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, The Glenn Beck Program, Parade Magazine, Newsweek and Oprah Magazine.

Dr. Kraeplin serves as a tenured professor at Southern Methodist University and has served as a Research Consultant for The Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press.

From a series of research studies, Kraeplin has published articles in the Newspaper Research Journal, Communication Quarterly, American Journalism and Journalism and Mass Communications Educator. She also serves on several education research panels and has authored numerous conference papers.

Kraeplin has received the Meadows Summer Fellowship and numerous Faculty Development and Research Grants from Southern Methodist University.

Kraeplin received a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and a Masters degree in International Journalism from Baylor University. She also holds a Master of Arts in Journalism and earned her Ph.D in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.