Yondr has appointed Torrey Searles as Chief People Officer, bringing to the role nearly a decade of firsthand experience scaling culture through hypergrowth in the data center industry. 

Torrey joins Yondr from T5 Data Centers, where across eight and a half years he watched the company grow from around 100 employees to more than 900, spread across nearly 100 locations in the US and internationally. 

Built through a breadth of experience 

Torrey’s path into people leadership wasn’t a straight line. A West Point graduate, he spent five years in the US Army, with postings in Alaska, Japan, Oklahoma and South Carolina. From there, he moved into Operations at Target, where he first got pulled into HR through projects and committees – “A way to soften me up coming out of the military,” as he puts it. High-volume military recruiting came next, placing veterans into Fortune 1000 companies, before his time at T5 Data Centers, where he eventually ran the full admin function: HR, IT, procurement and training. 

It’s a background that Torrey sees as foundational to who he is as a leader today: 

“This is about my upbringing and working through professional and personal challenges, the education background I’ve received, the discipline that was taught early on and enhanced through my experience at West Point, and remaining committed to the mission through all its ebbs and flows.” 

Leading through trust 

That grounding shows up in how Torrey leads now: a coaching style built on giving people “left and right limits”, then trusting them to take initiative, make decisions and – within the bounds of safety – make mistakes and learn from them. 

“First and foremost, you’ve got to earn trust across the board,” he says. “If people trust what you’re doing and see that you’re there to support them, that goes a long way.” 

Earlier in his career, Torrey soon understood that people can see HR very differently. 

“HR can be seen as an obstacle to get around,” he says. “It was clear to me that HR was actually an enhancement of what I do.” 

What’s next for Yondr’s people function 

Torrey is clear on where he wants to focus first: evolving alignment across Yondr’s senior leadership team, streamlining processes so decisions can move at the pace the data center industry demands, and protecting the culture as the company grows – making sure people understand how their work connects to the bigger picture. 

One thing he didn’t expect to find, just weeks in, is how ready the Yondr team already is to embrace technology, automation and AI within the people function itself – an openness he says often runs the other way in HR. 

“You never want to lose that picking-up-the-phone, talking-to-someone connection,” he says. “But how can we embrace what’s coming, use that data to streamline what we do and be proactive? I think that’s here – and I don’t know if people outside the company would expect that.” 

It’s early days, but the direction is set: a people function shaped by someone who has already lived the growth Yondr is planning for, built on trust, and – as Torrey puts it – never losing sight of the fact that this is, at its core, a people business.