Camille Fetter

Camille Fetter is founder and CEO of Talentfoot, the executive search firm based in Chicago, Illinois, that she started in 2010 to place marketing, sales, technology, and operations leaders at high-growth digital companies. She came up through media planning and digital recruiting, then built a firm around the idea that the right role can change someone's life.

Volunteering on a Crisis Hotline in Colorado

Her shifts on a crisis hotline in the Denver, Colorado area took calls about domestic violence, suicide prevention, and gender and sexual identity. She volunteered there while studying at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she earned a B.S. in advertising with a minor in technology, art, and media. In an Authority Magazine interview she called that work one of her most formative experiences, because it taught her to connect with people from empathy, respect, and kindness.

She has said she would not have predicted a career in executive search from that volunteer work. Looking back, she treats search as the same mission: helping people find work that makes their lives better.

Making the Transition from Media Planning to Starting a Recruiting Firm

"I had the opportunity to learn and understand this new form of media consumption that was quickly changing life as we knew it," she recalled in a JWC Media profile of her first job, in media planning at Kelly Scott Madison as digital advertising took off.

Her interest in digital marketing grew into an interest in digital business. She moved into staffing and then executive search, including leading Midwest digital marketing and media recruiting at Lucas Group, and served as vice president of corporate relations on the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association executive board. Working with investors and high-growth digital startups gave her the confidence to start her own firm at 28. She launched Talentfoot in 2010.

Letting Go of Running Everything

In the early years she tried to run everything herself. In the Authority Magazine conversation she described the change she had to make: a leader is only as good as the team, so she had to hire people smarter than her, with different opinions and skills. She now advises meeting people where they are in life and valuing impact over hours, and in Great Resignation coverage she argued that people leave leaders more often than they leave companies.

Launching Indigo at Talentfoot

"At Talentfoot," she told JWC, "we define our success by our ability to change lives for the better - for the employers who trust us to hire the right talent to grow their businesses, and for the job seekers who depend on our ability to match their talents and desires with the right position, culture, and leadership team." The firm fields a national team, about 50 associates at the time of that profile, matching marketing, sales, technology, HR, and operations leaders with companies from Series B startups to Fortune 50 brands, including PE- and VC-backed firms.

"The workforce continues to change at an unprecedented pace," she said. "Our job is to not only keep up with this pace but to stay ahead of it." That effort produced Indigo, an invite-only network for C-suite members that combines matchmaking, executive search, board, and advisory services in one membership.

She is a Forbes HR Council member, a founding member of Chief, and a YPO Chicagoland board member. Talentfoot is WBENC-certified as women-owned.

Personal Life

After more than a decade living in Chicago, she moved back to Lake Forest, Illinois, where she lives with her daughter, according to a 2022 JWC Media profile. Away from work she likes to travel and learn about other cultures, stay active, explore Chicago's art and music scene, find hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and catch a Cubs game.