A career built around people and the experiences that bring them together.
I’m Selma Beirne, founder of Beirne Collective. My career has spanned hospitality, event planning, and People & Culture — three fields that, on paper, look unrelated. In practice, they’ve always been the same work: paying attention to how people feel, and doing something about it.
A career that kept circling back to the same thing
My career started in hospitality, where I learned early that the small details are usually what people remember most — a genuine greeting, a room that feels considered, someone noticing before you have to ask. Event planning came next, and it asked the same question at a bigger scale: what does this particular group of people actually need, to feel connected to one another?
That same instinct carried me into People & Culture, where the audience changed but the question didn’t. I built employee experiences that helped people feel like they belonged, supported managers working through hard conversations, led hiring processes from start to finish, and owned the workplace programs and projects that don’t show up on an org chart but shape how a place actually feels to work in.
Beirne Collective is where all of that comes together — the hospitality instinct, the event planner’s eye for detail, and the People & Culture experience, applied to one underlying belief: how people feel, at work and everywhere else, is worth designing for on purpose.
Why I started Beirne Collective
Throughout my career, I’ve seen growing organizations need support with hiring, workplace culture, and bringing their teams together — but they aren’t always ready for a full-time hire. Team events and celebrations can also easily land on someone whose plate is already full.
As my own family grew, I started thinking about how I could keep doing the work I love while creating more flexibility for this season of life. Beirne Collective grew from both of those things: a desire to support organizations in a way that meets them where they are, and to build something meaningful for my family.
I work alongside teams to offer thoughtful People & Culture support and plan experiences that help people feel welcomed, valued, and connected.
Different services. One common thread.
People & Culture and Team Experiences & Events can look like different services from the outside, but they come from the same place: a belief that how people feel — seen, valued, connected — is worth designing for on purpose, whether that shows up in a hiring process, an onboarding experience, or a team offsite.
Photography carries that same idea forward, on a more personal scale, as that side of the business grows.
Whatever brought you here, I’d love to hear about it.
Tell me a little about what you’re looking for, and we’ll start from there.