Clean Energy Spotlight: Catherine McLean

In clean energy, some focus on wind power, on electric vehicles, on solar power, on geothermal, or other technologies and market subsectors

Not Catherine McLean, our latest Clean Energy Spotlight. Catherine focuses on people. And, that’s really important. Because for renewables to power America, we need more workers to power renewables, and that means more professionals from more types of backgrounds. 

That’s where McLean comes in. She’s a recruiter. She runs Dylan Green, a strategic talent acquisition consultancy that  she founded in 2019. Catherine transforms business through talent by placing top tier commercial individuals within leading clean energy and technology companies.. She does so in order to help workers and companies—but also the planet. "The mission of the business is to make my son proud by continuing to place outstanding individuals with impactful companies that contribute to a low carbon economy," McLean said.

Her son’s name is Dylan—hence Dylan Green.

Throughout her career, McLean has helped power the clean energy transition by connecting top-tier cleantech companies - from ENGIE to Lightsource bp to CleanCapital - with a pool of diverse and highly talented prospective employees. She did so at Acre Resources, a global recruitment firm focused on energy and sustainability. She did so at McLean Ross, an earlier recruitment consultancy she founded to place professionals in European utility jobs. 

Now, at Dylan Green, McLean is especially committed to, and specializes in, placing women, Black, Indigenous & people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQ & other professionals who have marginalized identities in cleantechs—so committed, in fact, that she won an award last fall for championing diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Having the clean energy workforce reflect the diversity of America is not only good for the industry: It’s necessary, McLean has said. “As we continue to grow this industry -and the jobs are just going to get more and more plentiful, at some point, we’re going to have to let more people in from other industries because we don’t have enough people to handle all of the work that needs to be done in cleantech,” she said.

The talent pipeline is critical for the growth of the clean energy industry, and Catherine McLean is making sure that pipeline continues to flow.