Neha Morrison – First Resource Bank of Pennsylvania

Neha Morrison walked into a boardroom filled with senior executives and a board member for an interview at Malvern Preparatory School, and as she introduced herself around the table, the greeting struck her as oddly distant and reserved. She left the interview unimpressed, already mentally moving on. Then, before she had even made it home, her phone rang. The school wanted her back. It was a strange way to begin what would become a decade-long tenure and one of the defining chapters of her career, but it captured something essential about Morrison’s path: the moments that looked least promising at first often turned out to be the ones that mattered most.

Neha Morrison | First Resource Bank of Pennsylvania | Senior Vice President, Human Resources

Today, Morrison is the newly minted senior vice president of human resources at First Resource Bank of Pennsylvania—she initially joined the company in April 2025 after more than two decades building HR departments from the ground up. She has just marked her first anniversary with the Bank, and she describes the year as someone might describe learning a new language while falling in love with it.

Finding the field by accident

Morrison grew up in Sugar Land, Texas, and arrived at Baylor University determined to become a clinical psychologist. That certainty didn’t survive contact with the actual coursework. After a conversation with an advisor, she enrolled in an industrial-organizational psychology class almost on a whim and found herself hooked. She transferred to Texas State University, where she double-majored in psychology and English, graduating in 1996 into a job market with few programs training people specifically for the work she wanted to do.

She went on to earn her master’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Baltimore, drawn to the program’s data-driven approach to understanding organizational behavior through analysis rather than intuition. While there, she landed an internship with Black & Decker that exposed her to a broad range of human resource functions. Working out of the corporate office and traveling to various manufacturing plants, she gained firsthand experience across multiple HR disciplines, deepening her understanding of the profession and laying the foundation for her career. “It was the opportunity of a lifetime,” she says.

That internship confirmed what she’d suspected since that first advising meeting: this was the work she wanted to do. Black & Decker offered her a full-time job in Charlotte, North Carolina, after graduation. She turned it down. She had met her husband, a native of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and moved to Pennsylvania. The decision set her on a winding tour through defined-benefits work supporting Raytheon, a union hospital environment in North Philadelphia, and roughly a decade at ORC International, where she worked as a generalist supporting offices nationwide and helped implement new HR systems. When her husband left his job to begin law school, she carried the household while he studied, and when he landed with a law firm in Wilmington, the family relocated from Yardley to West Chester, a commute that eventually pushed her toward something new.

A decade at Malvern Prep

The something new was a job with PA Leadership Charter School, a sharp turn from the corporate world she’d known. Not long after she started, an employee was leaving for a position at Malvern Preparatory School. Morrison conducted her exit interview, and the woman told her it was the best conversation she’d had in eight years at the school. Six months later, that same woman emailed asking for Morrison’s personal address and passed along a job posting: HR Director at Malvern Prep.

Her husband, who had grown up in the area, encouraged her to apply. Despite her first impression of the interview, her conversations with the school’s Head revealed something far more compelling: the chance to build an HR Department from scratch, a department that didn’t exist, with both the freedom to shape it and the backing to make it succeed. That opportunity changed her mind.

“I felt guilty about leaving the charter school after I’d only been there for a short time, but I wanted to be able to make an impact, and I knew that Malvern Prep would allow me to do so” she says.

She spent ten years at Malvern Prep, building the department into something durable enough that when she finally left, it was running, in her words, like a well-oiled machine. She wanted to be challenged again, and banking offered exactly that.

Learning the language

In 2005, First Resource Bank opened its doors in Exton with a handful of employees, a small office, and a simple goal: to become the bank that everyone loves. While the organization has grown significantly over the past two decades, one thing has never changed: its commitment to people. From the beginning, First Resource Bank was built on the belief that strong relationships, genuine care, and a supportive culture are the foundation of long-term success.

Today, that culture remains the driving force behind everything the bank does. As Morrison explains, it is unlike anything she has experienced elsewhere in her career. Whether employees are connecting in the company’s Town Hall meeting space, collaborating with colleagues, or celebrating milestones through weekly company updates, the emphasis is always on relationships. Regular Town Halls, communication from the Bank’s CEO, and recognition of employee achievements help keep employees connected, aligned, and invested in the bank’s success. This people-first mindset continues to set First Resource Bank apart.

“Communication is key,” she says.

Coming from academia and the non-profit world, Morrison had to learn an entirely new vocabulary, along with the heavy regulatory backdrop that shapes how banks operate under FDIC oversight. But she has found that the fundamentals of HR travel well between industries, even when the surrounding language doesn’t.

“The industry is the nuance,” she says.

Building for what comes next

Since arriving, Morrison has moved quickly to modernize systems that had gone underused. The bank already had Paylocity in place, but it was largely limited to timesheets and payroll before she rolled out its recruiting and onboarding modules, enabling hiring managers to independently manage their interview processes while creating a more efficient, streamlined onboarding paperwork process for new hires. She also launched the bank’s first internship program, placing students in departments across the organization, where they gain hands-on experience, contribute to meaningful projects, and understand how banking works. “The goal is to give young people a chance to experience banking firsthand so they can decide if it’s a career they want to pursue,” she says.

Recruiting, she says, hasn’t been the challenge some might expect for a growing bank with a strong reputation; the wider net cast through Paylocity has enabled the bank to hire nationally rather than relying solely on Indeed.” First Resource Bank’s reputation as an employer is further reinforced by being voted Best Places to Work for eight consecutive years, reflecting the culture that attracts and retains top talent. Strong employee referrals are valuable because employees are invested in the Bank’s success and often recommend high-quality candidates. Retention, similarly, tends to take care of itself when the culture is strong, and expectations are set intentionally from the very first conversation.

Morrison has also begun exploring how artificial intelligence tools might streamline parts of recruiting and administrative work, though she remains careful about how far she lets automation intrude on a fundamentally human process, using it mainly for small tasks like reviewing emails or building spreadsheet formulas. She still trusts her own instincts most in an interview room, a skill sharpened over twenty-five years of conversations that no longer need a script. What began as a sheet of basic questions early in her career has evolved into a dialogue, one in which each answer shapes the next question, and her background in psychology helps her read what isn’t being said aloud.

Outside the office, Morrison spends her weekends much as she approaches her work: with quiet attentiveness. She’s often in the yard doing yard work she finds genuinely relaxing or walking her dog and taking note of which flower bed needs attention next. It’s a small ritual, but it mirrors the instinct that has carried her through psychology programs, manufacturing plants, a hospital union floor, a charter school, and now a growing community bank: notice what needs tending and get to work. A year into her time at First Resource Bank, that instinct shows no sign of slowing down.