One of the challenges we hear from many Recruitment Marketing professionals in our community is that they’re a one-person team, working with many stakeholders across their organization and wearing many hats in their role and responsibilities.
Tricia Day started out as a team of one as the first recruitment marketer at Appian 3 years ago. Since then she has worked hard to demonstrate how impactful Recruitment Marketing and employer branding is, which has led Tricia to get buy-in from the company and secure more resources and budget. In fact, Tricia has spent the past year building a global employer brand team and strategy. The incredible impact of her work and how she’s grown her Recruitment Marketing team is what made Tricia one of this year’s Recruitment Marketing Rising Star winners at the 2021 Rally Awards!
The Rally Awards celebrate excellence in Recruitment Marketing and employer branding practices that attract and recruit talent through social and digital channels, as well as practitioners who have demonstrated how they’ve moved the needle to make a difference at their organization.
Our Recruitment Marketing Rising Star award recognizes practitioners who have spent between 1-3 years in a Recruitment Marketing role. This is a person who has helped to transform the talent acquisition strategy for their company into one that is brand-led and marketing-driven, and distinguished themselves as a future leader of our profession. In 2021, Rally named three Rising Stars!
Meet Tricia Day, 2021 Rally Awards Recruitment Marketing Rising Star
Tricia Day, Recruitment Marketing Rising Star in the 2021 Rally Awards
Tricia leads Appian’s Global Employer Brand team of talented Recruitment Marketing and content production professionals.
Launching a Recruitment Marketing function for a global company in less than 3 years is no small feat and that’s what Tricia has built at Appian. She started out as a one-person team and has now built a 4 person Global Employer Brand team, and all during the pandemic!
This year her team launched Appian’s new careers site and re-launched their blog with a focus on employee storytelling and advocacy with compelling content, and they’ve already seen an increase in traffic and social media engagement.
It’s clear the Recruitment Marketing work her team is accomplishing is resonating with candidates, so we connected with Tricia to learn more about her approach, building a team from scratch and what’s next for her.
Q&A with Tricia Day, Global Employer Brand Manager, Appian
Rally: We hear time and time again how most practitioners just “fell” into Recruitment Marketing, how did you get started in Recruitment Marketing?
Tricia: I attended a conference in 2018 and it was my first time hearing about the role of Recruitment Marketing. While I studied marketing in school, I ended up working as a recruiter, but I always had this itch to leverage more of my creative side in my everyday work. At that time, a few other recruiters and I were ad hoc running our AppianLife Instagram account and posting a lot of fun videos.
When I came back from this conference I shared my interest in Recruitment Marketing with my boss, and told her I would love to do it! We created the first Recruitment Marketing role at Appian and I was in that role for about a year and a half before I moved into managing our global employer brand and started building out our team.
Rally: What do you enjoy most about working in this space?
Tricia: What I enjoy most is the community and the people in the space — they’re incredibly welcoming. When I started in Recruitment Marketing, one of my first big projects was swapping the CRM we had at the time. I had zero coding background and needed to identify an easier user interface. I attended events, met a lot of people and reached out in a Facebook group asking for advice on CRM recommendations. I had a bunch of people responding and offering to jump on a call with me to chat and share experiences.
Practitioners were so willing to help! It was refreshing and awesome to see how much everyone in the Recruitment Marketing and employer branding space wants to help and see each other succeed.
Rally: What skills do you think are important for other recruitment marketers who are looking to forge their path in this space?
Tricia: A willingness to try new things, stay educated with market trends, and not being afraid to go against the grain are important skills in this field. It’s a fast-moving industry, and what sparked candidates’ interest one day will be quickly replaced with something else the next day. My team members have brought these new elements when they joined and I’ve seen so many exciting new things come to fruition. Setting a space for creatives to speak their minds and test new things has created this awesome morale and team dynamic. I feel really lucky to work alongside them every day.
Being able to develop partnerships with stakeholders is also really important. Making sure you’re bringing in the right internal teams to partner with, especially marketing. It’s a common trend I see in the industry that there’s often a big separation from Recruitment Marketing and employer branding and marketing teams, but we’re so much more powerful working together.
When you develop strong partnerships with departments, you’re supporting and uplifting each other, so it’s truly a win-win. They can also start to see and understand the breadth and impact of the work we do to uplift our employer brand.
Rally: Can you walk us through what projects you’re most proud of to date?
Tricia: I’m most proud of the work that my team has produced over the past year of the pandemic. We launched our new careers site, which had a quick turnaround — we notified our new website vendor in February and published it at the end of March!
This past quarter we also did our first large-scale brand campaign in partnership with our marketing team that was really innovative. To say I’m proud of the team is an understatement! It started with the idea of driving more awareness of Appian in the DC market and turned into us leveraging new tools like large editorial platforms such as the Washington Post and the Washington Business Journal, and advertising across Reddit, Google ads and even NPR radio. All things we had never tapped into before.
We worked with our PR team throughout to create this really well-rounded brand awareness campaign that tied our culture, our product and industry all in one. It was a huge team effort and success.
Rally: As a Recruitment Marketing Rising Star, what’s next for you in your career?
Tricia: My biggest focus right now is continuing to develop the team at Appian. It’s been awesome to see others on the team bring fresh ideas and new skill sets. It’s been a lot of learning for all of us as we’ve grown during the pandemic and being virtual. The launch of our EVP is our next big project that’s involved a lot of research and effort. I’m excited for this to roll out soon!
Rally: Any final words of wisdom for our Rally community?
Tricia: Immerse yourself in the Recruitment Marketing community, especially if you’re trying to get into the field. Don’t be afraid to try new things and reach out to others. Attending virtual conferences and joining online groups really set such a positive stage for me starting in Recruitment Marketing and showed me this great community we have to lean on.
Rally: Thanks so much Tricia, and congrats again! That’s exactly the community we aim to bring together here at Rally so it’s wonderful to hear about your positive experience and how you’ve grown in your career and with your team in Recruitment Marketing.
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Interested in learning more about the Rally Awards? You can see all of the 2021 award winners and learn how to enter your work in the 2022 program on the Rally Awards website.
