Each April, the Rally Awards honors a shortlist of practitioners who have been in a full-time Recruitment Marketing role for 1-3 years and have made an impact helping to transform the talent acquisition strategy at their company to one that’s brand-led and marketing-driven.
This year the Rally Awards recognized 2 Rising Stars! One of the winners, Whitney Wallace from Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH), was celebrated for leading Recruitment Marketing at her company for just 1 year, while bringing vision, innovation and strategy to her team and her company.
In their feedback to her nomination, members of the independent panel of judges noted:
“Whitney’s passion is evident in the creative ideas that she’s able to execute, the way that she’s able to overcome blockers, and how she’s supporting others at the organization in implementing employer brand and recruitment marketing strategies.”
“It’s clear that Whitney has brought transformational change through her relationships throughout the company and her drive for results.”
All of us at Rally and the Rally Recruitment Marketing community are proud to recognize Whitney with this award. So let’s meet our Rising Star!
Meet Whitney Wallace, 2023 Rally Awards Recruitment Marketing Rising Star
Whitney Wallace, TA Marketing and Sourcing Manager, Baylor Scott & White Health
Whitney Wallace began her career in talent acquisition in 2013 as a recruiter, working for a variety of staffing firms before joining Baylor Scott & White Health as a Corporate Recruiter in 2018. She moved through a number of tactical roles before transitioning to be the TA Marketing and Sourcing Manager in the summer of 2022. In her current role, she leads a team of Recruitment Marketing Consultants and Sourcers, striving to effectively attract talent for the company’s open positions through marketing strategies.
Rally: How did you get started in Recruitment Marketing?
Whitney: I was on the TA Programs team at Baylor Scott & White Health and was asked to help with collecting data to build out a new cost-per-hire report for the organization. I got to partner with the TA team on metrics, chat about the ROI of our various efforts and learn what was working well and what needed to be reviewed.
When the position of TA Marketing Manager opened, my director asked me to apply for the role. She felt my project management skills, along with my recruitment background would bring the insight and structure the team was looking for. She took a chance on me and now I am a part of such an amazing and talented marketing team.
Rally: What do you enjoy most about working in Recruitment Marketing?
Whitney: I love the mix of creative and analytic work. I am a nerd at heart and have always been really good with data (and enjoyed it): reading it, organizing it and sharing it out with other teams. Then you add in the fun creative work that our team gets to do (like our blogs, the career site, social media, etc.), it’s the cherry on top. It’s a great balance that keeps my work exciting.
Rally: What’s changed the most about Recruitment Marketing since you started your career?
Whitney: Specifically for us in healthcare recruiting, regulations have changed around tracking, in particular using GA4 (the new Google Analytics software) and pixels. This has directly affected our approach for targeting and tracking specific audiences. We had to review these regulations and make sure we were compliant before making any changes or taking on a new approach.
Rally: What skills do you think are important for other recruitment marketers who are looking to forge their path in this space?
Whitney: I think there are 3 skills that are pretty important. The first is being able to use and analyze marketing data to make informed decisions. The second would be knowing how to share data (and what data) behind the creative strategies with leaders in your organization, so that they see and understand the impact of your work. Third, I would say being able to take feedback on your work and then making adjustments, without taking it personally is really important.
I feel like our team as a whole has done a great job of balancing all of these.
Rally: What do you think has helped you to be a successful recruitment marketer?
Whitney: Definitely spending 10 years as a recruiter helped me to be a successful recruitment marketer. I already had good knowledge of the talent landscape and the different candidate personas at our organization. This helped me jump right into the work of strategizing where to find the candidates we were looking for, how to reach them, when to reach them and what messages they’ll be interested in.
Rally: What project are you most proud of to date?
Whitney: I’m definitely proud of our Employee Voice Campaign. In this campaign, we showcase our diverse employees and their individual experiences working at BSWH.
We love celebrating the heritage and backgrounds of our employees, but this also gives us the opportunity to showcase our great employee benefits or our company culture. We’ve shared stories of employees taking advantage of our tuition reimbursement program, being promoted to a new role, making an impact on our patients, and so much more.
Rally: What is the area that deserves the most focus from recruitment marketers right now?
Whitney: I believe there is a lot of work recruitment marketers can do to support DEI initiatives. We are seeing a lot of skill gaps in candidates. Recruitment marketers can put energy into promoting a company’s opportunities for professional development to upskill workers and attract candidates who are eager to learn and grow. This could really help improve our vacancy rates. At BWSH, we are very fortunate to have an amazing tuition program to promote. This program provides more equitable and inclusive opportunities to all employees.
Rally: What do you think the future of employer branding and Recruitment Marketing looks like?
Whitney: I think we are going to see a lot more AI technology being utilized by talent sourcing and marketing. AI has the potential to support and improve data-driven insights, automating tasks, increasing efficiency and personalizing candidate experiences. This will allow recruitment marketers and talent sourcers, who are now spending a lot of their time on tedious and repetitive tasks, to focus more on developing creative and strategic initiatives for the different service lines they support.
Rally: Can you describe an experience with failure in Recruitment Marketing, how you handled it and if you learned anything from it?
Whitney: I don’t look at things as failures, as much as the iterative process of testing and improving.
We have a very difficult group of positions that my team has been supporting. For these roles, the talent market has run pretty dry. We found some of our existing strategies were still working, but we needed to test new ideas. We got to try out some of these new strategies, and most of them failed!
While these failures felt like a setback at the time, I’m proud that we were able to try them out. Now we know they don’t work and we won’t keep spending money on them.
But one of the ideas we tested is really yielding the candidates, so we’ve upped our investment there. Despite frustration with all the ideas that failed, we still came away with something that works, and the entire experience feels like a win!
Rally: What’s next for you in your career?
Whitney: For now, I am going to continue to help foster and grow my current team. I am still learning so much at BWSH and want to spend more time in this role before I decide what’s next.
Rally: Any final thoughts you want to pass on to the Rally community, especially those just starting out or looking to take their career to the next level?
Whitney: Ask for projects you don’t have experience in yet. YET! You can learn so much on the job, so take a risk.
Invest time into understanding data and analytics. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new approaches and strategies. Innovation can set you apart and will lead to future success.
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Interested in reading more about the Rally Awards? You can see all of the 2023 award winners on the Rally Awards website.
Be sure to also stay tuned for more lessons from our award winners in the weeks to come!
