Ally Brown, Brand Manager, Employer Brand & Recruiting at VCA Animal Hospitals

For Ally Brown, Brand Manager, Employer Brand & Recruiting at VCA Animal Hospitals, the solution was to put employees’ real experiences at the center of the story.

VCA’s Your Power Has a Purpose campaign earned First Place for Best Recruitment Marketing Campaign – Solo Practitioner/Small Team in the 2026 Rally Awards. By combining existing employee photography with authentic voiceovers and a full-funnel digital strategy, the campaign generated 650 applications and 34 hires while reducing cost per application by 37% compared with a previous campaign.

I spoke with Ally about the strategy behind the campaign, how she brought employee stories to life and what other Recruitment Marketers can learn from her approach.

Behind VCA’s Award-Winning Recruitment Marketing Campaign

Lori: What recruiting challenge were you trying to solve with the “Your Power Has a Purpose” campaign?

Ally Brown: Through our employer brand research, we knew that veterinarians are deeply motivated by their love of animals and the sense of purpose they find in their work.

At the same time, there are a lot of misconceptions in veterinary medicine about working for a corporate organization. We didn’t want to shy away from the fact that VCA is a large organization. Instead, we wanted to show the support our associates receive and how being part of VCA can help them make an even greater impact.

The idea behind Your Power Has a Purpose was to show how VCA empowers veterinary professionals to do what they entered the profession to do: care for pets and the people who love them.

Lori: How did you develop the creative concept?

Ally: I worked with a digital and creative agency on the campaign. We’d collaborated on previous campaigns, so the challenge was finding a fresh way to communicate our employer brand message.

I really wanted to use specific, authentic employee stories. Candidates want to understand what working somewhere is actually like, and hearing real experiences helps bring those messages to life.

We also didn’t have a new photo shoot scheduled, so we looked at how we could make better use of photography we already had.

We reached back out to associates who had participated in a previous photo shoot and asked them to share their experiences. By combining their stories with existing photography, we were able to create something that felt new and personal without starting from scratch.

Lori: Why did you decide to use employee voiceovers instead of traditional employee videos?

Ally: One of the biggest challenges was collecting the stories. Our associates are busy caring for patients, so coordinating their participation took time.

We used Vouch to capture their voiceovers, which made the process easier. Employees didn’t have to appear on camera. They could simply tell their stories in their own words.

We also guided them with questions and asked for specific examples rather than general statements about why they liked working at VCA.

That helped us uncover much more meaningful stories.

One of my favorite moments came from an associate describing how the team came together during an emergency. He compared the experience to the Megazord from Power Rangers, where everyone combines their strengths to accomplish something together.

We had already developed the Your Power Has a Purpose concept, but that story captured the message perfectly.

Lori: How did you balance emotional storytelling with recruiting goals?

Ally: With digital advertising, you have to give people a reason to stop scrolling.

We wanted the creative to capture attention through both the visuals and the stories. Hearing an actual associate’s voice made the content feel more personal.

Rather than immediately leading with a job opening, we wanted to connect with candidates emotionally, get them interested in VCA and then encourage them to explore opportunities on our careers site.

We didn’t receive pushback on that approach. Our Talent Acquisition leadership understood the importance of purpose in veterinary medicine, so there was support for the direction.

Lori: How did you approach the candidate journey across different channels?

Ally: We created nine assets organized around three stages of the candidate journey: awareness, consideration and conversion.

The awareness content was designed to capture attention and introduce people to VCA. The consideration content went deeper into the employee experience, while the conversion content encouraged candidates to take the next step.

We used different messaging for each stage and ran the campaign across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Google Search.

The ads ran during the same period, rather than in separate campaign phases, but the creative and targeting were designed to support different points in the candidate journey.

We generally saw social advertising play a stronger role in awareness and consideration, while Google Search generated the most conversions.

Lori: What results did the campaign achieve?

Ally: The campaign generated 650 applications and 34 hires.

We also saw a 37% reduction in cost per application compared with a previous campaign.

When we looked at the differences between the campaigns, the creative stood out. Our earlier campaign used advertising featuring pets rather than employee voices. The newer campaign brought real associates and their experiences into the storytelling.

There were some differences in the channel mix and other factors that can influence campaign performance, so it’s difficult to attribute the improvement to one change alone.

But the results gave us a useful way to evaluate the campaign and demonstrate its impact.

Creative examples from VCA Animal Hospitals’ previous Recruitment Marketing campaign (2024).

Creative examples from VCA Animal Hospitals’ award-winning Your Power Has a Purpose campaign, featuring messaging across the awareness, consideration and conversion stages of the candidate journey.

Lori: What advice would you give Recruitment Marketers working as a team of one?

Ally: One of the biggest lessons is to keep learning from the campaigns you’ve already run.

You don’t always need to throw out your strategy and start over. If your audience targeting and channel strategy are working, think about what you can improve or approach differently.

For this campaign, we reused photography from a previous shoot and found a new way to tell employee stories through voiceovers. That helped us save time and resources while creating content that still felt authentic.

I think it’s important to ask yourself what you learned from each campaign, what you can replicate and how you can make the work you’ve already done go further.

Lori: What did winning a Rally Award mean to you and your team?

Ally: I was really excited and surprised when I found out we’d won.

One of the most valuable parts was being able to share the judges’ feedback internally. It showed our stakeholders that our work was being recognized alongside campaigns from other leading organizations.

That external validation is important, especially when everyone is busy and focused on the next project.

It also gave us a chance to celebrate the impact of the campaign.

We’ve been able to connect advertising activity to applications and hires, and I’ve also used ROI calculations to help communicate the business value of our Recruitment Marketing efforts.

Being recognized through the Rally Awards was another opportunity to demonstrate that value and celebrate what we’d accomplished.

Turning Authentic Stories Into Recruiting Results

Thank you to Ally Brown for being a member of the Rally community and sharing your expertise with us!

VCA’s Your Power Has a Purpose campaign shows how Recruitment Marketers can bring new life to existing creative by putting employee experiences at the center of their strategy.

By pairing authentic voiceovers with thoughtful messaging and a full-funnel approach, Ally and her agency partners developed a campaign that connected VCA’s employer brand promise to measurable recruiting outcomes.

For Recruitment Marketers working with small teams, the takeaway is clear: You don’t always need a completely new campaign to make an impact. Sometimes, the opportunity is in finding a more compelling way to tell the stories you already have.

The 2027 Rally Awards open for entries on November 2. Get inspired by this year’s winners and start thinking about the Recruitment Marketing work your team could share.

The post How VCA Animal Hospitals Turned Employee Stories Into Recruiting Success first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

It’s an appealing idea. Employees have networks that employers can’t reach through their corporate channels alone. People are more likely to trust information coming from other people than from brands. And for most practitioners, Employee Advocacy is one of many strategies they’re responsible for, not a full-time job. Making it easy for employees to share ready-made content just makes sense.

But there’s 3 problems with this approach:

1. Authenticity: Corporate content hides our employees’ unique voices and experiences.
2. Effectiveness: Social content that feels promotional is obvious to candidates, limiting the impact of Employee Advocacy programs.
3. Measurement: We’re focused on tracking shares and engagement, but not the impact of advocates on driving applications and hires.

I believe Employee Advocacy has the potential to become one of the most influential channels in Recruitment Marketing. But to realize that potential, we need a new playbook.

1. Authenticity: Let Employees Be Themselves

Think about how most Employee Advocacy programs work today. A Marketing or Recruitment Marketing team creates ready-made posts and encourages employees to share them with their networks, whether through an Employee Advocacy platform, an email or a message in Slack or Teams.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing company content. The problem is when that becomes the primary way we engage employees in advocacy. When dozens or hundreds of employees share essentially the same message, we’re using their personal networks like a PR channel rather than giving people a reason to connect with our employees.

What makes employees so valuable to our employer brands is that they have their own perspectives, experiences and relationships. They can talk about what they’ve learned from a challenging project, recognize a colleague for their contributions or share why they’ve chosen to build their career with our organization. These are the kinds of stories that help candidates understand what it’s actually like to work somewhere, in ways a corporate account can’t replicate.

Side-by-side comparison of a generic corporate social media post and an authentic employee post, illustrating how personal workplace stories build interest in an employer.

Of course, creating original content doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Some employees may not know what to write about, worry about saying the wrong thing or simply lack the time. That’s where Recruitment Marketing teams can help with inspiration, content ideas, guidance and AI-powered tools that help employees turn their experiences into engaging posts.

But if we’re simply replacing ready-made corporate posts with generic AI-generated content, we haven’t solved the authenticity problem. AI should help employees express their own perspectives and communicate in their own voices, not replace them.

Instead of asking employees to sound like our employer brand, we should be helping our employer brand come to life through the people who work there.

2. Effectiveness: Create Content That Actually Resonates

There’s another reason to rethink the content we’re asking employees to share: The traditional approach may be limiting the results we’re trying to achieve.

At Rally, we’ve spent years helping Recruitment Marketing teams understand what makes social recruiting content effective. In our analysis of 40,000 social media posts, we found some compelling differences between original employee content and reposted content.

Original employee content generated 81% more impressions and 333% more reactions than reposted corporate content. We also found that posts containing transactional recruiting terms such as “apply,” “job” and “hiring” were associated with up to 70% fewer impressions.

Original content drives significantly higher engagement in Employee Advocacy. Based on Rally® Inside data, LinkedIn posts with personal perspective (“repost with thoughts”) increase reactions by 83% and impressions by 25%, while original content drives a 333% increase in reactions and 81% increase in impressions compared to reposts. Source: Rally Inc.

These findings reinforce why we need to think differently about Employee Advocacy. If our goal is to attract talent, especially passive talent who aren’t actively looking for a new job, we need content that’s relevant and interesting to them, and we can use data to help support our content approach. An employee sharing an interesting project, offering professional advice or talking about an experience at work can introduce someone to an employer they might not otherwise have considered.

This doesn’t mean employees should stop sharing company content or promoting job opportunities. Both have a place in an Employee Advocacy strategy.

But we need to be more intentional about the content we encourage employees to share, using performance insights to understand what resonates with their networks. Are we giving people a reason to become interested in our organizations, even if they’re not looking for a job today? That’s how Employee Advocacy can help us build relationships with future candidates.

3. Measurement: Connect Employee Advocacy to Recruiting Outcomes

The third challenge may be the most important if we want Employee Advocacy to become a more strategic part of how we attract talent: We need to change how we measure success.

Traditionally, Employee Advocacy programs have been measured by the number of posts shared, impressions and engagement. Most Employee Advocacy platforms were designed for Corporate Marketing and Sales, so their metrics focus on how much content employees share and how people respond to it. But for Recruitment Marketing, that’s only part of the picture. We need to know whether employee content is actually attracting candidates and influencing their decisions to apply.

We should be asking: Are employees helping us reach prospective candidates? Are people visiting our career sites because of employee content? Are those visits converting into applications? And ultimately, is Employee Advocacy contributing to hires?

These are the same questions Recruitment Marketing teams are being asked about our other strategies and channels, so we should expect the same accountability from Employee Advocacy. Demonstrating the business impact of our work is already one of our biggest challenges and is a true skill to develop. We can’t afford to measure the success of Employee Advocacy by social engagement alone when what we really need to demonstrate is its contribution to recruiting outcomes.

Rally Inside’s Employee Advocacy funnel tracks how employee-shared content converts into job applications, providing Recruitment Marketing teams with attribution and conversion insights beyond social media engagement.

When we can track the candidate journey from an employee’s social post to a career site visit, an application and ultimately a hire, we can finally measure Employee Advocacy as a recruiting channel. This is where Recruitment Marketing attribution becomes so important. We can see which employee stories are attracting talent, which posts are driving traffic and, most importantly, which are converting that interest into applications. These insights help us improve our strategies, invest in what works and demonstrate the value of Employee Advocacy to our organizations.

I believe it’s time to hold Employee Advocacy to the same standard as every other Recruitment Marketing channel: Not just how many people we reach, but how effectively we convert that reach into candidates and hires.

Why We Built Rally Inside for Employee Advocacy

Over the past 9 years, I’ve worked with thousands of Recruitment Marketing practitioners through Rally. I’ve seen firsthand how much creativity and effort goes into building employer brands and attracting talent, and I’ve heard from practitioners about the challenges they face in getting employees involved, creating content that resonates and measuring results.

When we decided to build Employee Advocacy into Rally® Inside, I knew I didn’t want to create another platform focused on getting employees to share more company content or focus on metrics like earned media. I wanted to help Recruitment Marketing teams build programs that encourage authentic employee voices and measure the recruiting outcomes that matter.

That’s why we built AI-powered tools that help employees create content in their own voices, give them insights into how their posts perform and enable Recruitment Marketing teams to track the candidate journey from employee posts to career site visits, applications and hires. And because Employee Advocacy is part of Rally Inside, teams can measure its performance and conversions alongside their other Recruitment Marketing channels.

Our goal is to make Employee Advocacy easier for employees to participate in, more effective at attracting talent and more measurable for the practitioners responsible for its success.

The Next Chapter of Employee Advocacy

I believe Employee Advocacy has the potential to become one of our most valuable Recruitment Marketing channels. But getting there requires us to think beyond sharing company content and counting impressions.

We need to give employees the confidence and tools to share their own experiences, use performance insights to create content that resonates and measure how those efforts convert interest into applications and hires.

That’s the future we’re building toward at Rally, and I hope more Recruitment Marketing teams will join us in rethinking what’s possible.

On November 11, I’ll be hosting a webinar, What’s Next for Employee Advocacy in 2027. I’m excited that employer brand expert Alex Her will be joining the conversation. We’ll discuss what’s changing in EA, what Recruitment Marketing teams should be doing differently and how to build an Employee Advocacy strategy that delivers measurable recruiting results.

Register for the webinar >

And if you’d like to see how we’re putting these ideas into practice, explore Employee Advocacy by Rally Inside and discover how we’re helping teams make Employee Advocacy more authentic, effective and measurable.

The post Employee Advocacy Needs a New Playbook. Here’s Why. first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

Allison Crenshaw, CP-RM, Senior Manager, Employment Marketing at Spring Education Group/BASIS Overseas Educational Services.

Me: “I honestly don’t know.”

He asked me this question as I got ready for my first day of work as the Recruitment & Marketing Coordinator at BASIS Overseas Educational Services in 2018.

Prior to then I had never heard of Recruitment Marketing or Employer Branding. I had never given much thought to Recruiting or Talent Acquisition. Nor had I considered how it would change my life.

Fast forward 6 years and after following and learning from the Rally community during this time, and attending a workshop led by Rally Founder Lori Sylvia at SRSC in 2019, the Certified Professional in Recruitment Marketing (CP-RM) program was introduced.

Much of my training and knowledge of recruitment marketing had been self-taught, on the job or trial by fire to this point.

Being part of the first cohort of CP-RM graduates was an invaluable experience to learn alongside many experienced practitioners and their years of experience.

The CP-RM program was instrumental in providing me with the formal knowledge and framework to solidify what I had learned and experienced first hand, while filling in some of the gaps and going further than what I had had the opportunity to work on to date.

I have been able to better strategize and present data and results in ways that tell the story of the impact of my team’s work.

The culmination of this was in our BASIS International Schools team winning the 2026 Rally Award for Best Careers Blog.

The BASIS International Schools blog, winner of the 2026 Rally Award for Best Careers Blog.

Our blog has been instrumental in the success of our recruitment marketing strategies, and we will continue to build upon this to make further impact in our own recruiting efforts and beyond.

Now when I am asked “what do you do as the Senior Manager, Employment Marketing?” I know exactly what to say:

“I tell the story of how you can change your life with one career move.”

Ask me how I know.

The post A Winding Journey to Becoming a Certified Professional in Recruitment Marketing™ first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

Hanna Buckner, Manager, Employer Brand and Digital Learning at Brown-Forman

That created an interesting challenge for Hanna Buckner, Manager, Employer Brand and Digital Learning, who was tasked with helping Brown-Forman formalize its employer brand strategy.

The result was “Belong to Better,” a global employer brand designed to connect Brown-Forman’s history and well-known consumer brands with the experience of working for the company. The strategy was developed with global flexibility in mind, giving teams a consistent framework they could adapt for different markets, roles and candidate audiences.

Hanna submitted two examples of this work to the 2026 Rally Awards: the “Belong to Better” employer brand video and the launch of the broader Recruitment Marketing strategy.

What makes the work especially relevant for Recruitment Marketers is how Hanna approached activation. As a team of one supporting a global organization, she couldn’t personally create every asset for every recruiter and market. Instead, she focused on giving teams the framework, templates and resources to activate the employer brand themselves.

I spoke with Hanna about building Brown-Forman’s first formalized employer brand strategy, launching it during a period of organizational change and creating a model that could work around the world.

Inside Brown-Forman’s Employer Brand Strategy

Lori: Before “Belong to Better,” what challenge were you trying to solve?

Hanna: People outside of the Louisville area probably don’t know who Brown-Forman is unless they’re in the industry. Brown-Forman has a fantastic name and reputation in Louisville, from being an employer to a corporate citizen and what it does for local communities through philanthropy. But outside of that, even my sister-in-law lives two hours north in Indianapolis and she thought it was a law firm.

We have Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, Old Forester and these fantastic beverage alcohol brands. People know those, but that’s not the exact company or direct brand they’re coming to work for. That’s the company and the brands they get to experience.

As we continue to grow outside the U.S., we had to think about how we translate what Brown-Forman means and what our brands mean.

We had this long-standing ambition of “Nothing Better in the Market.” Our founder, George Garvin Brown, signed it on the first bottles of Old Forester (and it’s still on bottles sold today). But when you tried to translate that into another language, whether it was Japanese, Italian, Polish or Spanish, it didn’t quite have the same meaning.

We wanted to take this global brand and localize it while still having a framework with flexibility.

Lori: Was this an existing employer brand that you inherited?

Hanna: This was the first formalized employer brand role at Brown-Forman. Employer brand might have sat with recruiting or some communications work before, but it was never really someone’s official job title or the majority of their role.

I was tasked with building out the white paper that went to leadership, then the framework, an RFP and identifying agencies that might be a good fit.

We wanted to formalize it, create something that could be localized and build a toolkit of assets that anyone in the organization could leverage to go and do it themselves.

Our recruiters are fantastic at what they do. They are the best brand ambassadors for the company at Brown-Forman, but we don’t expect them to be designers, artists or the perfect wordsmith. We want to give them the tools so they can do their main responsibility successfully and make it easy for them.

Brown-Forman’s “Belong to Better” employer brand creates a consistent global framework with the flexibility to localize across markets.

Lori: How did you make sure the employer brand could work globally without losing consistency?

Hanna: We use the phrase “flexibility in the framework.”

You’re never going to let Jack Daniel’s use pink. It’s iconically black and white. Here’s the Brown-Forman color palette and here are our resources. But then you can use the bottles or brands you have in your market, translate it to your local market and use what you need while it’s still consistently Brown-Forman.

That’s what we found in our agency relationship with Tonic. They had that global reach and were headquartered outside the U.S., which was really helpful so that we didn’t get too biased toward what we see in the U.S.

We also leveraged employees around the world to help us understand what something might mean and make sure that it would translate.

Lori: How does the 60/20/20 framework help recruiters adapt the employer brand for different candidates and roles?

Hanna: The 60/20/20 allows that flexibility within a framework.

Maybe a candidate talks about how important it is to work for global iconic brands. They can lean into that brand piece. Maybe they’re a marketer and that’s what they want to lean into.

Or maybe it’s someone right out of college who is looking for a role that’s going to teach them. They want learning and development, career growth and benefits that help them plan for the future.

Based on the candidate and the role, there’s that 60/20/20 framework. The materials we provide emphasize that, but recruiters can customize it for the candidate or the role and think about what needs to be leaned into a little more.

Brown-Forman’s 60/20/20 messaging framework gives recruiters a consistent foundation with the flexibility to emphasize what matters most to each candidate and role.

Lori: You were developing this work while Brown-Forman was going through organizational change. How did you make sure the employer brand remained authentic?

Hanna: We kept trying to time the employer brand rollout so it didn’t have that impact. It was really important to us that we didn’t roll it out right as we announced new operational hubs because we knew employee sentiment might not align with that.

We didn’t want to roll out this big employer brand and celebrate it when that wasn’t authentic to the instability that some employees were feeling.

You need to know your organization and have your pulse on it. Is this going to land well? Or do we need to find a way not to do that yet?

That’s why we did the soft launch with our People and Communications organization to start having them embed it into the programs and tools they use and have it be a slow drip.

Lori: As a team of one, how did you give teams the ability to use the employer brand themselves without losing quality or consistency?

Hanna: Internally, we leverage Infogram. It’s similar to Canva. We created templates and toolkits that were pre-populated. We provided photos and examples, but at the same time created placeholders so people could fill them in.

We rolled that out to the People and Communications organization and created templates for them. I also sit in with the recruiting team once a month just to hear what’s going well and what they still need.

Through one of those sessions, I learned that they needed a PowerPoint template deck where they could pull things from for higher-level roles where they might have to do something a little different.

When I’m teaching them to fish, I still have to provide the materials. I still need to be there. I can’t set it and forget it like a crock pot.

I can start it, but I also have to think about what needs to evolve and change.

Brown-Forman’s templates and toolkits helped teams activate the employer brand across job ads, videos, social content and candidate touch points.

According to Brown-Forman’s Rally Awards submission, the self-service approach enabled a 100% global rollout without additional headcount, with 10 recruiters upskilled within 60 days. The strategy reached major global markets including India, Poland, Mexico and the United States, while more than 10 employee touch points were rebranded across more than 20 countries.

Lori: What did participating in the Rally Awards give you as a Recruitment Marketing practitioner?

Hanna: We don’t typically enter our work in external opportunities very often. We’re pretty humble, and I think we’re hesitant around that because we’re trying to balance showing the work with the authenticity of it.

My only wish was that I had done it sooner.

We talk about feedback being a gift at Brown-Forman, so I’m grateful for the gift of the feedback because this was the first time we had really formalized our employer brand strategy.

It was so nice to put it together and reflect on the work. It timed well with the end of our fiscal year, so it was a good opportunity to pause and reflect on what we’d done and also think about where we can go.

Creating Flexibility Within a Global Employer Brand

Thank you Hanna for sharing your experience with the Rally community! It shows us that building a global employer brand requires more than creating a central set of messaging and assets. Teams also need a practical way to use them.

For Brown-Forman, that meant creating a framework that protects the consistency of “Belong to Better” while giving recruiters and teams enough flexibility to adapt it for different markets, candidates and roles.

That approach is especially important when you’re operating as a small team. Her “teach them to fish” philosophy didn’t mean handing over a toolkit and walking away. As she put it, “I can’t set it and forget it like a crock pot.” The framework may be scalable, but maintaining a strong employer brand still requires listening, supporting teams and allowing the work to evolve.

Learn More About the Rally Awards

Have Recruitment Marketing or Employer Brand work you’re proud of? Learn more about the Rally Awards and get ready for the 2027 program.

The post How a Team of One Built a Global Employer Brand first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

That idea was at the center of the Recruitment Marketing campaign submitted by Stephanie Everson, Senior Recruiter & DEI Specialist at TriWest Healthcare Alliance, in the 2026 Rally Awards program.

Stephanie Everson, Senior Recruiter and DEI Specialist, TriWest Healthcare Alliance

This campaign provides valuable lessons that Recruitment Marketers and Talent Acquisition teams can apply to their own work. Stephanie designed and executed an initiative focused on bringing greater belonging, clarity and trust into the recruiting experience. Rather than treating employer brand as something that lives primarily in external marketing, she focused on equipping recruiters to deliver that brand through their everyday interactions with candidates.

Her work included recruiter education, standardized messaging, leadership content and ongoing guidance focused on areas including empathy, bias awareness, belonging and respectful candidate engagement.

I spoke with Stephanie about what inspired the initiative, what she learned about creating behavior change and how her colleagues are putting the human back in Human Resources.

Helping Recruiters Deliver a Better Candidate Experience

Lori: What made you realize there was an opportunity to approach the candidate experience differently?

Stephanie: One of the things that I was seeing was a lack of empathy. As recruiters, we already have the job. The person on the other side might be employed and looking for their next career move or they could be unemployed. We never know who we’re meeting aside from a name on a resume. We don’t know what they’re bringing with them.

I felt that if I could start with recruiters and teach them about belonging, connectedness and empathy for our job seekers, we could have a better experience. We’re not just filling a seat to close out the requisition. We’re getting more personable, connecting with applicants and getting to know them.

They may not be right for this role, but there may be another role in the next couple of months or another department they never thought of applying to.

Lori: You talk about changing the way recruiters think and communicate. What did that look like in practice?

Stephanie: One of the things I started noticing was that we tend to say, “They’re just not a cultural fit.” That irritates me because it really does start with belonging and connectedness. We’re not looking for a cultural fit, we’re looking for a cultural add. Who can add to what we already have to make it better?

It was changing the language and changing thinking.

We also needed to hire veterans and people from diverse backgrounds. Once we knew where to go to get those candidates, we had to know how to talk to them. That’s what this training did.

Examples of words and phrases to avoid when communicating with candidates to support a more inclusive candidate experience.

Lori: Changing established behaviors isn’t always easy. How did you encourage recruiters to try a different approach?

Stephanie: I was very intentional about telling them, “I’m not teaching you anything that you don’t already know. I’m just teaching you something that you may have put on the back burner.”

I’m trying to take you from good to great. I’m not saying that you’re bad, you’re already good, but I want you to be great. These are the tools that you can outfit yourself with. I said, try it for 30 days, prove me wrong.

I had a recruiter come to me and tell me about a conversation he’d had with a candidate. He said, “Instead of ‘What would Jesus do?’ I actually said, ‘What would Stephanie do?’” By the end of that pre-screen, he said the person had shown him his blind spots.

The candidate didn’t get that particular position, but the recruiter passed them on to another department where now they’re having their final interview.

I said, “Look what you did.” I don’t call out your faults. I simply shine a light on them and say, I’m trying to take you from good to great. What tools do you need to get there?

Strategies for expanding sourcing channels to reach a more diverse candidate pool and strengthen the candidate experience.

Lori: What does a more human candidate experience actually look like?

Stephanie: I had a candidate who had agreed to a pre-screen, and something was in her voice. I asked how she was doing, and she told me her twin sister was entering the end of her life.

I said, “Your sister deserves your time and attention. Would you like us to reschedule?”

When we met again, her sister had passed. She said she thought she was going to be strong enough to do the interview. I said, “I’m going to ask you a single interview question. We’re just going to talk.”

She shared her military career and some things about her sister. Through that conversation, I was able to learn what I needed to know without asking all of my pre-screen questions.

We ended up bringing her on board. Later, she told the department that if she hadn’t gotten the recruiter she got, she didn’t think she would have accepted the job because I never made her feel like she was a number. It was like having a conversation with a friend.

That’s what I hope to establish when I’m meeting with candidates. We need to go back to being human, put the human back in resources.

Lori: What advice would you give Recruitment Marketers who see an opportunity to improve candidate experience but aren’t recruiters themselves?

Stephanie: I think pairing up with a recruiter or recruiters and asking them, “What are your biggest challenges? If you could put together a to-do list or a dream list of things that would help you be a better recruiter in a shorter amount of time, what would that list look like?”

Then, as a Recruitment Marketer, identify who has the skills to give that to the recruiting department. Maybe it’s the data analytics team that can put together a dashboard so the recruiting team isn’t spending so much time pulling data.

Come in as a consultant. Listen to the pain points and know that of the 10 things on the list, you may only be able to tackle two at the moment. But those two things can make an impact.

Lori: What did you learn from participating in the Rally Awards?

Stephanie: My philosophy is “win or learn” because you always learn something regardless of the outcome.

Measuring the Impact of Candidate Experience

One measurable outcome was increased representation within leadership and other key roles. Through my recruiting efforts, I hired four Black women into Director-level positions across Utilization Management, Referral Management, Provider Services and Contract Administration. I also hired three Black veterans into management and individual-contributor roles.

Those outcomes were important because the initiative wasn’t simply about increasing representation. It was about making sure that once we reached candidates from different backgrounds, our recruiting practices, language and candidate experience supported belonging throughout the hiring process.

Bringing Employer Brand to Life Through Recruiters 

Stephanie’s experience offers an important reminder: candidates don’t experience an employer brand only through your careers sites, social content or campaigns. They experience it through the people representing the organization throughout the hiring process.

For Stephanie, strengthening that experience started with recruiters — giving them the language, tools and confidence to communicate with greater empathy and intention.

Her advice for Recruitment Marketers looking to create similar change is practical: listen to recruiters, understand their pain points and identify where you can make an impact.

And when an initiative doesn’t turn out exactly as expected? Take Stephanie’s approach: Win or learn.

Get Ready for the 2027 Rally Awards

Have Recruitment Marketing or Employer Brand work you’re proud of? The Rally Awards celebrate the strategies, campaigns and people moving our profession forward.

The 2027 Rally Awards open November 2. Start thinking about the work you want to showcase!

The post How to Empower Recruiters to Create a Better Candidate Experience first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

It’s a fair question. Recruitment Marketing has evolved significantly over the past decade. What was once primarily associated with employer branding, social media and job advertising now includes candidate experience, content strategy, analytics, CRM, AI, technology evaluation and much more.

As the profession has grown, so has the list of Recruitment Marketing skills required to be successful. Yet unlike many established professions, Recruitment Marketing still lacks a widely accepted framework for defining those competencies.

Over the years, I’ve worked with organizations to assess the maturity of their Recruitment Marketing function. A Recruitment Marketing Maturity Framework helps leaders evaluate the capabilities of their team, processes, technology, strategy and measurement practices.

But organizational maturity and professional competency are not the same thing. A maturity framework evaluates the capabilities of the function. A competency framework evaluates the capabilities of the people doing the work.

That’s why I developed the Recruitment Marketing Competency Framework and use it as the foundation of the Certified Professional in Recruitment Marketing (CP-RM) program. It defines the knowledge, skills and expertise Recruitment Marketing professionals need to attract, engage and convert talent in today’s rapidly evolving landscape.

If you’re wondering whether you’re developing the right Recruitment Marketing skills—or what skills separate good Recruitment Marketing professionals from great ones—this framework was designed to help you answer that question. Let’s take a look. 

Want to see how your own skills compare? Download the Recruitment Marketing Competency Self-Assessment to evaluate your proficiency across all 35 competencies and identify opportunities for continued professional growth.

Recruitment Marketing is a Multidisciplinary Profession

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to define Recruitment Marketing is that the role looks different from one organization to the next.

At some companies, Recruitment Marketing is primarily focused on employer branding and social media. At others, it includes recruitment advertising, CRM strategy, candidate experience, content marketing, analytics, technology management and more.

The scope of the role has expanded significantly over the past decade. As a result, the skills required to be successful have expanded as well.

This is why professional development has become increasingly important to our community. Recruitment Marketing is no longer a single skill. It’s a collection of skills that work together to make you exceptional at attracting, engaging and converting talent, ultimately giving your organization a competitive talent advantage.

What We Learned from Recruitment Marketing Professionals

As part of CP-RM, participants assess their proficiency across 35 Recruitment Marketing competencies before beginning the program. Over time, some interesting patterns have emerged.

Most practitioners identify themselves as professionals rather than experts. Recruitment Marketing has matured into a specialized discipline, but it’s also a profession built largely by self-taught practitioners. Most of us didn’t go to school for Recruitment Marketing. We developed our expertise through hands-on experience, experimentation and a willingness to adapt as the profession evolved.

In fact, across four recent CP-RM cohorts, nearly 6 in 10 participants reported that their manager either had no understanding of Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding or was learning it at the same time they were. This highlights one of the profession’s ongoing challenges: many practitioners are developing expertise without the benefit of experienced Recruitment Marketing leadership or formal training pathways.

According to Rally surveys, most Recruitment Marketers are learning without expert guidance.

We also see interesting patterns in how practitioners rate their skills. AI, Data & Analytics consistently ranks among the lowest-rated competency areas, with approximately half of participants identifying themselves as beginners.

By contrast, content creation, employer branding and campaign execution tend to be areas where practitioners report greater confidence. This is reflected in the work of many Rally Award-winning teams, whose success is often rooted in strong storytelling, compelling content and meaningful talent engagement.

None of this is surprising. Many Recruitment Marketing professionals entered the field from recruiting, marketing, communications, talent acquisition and HR. Those backgrounds provide a strong foundation for understanding target audiences and how to reach and engage them. Today, however, success also requires a growing level of technical, analytical and strategic expertise. And AI is making this shift even more apparent. While AI can help practitioners work faster and automate routine tasks, it also places greater value on skills such as strategy, analytics, critical thinking, creativity and human-centered communication. The professionals who thrive will be those who continue developing expertise that complements, rather than competes with, AI.

Introducing the Recruitment Marketing Competency Framework

The Recruitment Marketing Competency Framework organizes the profession into eight areas of competency. My hope is that it helps bring greater clarity to a profession that has evolved rapidly over the past decade but has often lacked a shared definition of success.

Whether you’re new to Recruitment Marketing or have been practicing for years, the framework can help you better understand the competencies required for success and create a roadmap for your professional development.

The Recruitment Marketing Competency Framework organizes the profession into eight competency domains encompassing the knowledge, skills and expertise required to attract, engage and convert talent.

Download the Recruitment Marketing Competency Self-Assessment.Ready to apply the framework to your own career? Use the interactive workbook to assess your proficiency across all 35 competencies, identify your strongest competency domains and uncover opportunities for continued professional growth.

1. Strategy & Planning

The ability to develop Recruitment Marketing strategies, align talent attraction efforts with business goals, manage budgets and evaluate market opportunities.

2. Employer Brand & Candidate Experience

The ability to define, activate and strengthen the employer brand while creating meaningful candidate experiences across the talent journey.

3. Content, Social & Communications

The ability to create content, develop messaging, communicate value and engage talent through compelling stories across formats, channels and candidate personas.

4. Talent Attraction & Engagement

The ability to build relationships with talent through recruiting, talent communities, events and other engagement strategies.

5. Advertising & Distribution

The ability to attract talent through recruitment advertising, social advertising, campaign management and distribution strategies.

6. Measurement & Analytics

The ability to track and measure performance, apply Recruitment Marketing attribution, identify actionable insights and use data to optimize results and demonstrate business impact.

7. Technology & Automation

The ability to leverage Recruitment Marketing technology, CRM, automation, AI and digital tools to scale and improve results.

8. Vendor Management & Operations

The ability to evaluate technology and service providers, manage vendor relationships and support operational excellence.

Together, these eight areas encompass the 35 competencies that contribute to success in Recruitment Marketing today. Few practitioners begin their careers with expertise across all of them. Most develop their capabilities over time as the profession continues to evolve and the demands of the role expand. 

Why This Matters to You

For practitioners, the framework provides a roadmap for understanding the breadth of skills required in Recruitment Marketing and identifying opportunities for your continued professional growth.

For Recruitment Marketing leaders, the framework can serve as your guide for hiring, professional development, performance evaluations and promotion decisions. It provides a more consistent way to evaluate capabilities than relying solely on years of experience or job titles.

For business and talent leaders, the framework can help determine whether Recruitment Marketing is a core organizational competency and whether your team has the capabilities required to attract and engage talent in an increasingly competitive market. Strong talent attraction doesn’t happen by accident. It requires intentional investment in the skills, expertise and resources that drive results.

——————–

The expectations placed on Recruitment Marketing professionals today are very different than they were 10 years ago. The role now requires a blend of strategic thinking, creativity, technical expertise, analytics and business acumen that few professionals develop by accident.

As our profession continues to evolve, we need a clearer understanding of the competencies that drive success. My hope is that the Recruitment Marketing Competency Framework provides a common language for discussing those competencies and helps practitioners, leaders and organizations continue advancing our craft.

Which of these eight competency domains are your greatest strengths, and where do you see opportunities to continue growing as a Recruitment Marketing professional?

If you’re ready to put the framework into practice, start by downloading the Recruitment Marketing Competency Self-Assessment to evaluate your proficiency across all 35 competencies and identify where to focus your professional development.

Then, take the next step to explore the Certified Professional in Recruitment Marketing program. Built on the Recruitment Marketing Competency Framework, CP-RM helps you build the confidence, capabilities and strategic expertise needed to advance your career and become a more effective Recruitment Marketing leader.

The post Recruitment Marketing Has Changed. Have Your Skills Kept Up? first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

Originally published April 2025. Updated March 2026 with the latest BLS and Rally ReachMap data.

What if I told you that most recruiting teams are spending the majority of their time and budget trying to reach just a fraction of the talent market — the people actively applying for jobs?

The real opportunity to hit your hiring goals this year — and gain a lasting recruiting advantage — isn’t about chasing more active jobseekers. It’s about building a strategy to engage the Hidden 75%: the passive talent majority who aren’t job hunting yet, but who can be persuaded if you reach them the right way.

Let’s talk about the gap that’s holding back most talent acquisition strategies today, why it’s imperative that we shift our mindset from depending on job advertising to embracing a comprehensive Recruitment Marketing strategy, and what you can do about it right now to change your hiring results in 2026 and beyond.

2026 Data Update

Since this blog post was first published, we’ve refreshed the Rally ReachMap using data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in February 2026 and updated platform engagement insights. The overall population has grown slightly, and the number of people not participating in the labor force has increased. But the strategic insight remains the same: only about one-quarter of the reachable talent market is actively looking or casually browsing. Roughly three-quarters remain employed and passive — informed, comfortable and rarely engaged intentionally by most recruiting teams. The opportunity hasn’t changed. If anything, it has become clearer for Recruitment Marketing and Talent Acquisition leaders.

Most Recruiting Strategies Are Built for Active Talent—But Most Talent Aren’t Active

Here’s the hard truth: Just 4.1% of workers are actively looking for a job right now, according to the latest U.S. labor force data.

Even if you include people who are working but quietly exploring other options, you’re still only reaching 25.6% of the total reachable talent market.

Yet job advertising — on job boards, aggregators, paid search and programmatic — is still where most of the recruitment budget and resources go. That’s like fishing in one corner of the lake — just because a few fish are biting there. Meanwhile, the rest of the lake is teeming with opportunity, if you bring the right bait. (P.S. That corner’s getting crowded — all your talent competitors are casting there too.)

The Hidden 75%: A New Way to Reframe Your Recruiting Strategy

To help our community see the full picture, we created the Rally ReachMap — a data-driven view of the talent engagement spectrum that helps align your recruiting strategy with candidate intent. It’s based on an analysis of data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in February 2026, public information from job boards and career platforms, and the latest proprietary candidate engagement insights from our Rally® Inside Recruitment Marketing Platform.

This spectrum breaks down the labor market into 5 distinct segments, based on how receptive people are to recruiting offers and how likely they are to engage with your employer brand and jobs:

• Job Seekers (7.5M / 4.1%) – Just 4.1% of the reachable talent market. These are people who are unemployed and actively applying for jobs.
• Job Curious (39M / 21.5%) – These individuals are exploring job opportunities but not applying as regularly or with the same urgency as the unemployed. They’re clicking on job ads, browsing job boards or visiting careers sites, but not in full-on job search mode — meaning they’re more likely to take no action at all.
• Career Informed (99M / 54.6%) – This group is staying engaged — following your company on social media, reading industry content, subscribed to your talent network and interested in advancing their career. They may not say they’re open to work, but we know from BLS data that people change jobs on average every four years.
• Career Comfortable (36M / 19.8%) – They’re off the career treadmill — not seeking growth, just stability. But with the right message at the right time — and a motivating reason to make a change — they can be influenced.
• Disengaged (93M) – These are people who are not working and don’t want to work. They’re not part of the reachable talent audience.

Note: The U.S. BLS data is for the Civilian Noninstitutional Population, not government workers.

Rally ReachMap: Talent Engagement Spectrum. Only 25.6% of the U.S. reachable talent market is actively looking. This data-driven framework shows how the other 74.4% — the passive majority — can be reached and influenced with the right recruiting strategy. Updated February 2026.

So what’s the Hidden 75%? It’s the passive portion of the reachable talent market — the Career Informed and Career Comfortable. These are people who aren’t applying, but they are influenceable. They’re browsing, listening, following and watching. And if you can reach them with the right message at the right time, they can become your next best hire.

The Hidden 75% refers to the majority of the reachable talent market who are not actively applying for jobs. These individuals aren’t searching job boards or submitting applications, but they can be influenced through content, brand experiences and consistent employer engagement over time.

When you view the labor market through this lens, only Job Seekers and Job Curious candidates qualify as “active” — together, they represent just over 25% of the reachable talent audience. Of the two passive segments — Career Informed and Career Comfortable — talent who are Career Informed are the most valuable. They make up over half of the reachable market, they’re more connected and more likely to be persuaded by your employer brand and engagement efforts — if you show up for them consistently.

The Big Miss: No Strategy for Passive Talent

Let’s name the gap: Most employers have a strategy (and budget) for jobseekers. At Rally, we call this Active Jobseeker Advertising, to clearly articulate that job advertising is designed to reach and appeal to people who are looking for a job and applying.

But where’s the budget — and the strategy — for Passive Talent Engagement? We believe that every talent leader should ask this critical question.

Today, the default approach to passive talent is to try to lure people away from their current jobs by either hoping they’ll notice job ads or targeting them through sourcing. The problem is, these tactics treat passive talent like active candidates — bombarding them with “we’re hiring” messages that don’t reflect their mindset or readiness to move.

But passive talent doesn’t behave like active jobseekers. That’s why so many job ads fail to deliver results. Job advertising is built for high-intent behavior: you post a job, people apply. Simple.

Passive talent follows a different path. They might discover your company through Instagram, hear about you on a podcast or check Glassdoor after chatting with a friend. They’re forming impressions long before they ever visit your careers page.

Passive Talent Engagement is about meeting them in those moments — with content, messaging, and experiences that speak to what they care about now, based on where they are in their lives and their candidate journey.

Reaching this audience requires experienced recruitment marketers with the skills, budget and tools to build brand awareness, spark interest and stay top of mind — so when someone’s ready to move, your company is already in the picture.

What Does a Passive Talent Engagement Strategy Look Like?

In 2026, if you want to make a real impact on hiring — especially in competitive or hard-to-fill roles — the time to act is now.

Imagine reducing your reliance (and budget) on job ads because the talent you want is already familiar with your brand and interested in what you offer as an employer. You’re not waiting for jobseekers to find you — you’re building trust with passive talent long before they’re even thinking about switching jobs.

To revisit our fishing analogy: you’re no longer elbow-to-elbow with competitors in the same crowded corner of the pond. You’ve moved into deeper waters, where fewer lines are cast, the fish are plentiful — and they’re already nibbling.

My recommendation: It’s time to rebalance your talent acquisition strategy to align with the Rally ReachMap and the full talent engagement spectrum. Your recruitment marketer will keep your job advertising engine running, but shift more investment into:

• Content marketing for passive talent — Create content that’s not always career-focused or employer-branded content. To reach passive talent, you must align with their interests, values and aspirations for where they are in the moment. That could mean sharing industry news, thought leadership, wellness resources, stories about community involvement — or even a playlist your team made to get through Monday mornings. The goal is to show up in the conversations they’re already having — and earn attention before they’re even thinking about a job change.
  
• Candidate personas and audience strategies — Tailor your messaging, content and channels to the mindset of each segment in the Rally ReachMap, from Job Curious to Career Comfortable. For example, Job Curious talent may respond to SMS, while Career Informed candidates would open your email. Career Informed audiences might follow your employer brand directly, while Career Comfortable individuals may only notice what your employees share.
• Always-on campaigns — Create a steady drumbeat of employer brand and value-driven content that runs year-round — not just when you have open roles. Focus on high-attention channels like social media, email and your careers site to stay visible and build trust over time. Passive talent needs repeated exposure before they’ll engage, so consistency is key.
  
• Success metrics that go deeper — Track reach, engagement, sentiment and reputation lift — not just applications — to understand how you’re shaping perceptions. These metrics help prove the value of your Recruitment Marketing strategy — especially with passive talent who may not convert immediately.

Recommended Budget Split for a Modern Recruiting Strategy

If your current investment is focused almost entirely on job ads, it’s time to rebalance your spend to reflect how and where people actually engage with your brand — and to support a strategy that reaches talent over the long term.

Recommended budget allocation for modern recruiting strategies. While 60% still goes to active jobseeker advertising, a growing 25% should be invested in Passive Talent Engagement — reaching the hidden majority of candidates before they start applying.

Here’s how this should impact your budget:

• 60% – Active Jobseeker Advertising
  Supports immediate hiring needs and high-volume roles.
  Includes: Job boards, programmatic ads, sourcing tools, SMS, staffing agencies, recruitment advertising agencies, ATS.
• 25% – Passive Talent Engagement
  Builds awareness, interest and trust with the full talent market.
  Includes: Content creation, careers site, social media, CRM, talent communities, email marketing, candidate personas, Recruitment Marketing Platforms.
• 10% – Employer Brand & Reputation
  Defines and strengthens how you’re known as an employer.
  Includes: EVP development, employee advocacy, employee / candidate review management, employer brand campaigns and EB agencies.
• 5% – Analytics & Operations
  Makes every investment smarter and more scalable.
  Includes: Tracking, measurement and reporting of organic and paid strategies, plus AI and automation for efficiency and optimization.

Rethinking Recruitment for the Passive Majority

This is your call to action — and maybe a long-overdue wake-up call.

We’ve all been talking about active vs. passive talent for years. But here’s the truth: most recruiting teams still don’t have a defined strategy to reach the passive majority. Too many are locked into chasing the 7.5 million people who are actively applying — while 135 million others go untouched, unnoticed and unengaged. But now we have the data to quantify and qualify the passive majority, and have literally thousands of Recruitment Marketing professionals in the Rally community with the skills to implement this successfully!

At Rally, we’re here to help you lead this transformation through development of a modern, comprehensive approach to Recruitment Marketing. We’ve created resources including frameworks, tools, templates and AI-powered solutions to help you build, scale and measure a Passive Talent Engagement strategy that truly works.

Because the teams that do this now? They won’t be stuck casting into the same crowded corner of the pond. They’ll be showing up in more places, with better bait — putting themselves in a stronger position to connect with the talent everyone else will be chasing next year.

Ready to apply the Rally ReachMap to your company or industry? Let’s talk about how we can help you create a Passive Talent Engagement strategy that sets you up to win — this year and beyond. Contact us

The post The Hidden 75%: How to Recruit the Passive Talent Majority first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

The 2026 Rally® Awards recognize the very best in Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding.

Now in its seventh year, the Rally Awards celebrates the practitioners, teams, agencies and technology partners whose work is setting new standards for our profession. This year’s winners didn’t just deliver impressive results. They challenged conventions, advanced our craft and inspired all of us to think bigger about what’s possible in Recruitment Marketing.

From employer brand launches and content marketing programs to careers sites, candidate experience innovations and recruitment technology, the winning entries demonstrate the creativity, strategy and impact driving our profession forward.

Missed the live event? Watch the 2026 Rally Awards Ceremony Replay →

Earning a Rally Award is no small achievement. The competition is peer-reviewed and judged against rigorous criteria including strategy, quality, innovation and results. Thank you to our distinguished panel of judges whose expertise and thoughtful evaluation helped identify this year’s winners.

Thank you to the Recruitment Marketing and employer brand leaders who judged the 2026 Rally Awards.

Now, let’s meet the winners of the 2026 Rally Awards!

Meet the 2026 Rally Awards Winners

The best Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding work of the year. 

Best Employer Brand Video

• First Place: VEG ER for Pets — “The VEG Beat”
• Second Place: Sony Music Entertainment — Lewis Calem, Mike Farrell, Jeff Soto — “What’s it like working at Sony Music”
• Third Place: Highmark Health — Jeannine Volchko, Jeremy Dean, Mike Cope, Amy Feldman — “Remarkable Together: The Wexford Moms Story”

Best Use of Employee Generated Content

• First Place: Ford Motor Company — “Ford Intern Social Ambassador Program”

Best Talent Newsletter

• First Place: Credicorp — “CREAting Credicorp: A premium talent newsletter that builds long-term executive relationships”
• Second Place: ADT — “The Power of Organic Reach: Storytelling that turns clicks into quality applicants”

Best Use of Organic Social Media in Recruitment Marketing

• First Place: UBS — “At UBS, you’re in the driver’s seat of your career.”
• Second Place: Ford Motor Company — “New Hire Spotlight Series”
• Third Place: IQVIA — “Perfectly Imperfect: How IQVIA Transformed Engagement With Real, Relatable Social”

Best Use of Paid Social Media in Recruitment Marketing

• First Place: Ford Motor Company — “Ford Places and Spaces Video Series”
• Second Place: UBS — “Curiosity powers. AI enables.”

Best Use of Video in Recruitment Marketing

• First Place: Ford Motor Company — “Ford Places and Spaces Video Series”
• Second Place (tie): Westpac — Elizabeth Clerke — “Find your tech happy place”
• Second Place (tie): Picnic Technologies — “Back to School”

Best Recruitment Marketing Campaign (Small Team)

• First Place: VCA Animal Hospitals — Ally Brown — “Your Power Has a Purpose”
• Second Place (tie): Westpac — Elizabeth Clerke — “Find your tech happy place”
• Second Place (tie): Galt — Lisa A. Doyle — “The Untapped Workforce — Putting Ability to Work!”

Best Recruitment Marketing Campaign (Large Team)

• First Place: UBS — “Curiosity Powers. AI Enables.”
• Second Place: Travel + Leisure Co. — “Turning Proximity Into Pipeline: How Travel + Leisure Co. Activated a Sports Partnership to Drive Talent Acquisition”
• Third Place: Sage plc — “Atlanta is ‘Ready To Win’ with Sage”

Best Content Marketing Program

• First Place (tie): Credicorp — “To The Next Level: A micromentorship content program designed for how Gen Z actually learns”
• First Place (tie): Credicorp — “Genias STEM: A content marketing program designed to expand the female technology talent pipeline”
• Second Place: UBS — “Curiosity powers. AI enables.”
• Third Place: Ford Motor Company — “Ford Places and Spaces Video Series”

Best Employer Brand Launch

• First Place: VEG ER for Pets — “Turning #lifeatVEG into a Shared Language”
• Second Place: Bright Horizons — “You’re the difference: The secret sauce behind Bright Horizons’ employer brand”
• Third Place: Credicorp — “Credicorp Early Talent Strategy: Launching Credicorp’s early-career employer brand as a growth platform for future leaders”

Best Careers Blog

• First Place: BASIS International Schools — “Stories That Move Around the World”

Best Use of Recruitment Marketing Technology

• First Place: Bon Secours Mercy Health — “Building an internal Recruitment Marketing engine at scale”

Best Careers Site

• First Place: National Grid — Lucinda Thomas, Bryan Adams, Jennifer Douet, Jim Taylor, Grace Kenyon — “Superpowered candidate experience”
• Second Place: Sony Music Entertainment — Lewis Calem, Mike Farrell, Jeff Soto — “Sony Music Careers Website”

Best Launch of Recruitment Marketing Strategy

• First Place: Gerber Collision and Glass — Lauren Olauson, Veronica Downey, Hannah Busekrus — “Great Teams Don’t Happen by Accident: Architects of the Revenue-Driven Recruitment Blitz”
• Second Place: VEG ER for Pets — “From EVP to Ecosystem: Scaling #lifeatVEG”

Best Agency Partner

• Winner: Stories Incorporated

Best Technology Partner

• Winner: Happydance 

Meet the winners of the 2026 Rally Awards, leading the way in Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding.

Distinguished Awards

Some of the most meaningful honors presented each year recognize individual practitioners whose work is elevating our profession. These awards celebrate both emerging leaders and established experts who are helping define the future of Recruitment Marketing and employer branding. 

2026 Recruitment Marketing Rising Star

• Winner: Brittany Washington

2026 Recruitment Marketer of the Year

• Winner: Sam Wood

Two distinguished honors were given to Britt Washington, 2026 Recruitment Marketing Rising Star, and Sam Wood, 2026 Recruitment Marketer of the Year.

2026 Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding Trends

Looking across this year’s winning work, several clear themes emerged.

Content became the strategy. Many of the strongest entries weren’t one-time campaigns, but ongoing content programs built around employee stories, mentorship, education, and career growth.

Employer branding became more employee-driven. The most successful launches were grounded in employee research, participation, and authentic cultural behaviors already happening inside the organization.

Storytelling continued to outperform promotion. Across categories, organizations relied less on corporate messaging and more on real people to bring their culture, purpose, and opportunities to life.

Candidate experience became a competitive advantage. Winning careers sites, technology partners, and recruitment marketing teams focused on reducing friction and creating better experiences from discovery through application.

Measurement matured. More teams connected awareness, engagement, applications, and hiring outcomes to demonstrate clear business impact.

Small teams delivered big results. Many of this year’s winners were solo practitioners or lean teams that combined creativity, focus, and strong strategy to achieve outsized success.

Together, these trends show a profession becoming more strategic, more measurable, and more closely connected to the employee experience.

Watch the Live Ceremony Replay

Relive the excitement as we recognize the practitioners, teams, agencies and technology partners shaping the future of Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding.

Thank you to every practitioner, team, agency and technology partner who participated in this year’s Rally Awards. Your creativity, innovation and dedication continue to move our profession forward.

We’ll be sharing more insights from this year’s winning entries on the Rally Recruitment Marketing blog throughout the year. To learn more about the Rally Awards and how to enter the 2027 competition, visit RallyAwards.com.

The post Introducing the Winners of the 2026 Rally® Awards™ first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

Employee advocacy is a valuable strategy that can expand your employer brand, help recruiters reach passive talent and give candidates a more authentic view of your company. But without the right structure, running the program can quickly become another full-time job for Recruitment Marketing professionals who already have a lot on their plates.

If you’re new to employee advocacy, here’s the definition:

An employee advocacy program gives employees and recruiters the tools and support to become employer brand ambassadors, sharing authentic content and experiences with their professional networks that help candidates understand what it’s really like to work at your company.

Employee advocacy sounds relatively simple at first. Your role is to find people who want to participate, give them great content and ideas, encourage them to post on social media like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, and measure the results.

But then you actually launch the program and reality sets in.

Suddenly someone needs to plan and create content, communicate with advocates, onboard new participants, answer questions, recognize contributions, track results and keep everyone engaged. As the program grows, so does the work, and what started as a great way to expand your talent attraction strategy can quickly require constant attention just to keep it moving.

This is one of the challenges I hear about across the Rally Recruitment Marketing community. Teams aren’t struggling because they don’t believe in employee advocacy. They’re struggling because they’re already managing employer brand, social media, recruitment campaigns, careers site content, events, technology, analytics and everything else that falls under Recruitment Marketing today.

The good news is that running a successful employee advocacy program doesn’t require you to manage every interaction, create every post or chase employees every week to participate. It requires the right structure, processes and technology to make participation easier for your advocates and the program easier for you to manage and sustain.

In this blog post, I’ll share what you need to run an employee advocacy program that can grow and deliver recruiting results without making it your full-time job.

Establish Clear Ownership, Not More Process

One of the first questions to answer is who actually owns the employee advocacy program. This sounds obvious, but unclear ownership is one of the fastest ways to create more work than necessary, and could put your EA program at risk of failing.

Someone needs to be accountable for the overall strategy and results, but that doesn’t mean one person should be responsible for doing everything. Before you launch, determine who owns the program, who will create or manage content, who your executive sponsor is, what approval processes are actually necessary and how results will be measured. Making these responsibilities clear from the start eliminates repeated questions and decisions later.

This is also an area where I see organizations overcomplicate things. Employee advocacy usually doesn’t need a large governance committee or a 20-page policy document. In most cases, simple guidelines that explain who owns what, how advocates can participate and what they need to know before posting are enough to get started.

Create a Pilot Advocate Group and Learn From Them

There can be pressure to make an employee advocacy program look successful by getting as many people involved as possible. But when you’re launching, the experience of your first advocates matters much more than the number enrolled.

Your employee advocacy pilot group should include employees or recruiters who are excited to participate, comfortable on LinkedIn and willing to experiment and provide feedback. You’re looking for people who can help you understand what works, where they get stuck and what would make participation easier.

“The most sustainable employee advocacy programs make participation easy for advocates and management easy for the people behind them.”

Think of these first advocates as founding members of the program. Their feedback helps you improve the experience before you scale, while their success can generate interest among other employees.

Starting smaller also gives you time to work out the operational details. If onboarding 10 advocates feels difficult, onboarding 100 won’t be easier. Build the processes with a smaller group first, then expand once you know they work.

Make Participation Easy Enough to Become a Habit

One of the biggest barriers to employee advocacy is time. Employees and recruiters usually aren’t opposed to participating. They just have a lot competing for their attention, and even people who enjoy creating content can struggle to post consistently when every LinkedIn post starts with a blank page.

That means one of the most important jobs of the program is removing friction. Advocates need an easy way to find content ideas, but they also need to be empowered to create original content in their own authentic voice without turning the process into another assignment. That could mean sharing a lesson they learned at work, offering their perspective on an industry trend, celebrating a team accomplishment, giving career advice or telling a story about an experience that reflects your company culture.

AI can make a significant difference here when it’s used the right way. Instead of asking advocates to write every post from scratch, AI can help them turn their experiences, expertise and ideas into original content they can review and personalize. The goal isn’t to replace the advocate’s voice, but to make it easier to create authentic content consistently.

The easier participation becomes, the less time you need to spend reminding employees to participate. You’re building a habit instead of repeatedly asking for an action.

Build Repeatable Workflows Before You Need Them

Seven repeatable workflows help keep an employee advocacy program running efficiently: content planning, content creation, content approval, content distribution, advocate onboarding, recognition and reporting.

This is where employee advocacy often becomes much more work than expected. Programs launch with enthusiasm, but the processes behind them are informal and the program owner simply takes care of whatever needs to happen.

That can work with a small pilot, but it becomes much harder as the program grows. There are seven workflows every employee advocacy program should think through:

• Content planning
• Content creation
• Content approval
• Content distribution
• Advocate onboarding
• Recognition
• Reporting

These don’t need to be complicated, but they should be repeatable. The strongest programs keep these activities moving without requiring the program owner to reinvent the process every week.

For example, instead of deciding each week what advocates should talk about, develop recurring content themes around employee stories, career advice, team accomplishments, community involvement, company news and career opportunities. This gives you a structure for generating ideas rather than starting from scratch every time.

The same principle applies to onboarding. Create a repeatable experience that explains why the program exists, what advocates will gain from participating, how to use the tools and where to get help.

A useful test is to ask yourself: if I weren’t available next week, would these processes still happen? If the answer is no, that’s probably an area where you need a more repeatable workflow.

Stop Making Every Communication a Reminder to Post

Communication is another area where employee advocacy can become surprisingly time-consuming. When participation declines, the instinct is often to send more reminders: new content is available, don’t forget to post, here’s something else you can share.

Over time, advocates start tuning those messages out because every communication is asking them to do something for the company. A better approach is to create a consistent rhythm that includes new content and ideas, but also tips, recognition, milestones, recruiting results and opportunities for feedback. The strongest programs communicate to build the advocate community, not only when they need someone to post.

One of the recommendations in our Employee Advocacy Launch Plan is to create a simple 90-day communication calendar. This gets you out of reactive mode by planning what advocates need to hear, when they need to hear it and what action you want them to take.

When new ideas, recognition and results show up regularly, the program feels active without requiring constant promotion from the person running it.

Give Your Advocates a Reason to Stay Involved

Another way to sustain participation is to make sure employees are getting real value from the program. Traditional employee advocacy has often focused on what the company needs: extend our reach, amplify this campaign or share this job. But if employees don’t see a personal benefit, participation will always require more encouragement.

Employee advocacy should help advocates strengthen their professional brand, expand their network, share their expertise and become trusted voices in their professional communities. In doing so, they become stronger employer brand ambassadors who can authentically represent your company and culture to potential candidates. Those outcomes motivate advocates to keep participating even when no one is reminding them.

You also need to show advocates the impact they’re making, and a good employee advocacy tool can do that. When their content drives careers site traffic, influences applications or contributes to a hire, share those results. It reinforces the impact they’re making to your overall talent acquisition goals.

When advocates can see both personal and recruiting value, employee advocacy starts to feel like an opportunity rather than an assignment.

Measure Employee Advocacy Results That Matter to Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing

Measurement is critical to a sustainable employee advocacy program, but it can become another manual task without the right technology.

Most programs can measure participation and engagement, but those metrics don’t tell you whether employee advocacy is actually influencing recruiting. I recommend thinking about measurement at three levels:

• Advocate activity: Are employees participating?
• Candidate engagement: Is their content getting talent to engage?
• Recruiting impact: Is employee advocacy influencing careers site visits, applications and hires?

Together, these levels show you the health of the program and the business impact it’s creating.

This is where technology becomes important. If someone has to pull LinkedIn activity into a spreadsheet, match it with careers site data and determine whether an advocate influenced an applicant, reporting can become a part-time job.

With Recruitment Marketing Attribution, you can connect employee advocacy to candidate behavior and hiring outcomes to see which advocates, content and messages are influencing results. More importantly, you can stop asking, “How do we get people to post more?” and start asking, “What should we help people create more of because we know it works?”

Assess the Whole Program Before You Add More Advocates

As I worked through what it takes to build and manage employee advocacy successfully, it became clear that these challenges are interconnected. You can have great advocates, but without content they want to share, participation will decline. You can have great content, but without simple processes and communication, managing the program becomes difficult. And you can generate a lot of activity without having any idea whether it’s influencing recruiting.

That’s why I developed the Rally® Employee Advocacy Framework, which identifies 9 building blocks that work together to create a successful program:

The Rally® Employee Advocacy Framework identifies 9 building blocks for launching, managing and scaling a successful employee advocacy program: Strategy, Program Ownership, Advocate Selection, Content Strategy, Advocate Enablement, Program Management, Communications, Measurement and Scale.

The framework helps you identify the areas that need to be in place so your EA program doesn’t depend on one person manually holding everything together. The 9 building blocks cover the foundational elements needed to launch the program and prepare it to grow over time.

If your employee advocacy program is starting to feel like a full-time job, look across those 9 areas and ask where the work is coming from. Are you manually creating everything? Are advocates struggling to participate? Are you repeatedly answering the same questions? Are you communicating only when you need people to post? Are you spending hours pulling together reporting?

Those are usually signs that the program doesn’t need more effort. It needs better infrastructure.

Build for 100 Advocates While You’re Managing 10

A successful employee advocacy launch is only the beginning. As participation grows among your brand ambassadors, the processes that worked for your first group of advocates will need to evolve.

The goal isn’t to build complex systems for a 100-person program before you’ve launched your first pilot. But you do want to make decisions with scalability in mind. The processes, communications and technology that support 10 advocates may not support 100, so look at where manual work is increasing, whether new advocates can join easily, whether content stays fresh and whether you can continue to support employees and measure recruiting impact as participation grows.

Ultimately, employee advocacy should expand the reach and impact of your Recruitment Marketing and Employer Brand strategy. It shouldn’t consume you to actually run it. The most sustainable programs make participation easy for advocates and management easy for the people behind them, with clear ownership, repeatable processes, consistent communications, meaningful value for employees and tools that reduce manual work.

Ready to build or improve your Employee Advocacy program? We’ve put together The Employee Advocacy Launch Plan, a practical guide for Recruitment Marketing and Talent Acquisition leaders. It walks you through all 9 building blocks in the Rally® Employee Advocacy Framework, with recommendations, reality checks and action items to help you launch, manage and grow a program that delivers measurable recruiting results.

I can’t wait to see the impact you make with your Employee Advocacy program. Reach out if you have any questions!

The post How to Run Employee Advocacy Without Making It a Full-Time Job first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.

The Rally Awards celebrate excellence in Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding, with entries evaluated by an esteemed panel of peer judges from across the profession.

The winners of the 2026 Rally Award for Best Use of Organic Social Media in Recruitment Marketing show three excellent ways to put that into practice.

UBS earned First Place with “At UBS, you’re in the driver’s seat of your career,” a campaign centered on internal mobility and employee career journeys. Ford Motor Company took Second Place with its “New Hire Spotlight Series,” turning new employee stories into a repeatable content engine. And IQVIA earned Third Place with “Perfectly Imperfect: How IQVIA Transformed Engagement With Real, Relatable Social,” which shifted the company’s social strategy toward less polished, more authentic employee-generated content.

Here’s how each team approached organic social and what Recruitment Marketers can learn from their work.

First Place: UBS — “At UBS, you’re in the driver’s seat of your career.”

UBS started with a challenge identified through employee engagement surveys: colleagues wanted greater visibility into internal job opportunities and clearer career pathways.

The Recruitment Marketing, Employer Branding and Internal Mobility teams partnered to make career mobility more visible and show employees that growth within UBS was possible. At the same time, the campaign gave external candidates a look at the long-term career opportunities available within the organization.

Throughout 2025, UBS shared unscripted employee stories built around its EVP-led message, “At UBS, you’re in the driver’s seat of your career.” Employees discussed nonlinear career paths, global moves, lateral moves and cross-functional transitions, supported by real images from their lives.

LinkedIn served as the campaign’s primary platform, reaching both UBS employees and external talent.

The Results

The campaign generated:

• 1.45 million impressions
• 266,000 engagements
• 18.35% engagement rate
• 59.4% of open roles filled internally
• 800 external applications from boosted posts within six months

UBS also reported increased traffic to its refreshed careers site, while employees began sharing their own career journeys and extending the campaign’s reach organically.

Praise from the Judges 

Judges praised the campaign for beginning with a real, validated employee insight and connecting employer brand storytelling with tangible business outcomes.

One judge described the approach as a strong example of using social to address internal mobility visibility while supporting retention and engagement. Others highlighted the authentic storytelling, cross-functional collaboration, clear EVP connection and measurable impact on applications and internal hiring.

The lesson for Recruitment Marketers: Employee stories can do more than communicate culture. When they’re connected to a specific talent or business challenge, they can help influence behavior and demonstrate measurable impact.

Second Place: Ford Motor Company — “New Hire Spotlight Series”

Ford faced a familiar Recruitment Marketing challenge: finding employees who were willing to share their stories publicly.

The solution came from an unexpected source. After meeting a newly hired corporate orientation lead who had previously worked as a high school principal, the team saw an opportunity to share her career transition. The post performed well and became the starting point for Ford’s New Hire Spotlight Series.

In 2025, Ford published 14 New Hire Spotlight profiles across Ford’s LinkedIn and Ford Careers’ Instagram and Facebook accounts.

The process was intentionally simple and repeatable. The team received quarterly new-hire lists from its corporate orientation lead, invited employees to participate and used a Jotform to collect information about their career journeys, company culture, benefits and other experiences. A copywriter then developed the responses into social posts.

When Ford noticed a change in LinkedIn’s algorithm after its first three posts, the team adapted, replacing branded photo templates with carousels of candid employee images. Impressions and engagement increased substantially.

The Results

Ford’s standout results:

• 14.4% average engagement rate
• 47,000 average impressions per post
• One post reaching a 41% engagement rate and 210,000 impressions
• More than 1 million people reached
• 2,000 visitors driven to the Ford Careers site
• Zero campaign cost

The series also gave Ford an ongoing source of employee stories that could support hiring initiatives, highlight different roles and teams and communicate company culture through employee voices.

Praise from the Judges

Judges pointed to the campaign’s simplicity, authenticity and repeatability.

One called it a “structured content engine for social,” while another praised Ford for executing a simple idea effectively without overcomplicating the process. Judges also highlighted the team’s ability to adapt to LinkedIn algorithm changes and achieve engagement rates well above the benchmark cited in the entry.

Some judges identified an opportunity to connect the strong engagement metrics more directly to downstream hiring outcomes.

The lesson for Recruitment Marketers: A successful content strategy doesn’t have to require a complicated production process. Creating a repeatable system for sourcing employee stories can make authentic content easier to sustain and scale.

Third Place: IQVIA — “Perfectly Imperfect: How IQVIA Transformed Engagement With Real, Relatable Social”

IQVIA entered 2025 with a strong-performing social recruiting content: a 4.2% engagement rate and 3.4 million LinkedIn impressions in 2024.

But the team believed its content might be too polished and easy for audiences to scroll past.

IQVIA intentionally loosened its approach, centering its new strategy on three priorities: trust employees, modernize the format and elevate the impact

IQVIA began using more self-recorded employee content, including phone videos, natural settings and real employee voices. The team launched “Found in the Feed”, a recurring series that elevated content employees were already creating organically, including self-directed office tours.

The team also introduced shorter videos, animated graphics and audiograms, and began using strong moments from Teams interviews rather than automatically recreating them with professional production.

At the same time, IQVIA shifted its storytelling toward the impact of employees’ work, including accelerating treatments, improving data clarity and supporting patients and sites.

The Results

From 2024 to 2025, LinkedIn results:

• 4.2% to 7.8% engagement
• 3.4 million to 4.2 million impressions
• IQVIA also reported increased employee reposting and organic amplification

Praise from the Judges

Judges highlighted the deliberate shift from highly produced corporate content toward authentic, employee-driven storytelling.

They praised the strategy for being timely, credible and aligned with how audiences engage with social content today. The recurring Found in the Feed format was also recognized for giving the strategy structure and scalability.

As with Ford, judges commended IQVIA for connecting Recruitment Marketing engagement directly with hiring outcomes.

The lesson for Recruitment Marketers: More production isn’t always the answer. Giving employees room to show up naturally can create content that feels more relatable while still supporting a structured Recruitment Marketing strategy.

3 Lessons Recruitment Marketers Can Apply to Organic Social

UBS, Ford and IQVIA took different approaches, but their winning strategies point to several lessons Recruitment Marketers can apply to their own work.

1. Start with a real challenge.
   UBS responded to employee feedback about internal mobility. Ford addressed the difficulty of consistently sourcing employee stories. IQVIA recognized that polished content wasn’t creating the level of connection it wanted. Each team built its strategy around a specific problem.
2. Make employees part of the storytelling.
   Real employee experiences were central to all three strategies. UBS highlighted career journeys, Ford introduced new hires and IQVIA gave employees more freedom to create and share content in their own voices.
3. Build something you can sustain.
   Strong organic social requires consistency. Ford created a repeatable process for sourcing new-hire stories. IQVIA introduced recurring formats such as “Found in the Feed”. UBS developed a campaign that encouraged employees to contribute their own career stories organically.

Turn Organic Social Into a Strategic Recruitment Marketing Channel

These Rally Award winners demonstrate what can happen when organic social is connected to a clear strategy, authentic employee experiences and measurable goals.

For Recruitment Marketers, the opportunity is to look beyond individual posts and consider the system behind the content: the challenge you’re solving, the stories that can bring it to life, a process you can sustain and the results that demonstrate impact

Congratulations to UBS, Ford Motor Company and IQVIA for creating an organic social strategy that gave talent a more authentic look at the people and opportunities behind the employer brand.

Learn More About the Rally Awards

Think your Recruitment Marketing or Employer Brand work could be award-winning? Learn more about the Rally Awards and consider submitting your work for the 2027 program.

The post 3 Award-Winning Organic Social Recruiting Strategies first appeared on Rally® Recruitment Marketing.