There is a particular kind of challenge that comes with working inside the Fortune 1 company (aka Walmart). The scale is unlike anything else. The governance is real. The brand is one of the most recognized on earth. And yet the work still has to be creative, human, and compelling enough to make someone choose to build their career there over somewhere else.
During my time at Walmart I worked within Corporate HR as part of the employer brand team, leading the social media strategy for Walmart Careers and owning the Northwest Arkansas marketing and storytelling effort, including a newsletter and a video series that still lives online more than ten years later.
Walmart Careers had a significant digital presence to manage and a complex set of potential employee audiences to reach, from corporate employees considering a move to Bentonville to college students looking for internships to pharmacists and optometrists that are recruited at the store level. We were also operating within a highly regulated, highly visible enterprise brand and every piece of content had to be aligned with our partners in corporate affairs, PR, internal communications, marketing, and technology before it went anywhere.
On the Northwest Arkansas side, the challenge was specific: the region was growing rapidly as a business hub but was still largely unknown to talent outside the area. Recruiting top candidates to Bentonville meant first convincing them that Northwest Arkansas was a place worth moving to. There was no single, compelling narrative doing that job, and the recruiting team had no consistent content to support those conversations.
Walmart was my first truly corporate role. I had worked in an agency environment for 5 years prior in very much a startup environment. Our clients at the agency were in corporate but I had never experienced the full scope of what that encompasses until I made the move to Walmart. I was brought on to the team intially based upon my social media background to lead the social media strategy for Walmart Careers across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn and to support our recruiting partners in health and wellness, campus and technology. That was the primary portion of my job and I directly managed the content and agencies who assisted with content, driving a 300% increase in LinkedIn engagement alone in a little over a year. I also served as a strategic partner for Walmart LinkedIn pages across our international markets including China, India, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Central America, ensuring a consistent brand experience across each of those accounts in order to best represent the Walmart brand.
As I settled into the role, I became the de facto Northwest Arkansas expert and go-to person for our team and our recruiting and hiring partners. They were consistently struggling with pulling together the latest updates on what was happening in Northwest Arkansas to share with candidates who were considering a move and personally were struggling on where to take certain candidates to showcase the best of the area when they were considering a move. Our relocation partners were not filling in this gap and we were losing candidates due to a poor visit experience, something had to change. With this knowledge, I built a resource to help that was quick, easy-to-read, and no frills, a weekly internal e-mail newsletter that was sent out each week highlighting the latest developments (especially new business openings), recommendations on where to take candidates for a visit, and more. It gave recruiters a steady stream of compelling stories and content about Northwest Arkansas that they could use in conversations and visits with candidates. It was practical, targeted, and it worked. Soon the newsletter was forwarded around the home office and externally to hiring partners, local civic engagement leaders and even my own Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. I was proud of the work and loved putting it together, but just thought of it as another part of my job that was fun.
Although the e-mail was great, I was already thinking about something more visual that we could use to "sell" Northwest Arkansas, something that could live on the website, could be shared across social media, and linked in e-mails from recruiters to candidates. That is where the Northwest Arkansas Truly Unexpected video project was born. It is one of the projects that I am most proud of to this day and ultimately that, along with the e-mail newsletter, led to my next opportunity after Walmart in founding leisurlist. You can read more about that story here.
For the project, I worked with an external video partner that I already knew and enjoyed working with, Verge Videos. With them, I developed a series of videos showcasing the best of the region for candidates who had never been here. I recruited an all-associate cast representing three distinct audiences: young professionals, families, and empty nesters. While Verge filmed, I interviewed a variety of associates about their experiences moving to Northwest Arkansas and we shot footage to support the interviews at dozens of locations across the area from an empty Arkansas Razorback football stadium (that we shot to look full with the help of real University of Arkansas footage) to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to the hottest coffee shop in town. We even filmed one of our stars riding his bike to the office (which he did anyway) by having him closesly follow the back of a car that our videographer filmed out of for the perfect angle. We filmed early mornings, evenings, and even some weekends all to capture the best of Northwest Arkansas.
The reason that I filmed in so many places, selected and interviewed so many associates, and ultimately created four videos in total was to capture just a small portion of the collective community energy that makes Northwest Arkansas what it is. I wanted to show that no matter what stage you were at in life, there was something for you here and it was truly something that you would not expect. During that project I was able to leverage my long-time relationships I had personally built with local businesses and community partners across the region and establish new relationships. I was able to leverage the power and scope of Walmart for the good of our community and I'm happy to say that the videos continue to live on the Walmart YouTube account to this day. There have been new videos put together since then as there are so many new things in Northwest Arkansas, but that project kicked it off. That project is what also ignited my passion for showcasing Northwest Arkansas in a meaningful way and it continues to this day. That is why I am so passionate about supporting growth-stage and mission-driven organizations and leaders in our region. I have witnessed this growth from the beginning and I know what can happen when we collectively come together to showcase our region and the businesses in it.
Working inside a company the size of Walmart teaches you things you can’t learn anywhere else: how to navigate complex governance structures, how to align across multiple functions without losing momentum, how to tell a human story within an enterprise brand that has to be consistent at global scale.
It also reinforced something I already believed: that the most effective work comes from genuine community knowledge. The Northwest Arkansas video series worked because I knew this region, knew its people, and knew what made it special. You can’t fake that. It comes from being embedded in a place and caring about it.
That combination of enterprise discipline and community-rooted storytelling is something I bring to every Blue Iris engagement. Whether I’m working with a large institution or a growing organization, the approach is the same: understand the audience deeply, tell a true story, and make sure the work holds up over time.
