Jenanne Wilson

“Every associate is also a customer and deserves to be treated with respect.”

For about five years, Jenanne Wilson spent her days in a preschool classroom, helping young children find the confidence to take their next step forward. Today she does a version of the same work for an entire bank's workforce as Talent Brand and Engagement Consultant at UMB Bank in Kansas City, shaping how the bank presents itself to prospective hires and how its associates see their own stories told. Running through both chapters is a single conviction: the people inside an organization deserve the same care as the customers outside it.

Jenanne is an individual contributor by choice, and she has turned that choice into a leadership philosophy of her own. Over the past six or so years, she has earned promotions roughly every two years. Each one followed the same pattern: spot a gap, design a solution, and carry the momentum forward until the results make the case.

From the Classroom to the Candidate Pipeline

The line from preschool to talent acquisition is more direct than it looks. What drew Jenanne to education was the chance to inspire young children and help them find opportunities to grow. An earlier stint in sales had shown her how much she enjoyed the positive, people-oriented side of work. When a friend recruiting for a local health system mentioned an open recruiter role, the fit felt natural.

She started as a PRN recruiter and built out from there, volunteering whenever a new project surfaced. The work shifted toward headhunting and sourcing, and along the way she noticed that the part she loved most was listening. Candidates on the patient care side, in particular, spoke about their loyalty and dedication to patients in ways that stayed with her. She began to see those accounts as stories worth telling, and that instinct became her specialty: employer brand and associate storytelling, the craft of showing prospective hires who already works somewhere and why they care so deeply about it. Joining UMB Bank deepened that focus, moving her squarely into associate engagement and employer brand.

At the bank, that storytelling increasingly reaches into the community. Jenanne works closely with a counterpart, Angelica, who leads community and giving efforts, from volunteer events to matching gift programs. Those efforts feed directly into the associate stories Jenanne champions, turning moments of service into a portrait of who the bank's people are and how they show up for their regions.

Leading Without the Title

About two years into her time at the University of Kansas Health System, Jenanne had a conversation that reset her thinking. Patrice, one of her leaders there, and Jeff, a vice president there at the time, made a point she has carried ever since: leadership is innate, and it does not require a manager title. Rather than steering her toward the next supervisory opening, they pushed her to consider what truly drove her and how she could make an impact as an individual contributor while still leading. The lesson gave her the autonomy to lead projects consistently, identify gaps, and run with the solutions. For someone who had come from a classroom and a sales floor, it also offered something rare. Nobody hands out a roadmap, Jenanne notes, and recognizing that she preferred individual work to managing people helped her chart the rest of her career.

That approach now shows up as leading by example and leading through projects rather than through a reporting line. At UMB Bank, Rhianna has become a constant source of empowerment. Jenanne describes her as a trusted partner for talking through strategy, a leader with a big-picture view of talent acquisition and HR as a whole, and a mentor to many teammates besides Jenanne. From Rhianna, she has seen that the most credible leaders show the way by doing the work themselves.

AI as an Assistant, Not a Replacement

In a business built on people, Jenanne argues, every new tool has to be measured against where the human element matters most. AI excels at streamlining processes and clearing away routine tasks, but an associate who is stressed or confused still needs a real voice and a real person on the other end. Her rule of thumb is clear: use AI to replace processes, not people, and spend the reclaimed time meeting associates in person more consistently.

Inside her team, that means putting the brand's established language to work so communications move faster, rather than digging up the same email sent year after year. She treats AI almost like a running task list, deciding which pieces it can lead and how to train it to do better. The goal, as she frames it, is to elevate her own work by leaning on a tool designed to make people more impactful.

Advice for 2027

Jenanne's guidance for talent leaders heading into 2027 returns to her founding conviction. Keep people at the forefront of everything, strategically, daily, and impactfully. HR teams can get so absorbed in serving external customers that they lose sight of a basic truth: "Every associate is also a customer and deserves to be treated with respect."

In an era of automated everything, she sees maintaining the human part of human resources as one of the most valuable things any leader can do. That means being an actual conversation and an actual person, not a bot, in the moments that count, and tying every strategy back to the human element at the heart of the profession.