Mary Wanciak

“Sometimes it's less about what people have done and more about what they can do.”

Mary Wanciak once planned to make her living arguing cases. Instead, she has built a career making the case for people, and today she does it as Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Vacatia, a vacation ownership and hospitality technology company where her hiring spans both the resort floor and the engineering team.

That dual mandate is new territory for a leader who spent most of her career in hospitality. Because Vacatia is at its core a technology company, Mary now recruits technical talent alongside the hospitality roles she knows deeply, a shift she describes as a welcome chance to broaden her scope. What ties the work together is a conviction she has carried for years: hiring is about potential and empathy as much as credentials, and the tools of the trade exist to serve the human parts of the job, not to replace them.

From Courtroom Ambitions to Talent Acquisition

Mary studied government, political affairs, economics and history with law school in mind. After graduation she wanted a break before the next big step and went looking for temporary work. The staffing agency she walked into saw something in her and offered her a job on the spot. She said yes, and the detour became a profession.

She spent her first two years in agency recruiting, which she still considers the best possible education in the ins and outs of the field. From there she moved into corporate recruiting at Hershey Entertainment & Resorts, then returned to her hometown of Philadelphia to work in talent acquisition at Aramark. A stint of a couple of years in broader HR followed. When Mary decided to move to Florida, she set her sights on getting back into hospitality and landed at Bluegreen Vacations, where she stayed for close to a decade before joining Vacatia.

The Leaders Who Shaped Her

Mary is candid that every leader she has worked under taught her something, including those whose styles she did not share. Those experiences clarified what she never wants to be as a leader, while the people who inspired her defined what she aspires to. Notably, she points out, the leaders who influenced her most have all been women.

At Bluegreen Vacations, an operations leader outside the HR function showed her what it means to lead with empathy and genuine care, an influence Mary says shaped her career in more ways than she can count. Earlier, a leader named Carol took a chance on her, bringing a recruiter with a primarily talent acquisition background into the wider world of HR. The move diversified Mary's experience, and it left her with a lesson she applies to every hire: people without every box checked on their résumé often turn out to be exceptional, because potential matters as much as history.

Her current influence is Caroline Shin, Vacatia's CEO and co-founder. Mary values the access, which is rare even at the vice president level, and credits Caroline with pushing her to view her work through a different lens. A self-described methodical thinker, Mary says that challenge has widened her perspective. The best leaders, in her view, do exactly that: they make you think differently, believe differently, and feel supported, teaching the parts of leadership no manual covers.

Empathy as the Core of the Work

For Mary, the stakes of recruiting and HR are personal. A job can change the course of someone's life, and she has seen how much that support can mean. About a year ago, a former colleague from her HR days told Mary how much her support had meant during a very difficult period. The moment reminded her how easy it is to underestimate the impact of the work. Helping someone find a job or change their career path, she says, is unlike anything else, and it all comes back to empathy.

Let AI Handle the Admin

Mary sees AI as a tool to streamline and improve recruiting, not a replacement, unless a recruiter isn't doing the work that truly matters. She remembers dreading requisitions that meant manually reaching out to and scheduling every candidate. There were days when administrative tasks like updating statuses, rewriting job descriptions and scheduling could consume 80% of her time. Now AI absorbs much of that load, freeing her and her team to build relationships, understand the business, and spend time with leadership planning not only for today's talent needs but for tomorrow's. She also uses AI as a thought partner, testing her thinking against different angles.

She draws a firm line at the human connection. A widely shared clip of an AI interviewer abandoning a conversation with a candidate who was speaking gibberish made her ask whether she would want to be interviewed by a bot herself. Personally, she is not there yet. Her guidance for fellow leaders is to start with the problem rather than the product. Vacatia isn't drowning in applicants; its challenge is finding strong candidates in tougher markets, so the AI she wants is one that sources in the background and surfaces candidates for her team to engage.

Advice for 2027

Mary's advice to talent leaders heading into 2027 distills everything she has learned along the way. Embrace the technology, she says, but don't lose sight of the human element. It is a philosophy shaped by leaders who bet on her potential, and one she now brings to every hire.