Rachel Newmyer

The Pull Toward People

Rachel earned her bachelor's in accounting from the University of Southern Mississippi for practical reasons. She was always good with numbers, and she wanted something stable, a skill every organization needs. The path ran through public accounting, then into industry: a publicly traded transportation and logistics company, then a privately held veterinary company.

Ten years in, the accounting held up fine. What she kept circling back to was the part of the day that had nothing to do with the close. "I wanted something more people-centric," she has said of that period. "I wanted to help people. I wanted to have purpose in my life outside of recording numbers on a spreadsheet." Accounting gives you coworkers and client deliverables, but relationships are the margin, not the main event. She wanted them to be the main event.

Full Desk, Then the Department

She joined Taylor White in 2017, having moved from Portland, Oregon to Tampa, Florida, and has since worked nearly every seat the business has. Full-cycle, full-desk recruiting came first. Then sourcing, and then leadership of the sourcing function, with titles along the way that read like a map of the firm's priorities: Candidate Experience Manager, Sourcing and Recruiting Manager, Senior Manager of Sourcing and Recruiting, Director of Candidate Experience and Development.

The current role represents a real pivot in the work rather than a promotion in name. As the firm scaled, the need shifted inward, and Rachel moved from placing accountants for clients to building the team that serves them. Culture and development sit in her title alongside talent for a reason: hiring into a fast-growing firm is only half the assignment. The other half is making sure the people who arrive stay and grow.

The Ten Percent That Makes It Worth It

Her own experience as a candidate turned out to be formative in an unusually literal way. The recruiter who worked with her on the Portland to Tampa move, and who would later become her boss, spotted someone she knew at the bar during their first meeting and pulled him over to tell the newcomer why Tampa was worth the move. He works in accounting and finance. He is now Rachel's husband, and over the years he has also been a candidate and a client. The lesson she took from it was not about luck but about range: a good recruiter is paying attention to a person's whole life, not just the job order in front of them.

That belief hardened into a philosophy. In staffing, some candidates and clients will treat the relationship as a transaction, because they simply need to hire or need a job. Others become something else entirely. Rachel has attended weddings and funerals for people who first came to her as candidates, and has taken trips to Denver with former candidates. Her estimate is that roughly ten percent of the people she works with reach that level. "Those are the people who make ninety percent of the job worth it every day," she says. The tough placements and the days that end in defeat are real. The ten percent is what she measures against.

Early Adopter, Human Approver

Taylor White got moving on AI early, starting where most firms did, with Microsoft Copilot bolted onto tools the team already had in Microsoft 365. Rachel and her colleagues spent spare hours building agents and testing what would actually change on a desk: transcribing candidate and client meetings, always with permission and clarity about how the transcript would be used, then consolidating and summarizing. One rule never moved. A human approves anything that leaves the building, and anything that circulates internally.

These days the firm has gone all in on Claude. Rachel builds artifacts that take a meeting transcript and a candidate's resume and produce a summary of the person's experience against eight defined criteria, tuned for readers with no time to spare. She is candid that she can be lengthy in conversation, so the tool does something specific for her: it makes her concise for the CEO and the SVP. Other uses are humbler and just as valuable, like standardizing a resume onto firm letterhead, a task that used to be entirely manual.

Some of what she builds is firm-wide, available to everyone. The rest is a standing expectation that people keep asking where the next hour of the week can be recovered. That thinking is now being packaged for clients: Taylor White is adding an AI delivery service line to its traditional accounting and finance engagements, aimed at companies that need help figuring out where to start, how to implement AI safely, and how to turn it into daily effectiveness. Investment is following, including a new ATS with AI built into its foundations.

Advice for the Year Ahead

Rachel's counsel to other talent leaders is a warning wrapped in an endorsement of the technology she has championed. Volume is climbing, in part because candidates are using AI to apply and to tailor resumes against job descriptions, and the temptation is to answer machine speed with machine filtering. That is where good people get screened out of good jobs.

"Make sure that whatever your process is with the new technologies, it is doing the manual tasks and giving you time back in your day," she says. "Then use that time wisely." The efficiency is only worth what it buys, and what it should buy, in her view, is a critical human eye on the resumes and the candidates, and the hours to be genuinely people focused. For someone who left a stable profession because relationships were the best part of the day, that is less a prediction than a standard.