Tina Wilson

The Model She Built at Gartner

Wilson joined Gartner a little over a year ago after a recruiter reached out about a Dallas-based role leading partnerships under the company's inclusion team. For someone who describes herself as drawn to research and to the trends shaping talent, HR, workforce development, and human capital management, the fit was immediate. "The onboarding was great," she says, and the team she landed on, a TA Inclusion function spanning TA enablement, recruiting events, and inclusive partnerships, gave her the platform she had been building toward for two decades.

What she brought with her was a framework. Rather than spreading partnership investment evenly, Wilson mapped Gartner's highest-demand hiring areas and rebuilt the portfolio around them. Sales in all its forms, conference sales, technology sales, and the sales development program, sits at the core because sales sits at the core of revenue. Technology gets its own allocation to fuel the next generation of AI and data analytics talent. Consulting, the consultative craft central to how Gartner serves its clients, retains dedicated focus. Around that architecture she has layered employer brand work, talent pipeline channels, and collaboration with HR systems, connecting recruiting leaders by function and business unit to alliances such as Women in Sales Everywhere, Forte, and national sales networks.

She works in close partnership with the Inclusion Center of Excellence, effectively the chief diversity office, looking for the points where talent acquisition outreach can carry ERG ambassadors into meaningful external work. "I always look at where does the revenue of the roles lie the most," she says. Market intelligence, high-demand mapping, and alignment of the employer value proposition are the tools she uses to answer it.

From Law Students to National Partnerships

The origin was academic before it was professional. Wilson minored in personnel management in college, then took a job at a law firm recruiting third-year law students. That is where the love for recruiting and for engagement with people took hold, and it never let go.

From there came a tour through industries. At DTE, the telecommunications business that later became part of Verizon, she spent more than seven years moving across college recruiting, inclusion, talent development, and marketing, an unusual combination that shaped her lasting interest in recruitment marketing and employer branding. An opportunity at Corning took her from Dallas to upstate New York, where she deepened her partnership work with organizations including the National Black MBA Association, the National Society of Black Engineers, and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and where she began building the model she still uses: understand the business model, find the high-growth needs, then design talent strategy to match.

A downsizing at Corning turned into an opening. Former colleagues who had moved into leadership at Wachovia in Charlotte remembered her and called. She spent close to twenty years in that lineage, honing diversity recruiting strategy in financial services and surviving the Wells Fargo acquisition, no small feat at the time. Her titles tracked the ascent: AVP, VP, diverse segments program leader, national partnerships and programs, diversity relationship consultant and strategist. Later chapters took her into healthcare at McKesson as an inclusion talent strategist in a Center of Excellence workforce environment, and then into manufacturing at Watts Water Technologies, where she managed the ERGs, built ERG governance, partnered with TA leaders, and pushed accessibility and disability inclusion into an industrial setting that was, by her own assessment, several years behind where she had already progressed.

Downsizings touched her more than once. Her response has been consistent. "I look at the glass half full," she says, taking the experience forward and continuing to build both her personal and professional brand while staying current with where the market is heading across talent acquisition, inclusion, and branding, the three intersections she knows best and loves most.

Leading by Bringing People With Her

Ask Wilson to describe her leadership philosophy and she does not reach for a framework. She describes a posture. "Yes, I may be in the spotlight, but I'm bringing people along with me," she says. Acknowledging people, mentoring people, and elevating those she believes are on the cusp of a move are not adjacent activities to the job; they are the job. She has mentored widely across two decades and multiple industries, and she treats the practice as compound interest on everything her own mentors invested in her.

There is also a personal thread running underneath the career map. An only child whose parents remained in Texas, Wilson made geography a deliberate variable, moving from New York toward the South and eventually back to Dallas, where the Gartner role happened to be based. Twenty-plus years in, across seven industries and more titles than most people accumulate in two careers, she describes her current work in unusually settled terms: the place, since leaving Wells Fargo, where she completely belongs.