North Star Talent

Corey Shaw

Corey Shaw is founder of North Star Talent dedicated to optimizing talent acquisition and development strategies. With extensive leadership experience in talent management, he is passionate about transforming people, processes, and technologies to help organizations attract and nurture exceptional, diverse talent. A natural networker and “netgiver,” he thrives in collaborative and dynamic environments, fostering connections that drive business success. Known for his innovative approach, Corey frequently collaborates with industry leaders and participates in discussions about AI, automation, and the evolving workforce landscape.

Through this article, Shaw emphasizes the critical importance of aligning an organization’s hiring strategies with its culture, values, and business objectives to achieve sustainable success.

An organization’s culture, values, and economic success derive from its talented employees – incredible people who devote their passion, effort, and intellect, enabling a company’s success. All organizations need to hire related to turnover, growth, or factors involving people changes. Effective talent acquisition is achieved when a company forms a strategic hiring program that integrates people and business plans. The successful program will attract quality candidates and facilitate intentional sourcing, engagement, and validation activities. The outcome when this recipe is done, right? A great candidate experience and exceptional hires.

Like any sustainably effective business program, it starts with a plan – in this case, a talent strategy aligned to the company’s culture, growth mandate, revenue drivers, and employee value proposition; the first step is gaining a clear picture of the ‘current talent reality’ across the company with a focus on key hiring segments like IT, Finance, Sales, etc. Start by reviewing historical hiring information— This includes an examination of internal and external hiring counts, turnover, productivity, performance, engagement, and succession data. Next, review external talent market data involving supply, demand, scarcity, compensation, and attraction drivers for each talent cohort. With this data, you pull it all together as your baseline talent intelligence - what I call the current talent reality. Now, you are ready to bring together the segment leadership and key stakeholders (Finance, HR, Marketing, etc.), aligning what hiring success looks like for that specific area of the organization. Once you have completed the planning phase, you have the foundation for targeted, intentional attraction, sourcing, validating, and hiring activities.

Sounds easy, right? Build the above planning framework, engage in the activities, and voila -- you have achieved a successful hiring program. So why do so many organizations struggle to do this? I have been engaging in these candidate experiences and hiring quality conversations with all forms of leaders for many years, and in almost every case, they agree -- it is critically important to their organization’s success, but they don’t have the trusted measurable data. Sounds crazy, right? With hiring activities happening all the time, you would think there would be a trusted, regular line of sight to candidate experience and quality of hire – providing perspective on successful hiring return on investment. The critical ingredient? Having process, technology, and practices clearly defined, aligned to the talent strategy, and working in harmony. Without this, you will not have a sustainable, effective hiring program.

Below are insights on success criteria for process, technology, and practices, but first, a story that highlights the criticality of harmonizing the approach. During a period of merging organizations and consolidating policies, we worked with a company to configure its process and technology stack and made sure to engage stakeholders on the change – the implementation happened with good, efficient results and celebration. After launch, we ran reports showing a pattern of inconsistent practice application to policies across different organizational segments. We realized to achieve consistency, we needed to improve the practice element with an effective decision model, ensuring that the talent transaction aligned with the aspirational policy. We chose a decision model that would effectively inform, engage, and arbitrate, involving the appropriate stakeholders for decisions that aligned with the policy. The hard work to achieve consistency was ensuring stakeholders understood why this consistency was important to equitable practices that enabled the organization’s hiring success.

“Building and harmonizing relevant processes, technology, and practices as part of a strategic talent program will ensure you consistently deliver exceptional candidate experiences and quality hires, call it the recipe for success!”

Process adoption – Start by ensuring critical stakeholders are engaged to collaboratively build guiding principles that align with your talent strategy. The principles will be a key anchor point as you build lean, effective processes aligned to the aspirational experience for candidates, leaders, and new hires. Form clear roles and responsibilities for all participants in the key hiring stages (planning, attraction, sourcing, validating, offers, and new hire experience). Build bespoke process maps with the personified candidate and hiring leader scenarios for the different types of hiring - external, internal, and contingent hiring segmented by your hiring cohorts (high volume, subject matter expert, leadership, and executive roles) Creating the maps and talent scenarios is foundational and should be the starting point to determine the relevant technology stack.

Technology adoption – From the process maps, you have your experiential requirements, which, alongside IT and Privacy requirements, will enable you to build a scorecard to determine your technology stack. The research, review, and technology adoption phase are best managed as a project. This ensures you have clear requirements, governance, milestones, testing, change management, implementation, and sustainment practices.

Practice adoption – It is important to practice adoption so that key participants in the hiring process collaborate on their roles in each phase. The planning phase involves senior business segment leadership, recruitment, HR, and finance stakeholders forming a consensus on hiring success. In the attraction and sourcing phase, you want marketing, recruiters, and hiring leaders to collaborate to deliver intentional, targeted, and regularized marketing, sourcing, and outreach activities. For the validating phase, you want recruiters and hiring leaders to adopt a structured assessment approach (screening, interviewing, assessment tests) to validate the right hires aligned to the company’s skills architecture. For hiring, you want an offer and new hire experience to provide technical guidance (location, technology, team dynamics) and cultural immersion (company strategy, revenue drivers, risk profile).

Establishing clear metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the hiring program is critical. These could include candidate and hiring leader satisfaction, vacancy rates, time-to-fill, and hiring quality (retention, productivity) representing the impact of hires on the company’s performance.

An effective hiring program is vital to an organization’s success. Building and harmonizing relevant processes, technology, and practices as part of a strategic talent program will ensure you consistently deliver exceptional candidate experiences and quality hires, call it the recipe for success!