Corey Shaw, founder of North Star Talent, suggests there's potential in using technology to lift recruiting standards and make hiring more aligned with business priorities. His perspective stems from a professional journey of over two decades that moved from financial services to talent acquisition leadership. He states, "From that experience, I've come to believe that technology, when thoughtfully aligned with processes and purpose, can enhance the way organizations identify and welcome people."
Starting at the teller window, Shaw advanced through retail banking, wealth guidance, and commercial finance before transitioning into corporate programs and people-related work. During those years, he discovered his vocation, which was leading hiring practices with a focus on quality and business alignment.
That realization led to the creation of North Star Talent, an advisory practice designed to help organizations build hiring programs that integrate process, people, and technology. "When hiring is designed with business outcomes in mind," Shaw says, "it can become a lever for growth that people can understand and support." With a focus on meaningful outcomes, it aims to help leaders see hiring as a contributor to business results rather than as a series of transactions.
Translating this vision into practice requires acknowledging the trends of today's hiring environment. North Star Talent has observed that many organizations rely on technologies and processes that operate in parallel rather than within a unified design, creating gaps that obscure the connection between hiring and business priorities. "Platforms for sourcing, assessment, tracking, and onboarding may each serve a purpose, but together they can produce an uneven candidate experience," Shaw explains. North Star Talent notes that addressing this challenge means moving beyond isolated tools toward an integrated approach where technology, process, and business objectives work in harmony.
Recent labor market data highlights the importance of this shift. In Canada, the unemployment-to-job vacancy ratio rose to 2.9 in the first quarter of 2025. This increase reflects both a rise in the number of unemployed persons by more than 200,000 and a decline in job vacancies by about 115,000. These figures illustrate the need for organizations to be more deliberate in how they design hiring systems.
Still, North Star Talent emphasizes that even with stronger systems, the effectiveness of hiring may ultimately depend on the leadership's capacity to interpret results and guide programs toward reliable outcomes. "Recruiting leaders often bring strong interpersonal skills and risk awareness, but some may be less practiced in connecting hiring activity to business performance or managing complex technology ecosystems," Shaw states. He adds that measurement is central to this shift: tracking outcomes such as how quickly new hires reach productivity, retain their top talent, how engagement develops, whether internal mobility increases, and how diverse representation expands market reach.
Besides the importance of measurement, process architecture is another area the company highlights. North Star Talent suggests that organizations may benefit from considering external hires, internal moves, and contingent arrangements to gain a clearer view of overall workforce change.
Approaching hiring in this manner, North Star Talent notes, may help create greater consistency in candidate experiences, hiring quality, and align role expectations with the points where assessment and onboarding are most useful for early productivity. Shaw says, "A standardized job framework, combined with structured assessment and a shared decision model, may provide conditions that support more reliable outcomes and a fairer experience for both candidates and hiring teams."
North Star Talent extends its work into broader program design. Its integrative approach emphasizes aligning workforce planning with business priorities, streamlining technology portfolios to eliminate overlap, and tailoring solutions that connect hiring activity directly to measurable impact. Shaw highlights the importance of diagnostic work to uncover each client's unique talent landscape and identify the levers most likely to drive improvement. Programs typically begin with discovery, advance through targeted design, and incorporate sustainment practices so that progress endures beyond the initial rollout. "Sustainable hiring is about building a repeatable system that people trust," he remarks.
Ultimately, when organizations blend a business-oriented view of talent with an aligned technology footprint, measured practices, and a shared process architecture, the outcome can lead to more consistent candidate experiences. Shaw frames success as a series of small shifts that accumulate: clearer planning conversations, more intentional sourcing, structured validation that maps to role expectations, and onboarding that accelerates contribution.
His ambition for North Star Talent is to broaden that influence, helping more leaders translate the day-to-day work of hiring into sustained organizational value.
