The real value comes when HR tech works in harmony, says Corey Shaw, founder of North Star Talent
The hiring landscape has been flooded with talent technologies, but that quantity alone doesn’t deliver results.
What begins as a functional systems, gradually morphs into a disjointed ecosystem as new platforms are bolted on, and ends with systems that don’t communicate, processes that overlap, and unhappy users.
To combat this, organizations need to ensure they are integrating these into a cohesive talent architecture.
So says Corey Shaw, founder of North Star Talent. That harmony, Shaw argues, is not about chasing the latest flashy feature or bolting on another platform. It’s about designing hiring systems around what hiring success looks like for the company.
“There was an explosion post-pandemic of multiple talent technologies that can effectively attract, source, shortlist, engage, assess, onboard and develop talent,” Shaw says. “How those technologies work in harmony is a critical success factor today; there is an opportunity to impact hiring quality when the technologies are working in harmony.”
This trend has been top of mind for employers, with optimizing HR technology being one of Gartner’s top HR priorities for 2025, with 55% of HR leaders reporting their current technologies don’t meet evolving business needs and 51% being unable to measure the ROI of their technology investments.
Untangling messy tech stacks
For Shaw, the starting point is always clarity on the current reality of the company's talent tech stack and what it defines as hiring success. From there, companies need to build a process architecture that aligns with their values and goals.
“[Companies need] processes that are not just lean, but that are effective and driving the right value orientation, candidate experience and hiring quality,” he explains.
The challenge, however, is that many organizations are already weighed down by a patchwork of tools accumulated over the years. He adds that leadership buy-in is often missing.
“The tech stack gets to be kind of messy when it’s been iteratively built over the years, “Shaw says. “It’s not cohesive in terms of making sure that if you’re using four or five different disparate technologies, that they’re working in harmony.”
Measuring ROI starts with defining hiring success
Shaw sees the consequences of this lack of integration play out repeatedly.
“The number one challenge is when leaders step back and say: ‘What ROI am I getting out of my investment in my HRIS, LinkedIn, psychometric assessment, background check and my sourcing technology?’ Well, the truth is, they need to work in harmony to achieve a line of sight on what that hiring ROI looks like,” he says.
Getting to that return requires an honest look at hiring realities. Every company will hire every year, whether that’s internally or externally, but what matters is whether the people hired are retained, engaged and productive, Shaw says.
“Most companies have not defined what hiring success looks like,” he explains.
When organizations can accurately measure their current state, set a target, and align their systems to that vision, the financial benefits follow.
“If, for example, a company beats the historical mean on hiring quality by 5% and that translated into an organizational revenue lift of X millions of dollars, usually because hiring, while it has a cost, it has a direct bottom line impact to revenue generation,” Shaw says.
Shifting HR from features to strategy
One major shift Shaw highlights is how data is being used. The goal is to move from basic reporting to real insight that leadership can act on, Shaw says.
“The trends are all about taking data and turning it into talent intelligence, that gives you a correlation of data to create the causal impact,” he says. “Once you achieve that impact through that harmonization of the talent tech stack, and you’ve got those actionable insights, then you can provide strategic advice to the C-suite,” he explains.
To best support this, Shaw believes HR leaders must raise their game. That requires fluency in finance, data science and business strategy – not just HR, he says.
“A top line talent acquisition leader today needs to have that business expertise alongside talent expertise in the marketplace and Human Resources expertise,” he says. “That combination can then produce hiring success insights to the organization.”
He also warns against what he calls “chasing the shiny feature.”
“There are so many incredible technologies that can do some of these activities. The key is not just focusing on the features but focusing on what hiring success looks like at your organization, or alternatively, what is your biggest talent problem, and start there,” Shaw says.
