Key hires: The strategic talent advantage

The attached paper outlines how Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) and Recruitment can partner to secure “key hires” — individuals whose skills, scarcity, and network centrality make them force multipliers for business strategy. It highlights recent high-impact hires across industries (e.g., Walmart, GM, Citi) to show how one role can accelerate transformation. The framework introduces a Key-Hire Flywheel with six steps: aligning intent with business priorities, decomposing roles into workloads, mapping talent signals, targeting recruitment with precision, preparing impactful onboarding, and running a continuous feedback loop. The central message: competitive advantage no longer comes from headcount scale, but from identifying and empowering the handful of roles that can shift an organization's trajectory.

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