Who we serve — Talent leaders
Talent is not a function to staff. It is an architecture to design.
For CHROs, VPs of HR and talent leaders carrying the gap between the strategy the enterprise published and the people it actually has. Compass partners with you on three connected systems — workforce planning, talent review and talent acquisition — and installs them so your team runs them without us.
One page for an executive team — the market read, the seven stages with owner and measure, and the delivery shapes.
The principle
Three questions decide whether the talent system is architecture or activity.
“Do we know — by role, by value stream, by date — what talent the strategy actually requires?”
“Does our talent review produce decisions and dated commitments, or a rated grid nobody uses?”
“Is hiring a designed system with owners, measures and hand-offs, or a queue of requisitions?”
01 — Labor market assessment
Read the market before you write the requisition.
Every hiring plan carries an assumption about the market. Most are never tested. The first step is a written read of the labor market for the specific jobs the strategy requires — wage, competition, size and velocity, inside the commuting corridor — and the go-to-market strategy that read makes defensible. A market read that does not change a decision was not a read.
- 01
Wage — what the job actually clears at
Base range, shift premium, overtime reality and total cash by occupation code inside the commuting corridor — not a national average. The band is stated as three numbers: entry, market, and what it takes to move a currently employed performer.
- 02
Competition — who else is buying this skill
Named employers hiring the same occupation in the same rings, their posted rate, their shift pattern, their posting age and how long their openings sit. Competing employers are listed by name, because that is who your offer is measured against.
- 03
Size — how many exist, and how many are gettable
Employment in the occupation by county, concentration against the national average, annual completions from the schools that feed it, and the realistic gettable share after commute, shift and wage screens. Total supply is not a pipeline.
- 04
Velocity — how fast the market clears
Openings-to-hires, time-to-fill for the occupation locally, quit rate and seasonality. This is what sets an honest time-to-fill commitment and tells you whether the plan needs buying, building or borrowing.
Where the numbers come from — and what each one is allowed to decide.
No single source is treated as the answer. Federal series carry the structure, subscription services such as BLR carry the pay-practice and compliance standard, and the corridor evidence is gathered first-hand. Every figure in a Compass market read is dated and attributed.
BLS — OEWS
Wage percentiles by occupation and metro
Sets the defensible skeleton of the band: 10th / 25th / median / 75th / 90th percentile for the occupation in this metro. Compass anchors the posted range to a percentile decision, so the range is a choice on record rather than a guess.
BLS — QCEW & industry employment
Employer count and employment by industry, by county
Sizes the competing demand. A heavy-fabrication county with high concentration in NAICS 332 means the welder you want is already employed by someone three exits away.
BLS — JOLTS & local time-to-fill
Openings, hires, quits — market velocity
Converts tightness into schedule. It is the difference between committing to 45 days and committing to 90 with a build option.
BLR / HR Hero-class services
Pay-practice and compliance standard, plus survey comparables
Compass uses BLR-class subscriptions for the governance half of the read: FLSA exempt/non-exempt tests, shift-differential and overtime practice, state pay-transparency and posting-notice requirements, and job-description language. Salary-survey comparables from BLR are used as a second opinion against OEWS — never as the only source, and never quoted into a posting without the survey's effective date.
Third-party survey & posting data
Live posted rates and competitor offer behavior
Posted rates age fast, so they are read as a trend line against OEWS, with the pull date recorded. Where survey licenses restrict redistribution, the report cites the band and the source, not the raw file.
Compass corridor evidence
Commute rings, school completions, first-hand employer reads
Drive-time rings around the plant, named institutions assigned to the correct ring with annual completions, and what candidates and exiting employees actually say about pay and shift. This is the layer no subscription supplies.
The read produces a strategy — one of five plays, or a combination, each with an owner.
Buy at market
When
Supply exists in-ring, you can pay at or above the 60th percentile, and velocity is normal.
Post at a stated range, source against named competitors, and compete on shift, stability and the quality of the first 90 days. This is the only play where a posting alone is a strategy.
Buy above market, narrowly
When
The skill is scarce, concentration is high, and a small number of roles carry disproportionate value.
A premium is architected for specific certifications or shifts — not applied across the wage structure — with internal-equity impact modeled before the first offer letter leaves.
Build the skill
When
The market is short at any price, but adjacent talent is abundant.
Hire for aptitude and behavior, then certify. Requires a training path, a certified trainer, a wage progression tied to demonstrated skill, and a retention commitment — otherwise you are training the competition.
Pipeline the schools
When
Completions exist in-ring but you are not in the room.
The five-move school ladder: instructor relationship, plant tours, live projects, paid internships, then a standing hiring agreement. It is a 12–24 month play and must be started before the vacancy exists.
Move the work or the geography
When
No wage, build or pipeline play closes the gap in the corridor.
Second-shift design, a satellite location inside a denser ring, relocation for a narrow set of roles, or reassigning scope so the scarce skill is applied only where it is genuinely required.
Composite example — illustrative, not a client record
Welding talent in a heavy-fabrication market.
The hardest version of the problem: the skill is scarce, the corridor is dense with employers buying the same skill, and the plant’s current range sits below where the market clears.
- The read
- OEWS puts welder/cutter median wage in the metro at a level the plant's current range sits below at the 30th percentile. QCEW shows heavy-fabrication employment concentrated well above the national average within 25 minutes — six named competitors, three of them running premium second shifts. Two technical colleges inside the rings produce a combined class of certified welders each year, most of whom are hired before graduation.
- What the read rules out
- A posting strategy. In a market where every qualified welder already has a job at or above your range, more applicant flow does not exist to be captured. Volume tactics here produce interviews with candidates the competitors already declined.
- The go-to-market strategy
- Three plays run together: reset the certified-welder band to the 65th percentile with a certification-based progression (buy above market, narrowly); open a fit-for-aptitude entry track that certifies internally with a wage step at each qualification (build); and take a standing position with both colleges — instructor relationships, plant tours, paid internships, a named hiring agreement (pipeline).
- Where BLR fits
- BLR-class guidance sets the pay-practice governance around those plays: whether the certification premium is handled as base or differential, how shift and overtime are treated under FLSA, the state's posting and pay-transparency obligations for the range you publish, and the job-description language that keeps the requirement defensible. Its survey comparables are used to sanity-check the OEWS percentile before the band is published.
- The commitment
- Each play carries an owner, a dated milestone and a measure pair — so the market read becomes a plan on the Deck rather than a slide. The requisition scorecard then measures whether the strategy is producing hires at the promised velocity, and ARC™ renews the read each cycle.
02 — Workforce planning
The plan states what the enterprise must be able to do — then what talent that requires.
Workforce planning at Compass is derived from the architected value streams, not from last year’s attrition. Demand, supply and the dated gap are read in the same document, so the plan can be defended to a board.
- 01
Demand from the strategy, not from turnover
Roles are derived from the value streams the strategy requires — element by element — so the plan states what the enterprise must be able to do, then what talent that implies.
- 02
Supply read honestly
Internal capability, bench depth, retirement and flight risk, and the external labor corridor — commute rings, competing employers, market-informed wage bands.
- 03
The gap, dated and owned
Every gap carries a build/buy/borrow decision, a named owner, a measure pair and a date. Gaps without a dated owner are reported as gaps, not plans.
- 04
Cost and capacity arithmetic
Hire volume, time-to-productivity, span and layer, and the cost of the plan against the cost of the vacancy. The numbers are shown, not asserted.
03 — Talent review facilitation
A talent review that ends in dated commitments, not a rated grid.
Compass facilitates; your executives decide. Evidence is standardized before the room opens, calibration happens across functions, and every name leaves with an outcome that is tracked in the operating cadence.
Prepare
Standard evidence pack per leader: performance record, observed behaviors against the Compass competency constructs, readiness reading and risk of loss. Same inputs for everyone, so the conversation is comparable.
Facilitate
Compass runs the room. Claims are tested against evidence, ratings are calibrated across functions, and language is kept behavioral. The owner of the talent decision is the executive, never the facilitator.
Decide
Each name leaves with one of four outcomes: develop in place, develop for a named next role, place now, or address. Successors are identified with a readiness horizon, not a title promise.
Commit
Development commitments, successor pathways and follow-up dates are recorded in the operating cadence and reviewed on the Deck — so the review has consequences after the meeting closes.
Renew
ARC™ closes the loop: analyze what the last cycle produced, refine the constructs and the calibration, commit to the next cycle.
04 — Talent acquisition
The Compass Talent Acquisition System™ — at a glance.
One system, read as a SIPOC: who supplies each stage, what it consumes, what it does, what it produces and who receives it. Every stage carries an owner and a measure, which is what makes it a system rather than a queue of requisitions.
Stage 01 of 07
Define the need
“Is the work, the outcome and the wage band written down before the search opens?”
- Suppliers
- Hiring executive, workforce plan, finance
- Inputs
- Value-stream requirement, approved position, written job requirements, wage band
- Process
- Requisition chartered: outcomes, must-haves, evaluation criteria, panel and dates
- Outputs
- Approved requisition and scorecard
- Customers
- Hiring manager, recruiter
Who hands work into this stage.
What the stage consumes.
What the stage actually does.
What the stage produces.
Who receives the output and judges it.
Owner
Hiring executive
Measure pair
Requisitions chartered before posting (%) · days from need to approved requisition
How it fails when unowned
The search opens on a title instead of a written requirement, and the panel later disagrees about what good looks like.
See all seven stages as one table
| Stage | Suppliers | Inputs | Process | Outputs | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Define the need | Hiring executive, workforce plan, finance | Value-stream requirement, approved position, written job requirements, wage band | Requisition chartered: outcomes, must-haves, evaluation criteria, panel and dates | Approved requisition and scorecard | Hiring manager, recruiter |
| Attract | Compass brand studio, job boards, schools, referral network | Board-level posting, brand assets, sourcing map, compliance notices | Post, source, referral and pipeline campaigns run against the labor corridor | Qualified applicant flow | Recruiter, candidates |
| Screen | Candidates, shared candidate inbox | Applications, pre-screen answers, voluntary character references | Structured pre-screen against the written requirements; routing to requisition, stage and owner | Shortlist with evidence | Hiring manager |
| Evaluate | Interview panel, Compass instruments | Competency-based interview guides, weighted scoring, Saboteurs / PQ® / DISC fit reading | Behavioral interviews, panel calibration, fit-and-integration read against the job requirements | Ranked finalists and a documented decision | Hiring executive |
| Offer | Total rewards, finance, legal | Wage band, offer package, approvals | Offer construction, verbal, written offer, acceptance and closure of remaining candidates | Signed offer, start date | New hire, HR operations |
| Onboard | Hiring manager, HR operations, IT | Onboarding checklist, 30/60/90 plan, equipment and access | Pre-start, first day, first week and first-90 checkpoints with named owners | Productive employee, closed checklist | Hiring manager, employee |
| Measure & renew | Recruiters, hiring managers, HRIS/ATS | Stage conversion, time-to-fill, quality-of-hire, 90-day retention, source yield | Scorecard review in the operating cadence; ARC™ improvement loop on the weakest stage | Improved system, published measures | Talent leader, executive team |
Measured at every stage: source yield, stage conversion, time-to-fill, offer acceptance, quality-of-hire and 90-day retention. Nothing goes live until the readiness gates are cleared and the improvement loop is scheduled.
How it is delivered
Two shapes, and the transfer between them.
Compass operates the system.
Architecture, sourcing, screening, interview management, offer support, onboarding checkpoints and the measurement scorecard — run by Compass against your requisition volume, on your brand. Suited to organizations without a built talent-acquisition function, or carrying a volume surge the current team cannot absorb.
- Compass-run recruiting operations under the client brand
- Per-client careers presence and branded candidate experience
- Weekly pipeline review with the hiring executives
- Transfer plan written from day one — Compass leaves architects, not dependency
You keep your HRIS/ATS. Compass installs the system around it.
The stage model, evaluation standards, scorecard and cadence are installed on top of BambooHR, Workday, ADP or your current stack. Compass is the system of record for the architecture; the vendor remains the record for requisition facts, with reconciliation between them.
- Connectors for BambooHR, Workday and ADP applicant tracking
- Stage model, interview guides and weighted scoring installed in your tools
- Recruiter and hiring-manager enablement, then hand-off
- One measurement scorecard across both systems
In every shape the end state is the same: your team owns a documented talent system, with measures published and a renewal loop running. Compass leaves architects, not dependency.
Which shape fits you
Seven questions decide whether we run it or install it.
Capacity, volume, urgency, accountability and the honest state of your current HRIS/ATS decide the delivery shape — not preference. Answer seven questions and the routing names one of three shapes, states what has to be true for it to work, and says plainly where your answers contradict it. Nothing is stored; the reading stays in your browser.
0 of 7 answered. Nothing is stored or sent — the reading stays in your browser until you choose to share it.
Your reading so far
Answer the seven questions
The routing needs all seven answers before it will name a shape. A partial reading would be a guess with a confident face.
- What talent-acquisition function do you have today?
- How many hires do the next twelve months require?
- How soon do hires have to start?
- How well does your current HRIS/ATS actually carry the work?
- Who is accountable for hiring outcomes today?
- How much of the candidate experience do you want to run yourselves?
- Your current HRIS or ATS
Go one layer deeper
Read present reality
The Compass Enterprise Readiness Assessment™ — read through six executive lenses, including talent and leadership capability.
- Our Ideal Clients
The eight enterprise conditions that create value.
- FOUNDATION™
Structure, roles, accountability and capability.
- Succession Architecture™
Building successors instead of announcing them.
The next step
Carrying the gap between the strategy and the people?
A 30–45 minute executive conversation. We read your present talent architecture — planning, review, acquisition — and say plainly which of the two delivery shapes fits, or whether Compass is not the right partner.
Not sure where to start?
Three questions, and we point you to the right instrument.
Under a minute. From this page, most leaders begin with The organization.