Dalia Naami

An Accident That Turned Into a Calling

The entry point was, by her own cheerful admission, unplanned. "You get started in HR recruiting by accident," she says. Hers came during a university summer spent interning at a recruiting firm at the height of Sarbanes-Oxley implementation, when the demand for compliance talent was enormous and the agency world was moving fast. She was supposed to be learning about a profession. Instead she found something closer to a personality fit: connecting people, talking to people, networking, and the specific satisfaction of bringing the right person to the right project for the right company.

After graduation she landed a recruiting job with a marketing firm in the Greater Toronto Area, and, as she puts it, the rest is history. What she did next is the part that reveals the professional. Rather than coast on aptitude, she went back to school while working full time. Her university program had been general, so she completed a diploma in HR management and earned her designation, deliberately converting an accidental start into a credentialed discipline. "I fell in love with it," she says, and the investment shows: the strategic vocabulary she uses today is the vocabulary of someone who studied the field as well as lived it.

The Voice Still in Her Head

Naami is generous in crediting the people who shaped her, and one name comes first. Judy Chong, her former director during her years at Johnson & Johnson, remains a dear friend and, she says with a laugh over a recent dinner, a voice she still hears in her head. Chong's lesson was to zoom out: to get outside the immediate problem, to think strategically, and to see the HR function as an extension of the business it supports rather than a service desk beside it. That single idea has become the organizing principle of Naami's practice, applicable equally to recruitment, to operations, and to whatever else lands on her desk.

The other formative relationship runs in the opposite direction. Naami hired Rhianna Turner as an entry level recruiter and managed her early in her career; Turner now leads the recruiting function at Boston Scientific in Canada. Watching that arc unfold taught Naami something about what actually compounds in this profession. Not volume, not cleverness, but reliability: a genuine commitment to customer service and to being the dependable person your clients can count on. "She creates a team that is empowered," Naami says of Turner, whose progression from the early recruiting days to leadership she describes as knocking it out of the park.

She is equally quick to spotlight Vinette Macalino, a close collaborator from her Johnson & Johnson years who has built a formidable reputation in direct sourcing and recruiting and is now a senior manager at Loblaw. What Naami admires there is the balancing act: Macalino is tuned in to recruitment strategies that genuinely support her business, while remaining a strong advocate for her candidates and marrying those two interests rather than trading one against the other. The two still have dinner frequently, which tells you something about how Naami maintains a network built over two decades.

AI as a Starting Point, Never the Substitute

On the question preoccupying every talent function right now, Naami is neither a skeptic nor an evangelist. She is precise. AI, in her framing, is intended to be a tool that augments and supports the way organizations operate, and her recruitment strategy does not surrender the human element to it. At her organization the strategy remains a personal one. Resumes still get read by people. Conversations still get had. The screening relationship is not delegated to a model.

Where she does find real leverage is upstream, in structure. AI is genuinely useful for building procedures and frameworks, for establishing a starting point a team can then build from. Drafting a policy, to use what she calls a boring HR example, might reasonably begin with an AI structured template. What it cannot do is finish the work. "It's not exclusively AI output or exclusively human output," she says. The point of the tools is to make the job easier so that a practitioner can spend their judgment where judgment matters: on a well thought out strategy that delivers what the business actually needs. HR professionals, she notes pointedly, know exactly what that needs to be.

What, So What, Now What

Asked for the advice she would pass to other talent leaders, Naami offers a framework she was trained on early and has used ever since. Every project, solution or strategy has three components: the what, the so what, and the now what. It is, at bottom, a discipline of translation. If she needs to convince her leaders to add a specific capability to the business, she has to speak in their language and in terms that make sense to their world. What is being proposed. Why anyone in that room should care, whether the ask is more people, a new capability or a training investment. And then the now what: the impact, the return on investment, the consequence that outlasts the meeting.

It is a corrective to the most common failure mode in her field. "You can't just deliver the nice little package of, here are the 10 things I'm going to do," she says. Lists are easy. Lasting impact requires a leader who can connect a talent decision to a business outcome and then stand behind the arithmetic. That framework, she says, anchors her whenever she brings a new proposal to the table, and it is the throughline that runs from an accidental internship in the Sarbanes-Oxley years to a seat in the strategy conversations she occupies today.