Walmart’s first chief talent officer explains her role

Companies are at a pivotal moment with how they attract and retain talent.

Talent shortages have and will continue to make it difficult to hire, particularly for hard-to-fill roles, meaning organizations must also think about how existing talent can be trained or developed to meet these needs. To address these challenges, some companies have commissioned chief talent officer roles to oversee recruitment and talent acquisition, performance management, learning and development, and workforce and succession planning.

In April 2024, Walmart created its own chief talent officer position. The retail giant appointed Lorraine “Lo” Stomski, the executive then in charge of its learning and leadership initiatives to the new role.

Holistic approach. Stomski, who holds a PhD in industrial organizational psychology, had spent her career working on and eventually learning leadership development as well as job assessment and selection. She joined Walmart in November 2016 as VP of global learning and leadership, before rising to SVP of enterprise leadership and learning in March 2019.

In those positions, Stomski oversaw a vast array of initiatives, while another organization oversaw all of recruitment. Stomski and Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer, discussed creating a chief talent officer role to streamline her job, and the recruitment organization’s responsibilities, under one role.

“You start to see this in the industry, the emergence of chief talent officers really taking care of the end-to-end talent ecosystem. It became really clear for us, to become a talent academy, you really needed to have that,” she told HR Brew in late April.

Creating the talent flywheel. Transforming Walmart’s talent operations, however, involved more than just combining these roles under one team. Workers primarily want three things from their employer, Stomski said: Purpose, to make an impact, and to grow.

If employees aren’t satisfied with those expectations, their opinion of their employer can sour, prompting them to leave. Translating that individually to a worldwide team is a big task, according to Stomski.

“It’s a beautiful end-to-end system that works, but we’ve got to get each of those pieces right and at our scale,” Stomski said, adding that with “2.1 million career paths, it’s very cool, but it could be very daunting. You can get one piece of it wrong, and it will affect that experience of the associate.”

In order to meet those demands, Stomski ensures that each of her teams—which include recruitment, talent management, workforce planning, and learning and development teams like Walmart Academy—work together smoothly in a way that she calls her “talent flywheel.”

“Think of it as this moving, mutually reinforcing wheel, and I’ve got leaders on each of those spokes, if you will,” she explained.

For example, some talent development programs designed to train associates for hard-to-fulfill roles, including for technicians or commercially licensed drivers, were born from these cross-team conversations.

“Who knows, our recruiters could still be, to this day, going, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get truck drivers, this is really rough.’ But once you pull all of those components together, it opens the team’s eyes,” Stomski said.

Keeping up with change. Looking ahead with her role, Stomski is focused on ensuring that her team continues to fulfill its promise of being a talent academy and having the best talent to serve the business.

“With the rate of change that’s going on in our macro environment out there…we have to move at an even faster pace,” she said.

As an example, Stomski notes that AI and machine learning’s impact on talent operations will continue to be at the forefront. Her team is “constantly” researching the outside economic environment, and speaking with outside leaders including startups in the AI and machine learning space, and fellow organizations participating in Walmart’s Opportunity Summit, a consortium focused on skills-first talent strategies.

What’s most important, however, is listening to and gathering feedback from Walmart’s own associates. Toward that end, Stomski’s team travels to various stores, clubs and training facilities to speak with associates directly and learn what is top of mind for them.

At a recent visit to a training for first-time managers held in Saratoga Springs, New York, for example, a participant gave Stomski a letter explaining her background as an immigrant from Brazil and how monumental the experience was for her, followed by a list of questions including Stomski’s opinion on leadership, and ways the new manager could grow her career. “That’s what we are in service to, is to make sure that she gets that opportunity to continue to grow,” Stomski said.

“I think we have exceptional talent, but at 2.1 million, the ability to reach them and to see them and to talk to them, you have to be in that constant state of listening,” she added. “You can’t do it sitting in Bentonville [Arkansas], you’ve really got to be out there talking to our associates.”