“I’ve built a [post-sales implementation] team of ~20 folks and could not have done it without Taara’s guidance. She has been a strong thought partner to me from the beginning, advising me on ideal candidate profiles, interview strategy, closing strategy, and more...I highly recommend any startup looking to scale chat with her.”
OUR TRUE NORTH
Recruiting and people systems for ambitious founders.
As companies accelerate, the signals they send—through candidate conversations, customer calls, and day-to-day practices—matter more and more. Elite talent pays close attention to these signals. They look for rigor and taste: evidence of clarity, judgment, and care under pressure. These details reveal whether a leadership team knows where it’s going, or whether they unconsciously apply ambition and clout as substitutes for excellence and output.
North Star Talent exists to help teams stay oriented as they accelerate. We strengthen judgment while momentum is high. Our approach blends technical fluency with human depth, supporting teams as they scale in ways that are credible, coherent, and worthy of the people they hope to attract and retain.
“Hiring for my roles is challenging; folks need to have deep technical expertise, strong product sense, and the ability to make platform-wide developer experience decisions. Taara was critical in identifying and hiring the best talent in the industry. She also had a thoughtful approach to closing candidates that helped us successfully hire three PMs who were between multiple offers.”
Ghost Sourcing
North Star sources and engages talent on your behalf. We coach and guide you through pipeline management candidate experience, and closing.
OUR SERVICES
Embedded Full-Cycle
Taara joins your team directly. She runs searches end-to-end, coaching your team and refining your process while she’s at it.
Contingent Search
Success-based searches for critical roles.
People Operations Design
North Star looks under the hood at your people systems. We help set up your tools and processes to align with your goals and values.
Readiness Audit
Ready to scale? Want to do it in-house? We’ll assess the unique headwinds you’re likely to run into and how to avoid them.
Founder & Principal
TAARA KHALILNAJI
ex-Stripe. ex-Facebook. ex-Unicorns
Taara has worked inside the full spectrum of startup mythology — from the companies VCs boast about in conference rooms on Sand Hill Road to ones HBO parodied on Silicon Valley.
She began her career as a recruiter at Clinkle, the payments startup that raised an astonishing amount of money for its time, attracted frighteningly smart people, and became a minor cultural phenomenon when it failed spectacularly. It was the Stanford-mafia era of “surely this will work” — until it didn’t. She moved onto Mixpanel under Suhail Doshi. Mixpanel was one of the first non-FAANG companies to normalize the idea that you could have taste, talent, and technical rigor without being a trillion-dollar behemoth. As employee number 33, she and Suhail scaled Mixpanel to 100 employees and into its Series B.
Then came Facebook where Taara worked with niche technical teams inside an environment that had already crossed the existential threshold. The challenge there was: “How can we hire and retain world-class talent from inside Silicon Valley — where opportunities to build 0-1 are as abundant as sunshine?”
Later, at Stripe, she was as a founding member of the product recruiting team, doubling the product org from 50 to 100 in a year. In her time there she went on to found two employee resource groups, she trained and developed recruiters, coached interviewers and leaders, and transitioned to hiring exclusively M2’s.
She’s seen the signals that correlate to enduring companies, and she’s seen the warning signs of both the slow flatline and the glamorous implosion. She has seen how ambition and pedigree can fail to compensate for operational tact and world-class output, and how sometimes even exceptional output isn’t enough.
In 2024, Taara started North Star Talent to help technically ambitious startups hire the kinds of people who raise the bar and while avoiding the failure modes she learned to recognize up close.