Queensland Hydro is developing a large-scale pumped hydro energy storage project that will support the State’s energy transition. Founded in 2022, the organization sits at the intersection of infrastructure, green energy, and public accountability. With no legacy systems to migrate and no inherited processes to fall back on, they had to build everything from scratch, including their workforce, technology, culture, and support capabilities.
Their blank canvas was both an opportunity and pressure. They needed a platform to cover hiring, onboarding, compliance, learning, performance, and succession. Because they needed to move fast, they wanted to do it once and do it right, with capability to easily scale.
The cost of running without a foundation
Initially, Queensland Hydro operated a patchwork of spreadsheets, disconnected tools, and paper-based forms. Onboarding a new employee meant manually tracking every due date, chasing paperwork, and following up across multiple systems. And all of it was held together by individual effort rather than system design. There was no single source of truth for people data, no reliable compliance reporting, and no way to get a clear picture of the workforce without hours of manual assembly.
For a team trying to scale quickly, the friction was constant. People and Capability Coordinator Lynn Nguyen describes the mental load plainly as a series of calendar invites to herself, manual reminders, and no shared system to work from. People Systems and Training Specialist Bridget Horner said there was no way to get information at the click of a button and that affected everyone.
The compliance picture added a different kind of pressure. Queensland Hydro manages a large workforce of contractors, spread across remote construction sites, that requires mandatory qualifications and site safety requirements before they set foot on site. Managing that workforce manually was just too slow. They had a governance responsibility that required structural answers. They needed a reliable system to track who was compliant and qualified to be on site. Anything less was non-negotiable.
From an IT and security perspective, the fragmentation carried strategic risk too. Without a system of the right caliber, Queensland Hydro faced what Head of Information Communication and Security Ashlen Naicker described as an “information void.” That’s, in his words, an “inability to make good decisions about human capital today, let alone plan confidently for their future.” For a government-owned infrastructure body held to critical infrastructure security standards, that was a key driver.
A decision made to last
Queensland Hydro's evaluation of possible HR platforms was deliberate and demanding, shaped by a philosophy that ran through every major decision: “Done once. Done right.”
They assessed every vendor against 890 cybersecurity criteria aligned to the Cybersecurity Framework. This is the same rigorous standard applied to Queensland's essential services. Cornerstone met almost 90% of those criteria right out of the box, running well ahead of every competitor on security. Critically, according to Ashlen’s team, the score wasn’t the only thing that moved their Cornerstone decision forward. His team valued the additional verifiable evidence, like certifications held, testing completed, and proof of what had actually been achieved rather than claimed.
Technical compliance was just the start. HRIS Project Manager Stephen Hill was looking for something equally important. He wanted a single platform that could track every stage of the employee lifecycle in a single connected experience, and one designed around the employee experience from first application through onboarding, learning, performance, skills, and succession.
Cornerstone really stood out because it had that human-centered design. It was all about the employee. You could track someone from their very first touchpoint as a candidate all the way through learning, performance, skills, and succession. No other system had that level of functionality.”
Stephen Hill
HRIS Project Manager, Queensland Hydro
Stephen couldn’t find another platform that combined everything in the same way Cornerstone did. It met their security bar and covered the full lifecycle depth. And while other systems also answered the question of today, only Cornerstone answered the questions about what Queensland Hydro was building toward for the future. So they chose Corenrstone, and the outcome was the creation of their Hydro Hub.
Seamless, collaborative, roadblock-free delivery
Cornerstone implementation partner Pinpoint helped guide Queensland Hydro through both integrating the core HR and learning modules. That continuity proved its worth. In Stephen’s words, “We had the same consultant and having that continuity made such a difference as Pinpoint knew where we were coming from.” Bridget described the partnership as “collaborative and never just one solution. There'd be multiple ways we could attack something, which was really great."
From an IT perspective, the delivery of Hydro Hub set a new standard. Cornerstone integrated into Queensland Hydro's Azure environment and payroll vendor, instead of sitting alongside the technology ecosystem. By becoming part of their system, when they hire a new employee, Hydro Hub gets to work downstream, automatically granting system access. Ashlen describes it as a blueprint for future cloud transformation and as proof that secure integration and enterprise governance can coexist with deployment agility.
When Hydro Hub went live, one piece of feedback captured the moment summarized the benefits of integrating Cornerstone better than any metric, "We feel like a real company now."
The outcome wasn’t simply technology. Through that evaluation process, it was about trust, visibility, and organizational maturity.”
Ashlen Naicker
Head of Information Communication and Security, Queensland Hydro
What changed and for whom
The impact of Cornerstone runs across every layer of Queensland Hydro because the problem it solved touched everywhere.
For the people team, the shift was from operational burden to strategic contribution. Processes that required constant manual effort became automated and auditable. People and Capability Coordinator Lynn Nguyen estimates “saving four or more hours a week.” She used that time to build Humans of Hydro, an employee spotlight initiative she had always wanted to deliver but never had the capacity for. Bridget describes it as a shift from data entry to strategy and that it opened bandwidth to look ahead rather than just keep up.
For employees, Hydro Hub changed what development looked like. Online learning became accessible. Onboarding became structured and sequenced. Performance reviews became consistent and visible. Together, they pushed completion rates to 98%. And culture survey scores related to development jumped up 10–15% in a short timeframe.
- For Queensland Hydro’s contractor workforce, Cornerstone turned a manual compliance process into a governed one, with benefits like:
- Register on your own
- Complete mandatory site safety inductions remotely
- Upload licenses and qualification documentations for verification
- Run compliance reports on any company before anyone arrives on site
Leaders across the business shifted from dependency to visibility. Team learning status, compliance data, and development progress are now available in real time, without chasing the P&C team. Conversations with the business became more informed and more forward-looking.
What I've gained is not only time, but data security. The confidence that the information I'm giving someone is correct, because it's only updated in one place.”
Bridget Horner
People Systems and Training Specialist, Queensland Hydro
Building the workforce that the project requires
Queensland Hydro is preparing for significant growth. The next construction phase of its pumped hydro project will require a considerably larger workforce. Head of People and Culture Carla Cations knows that the organizations that manage that kind of scale-up well are the ones that plan rather than hire reactively and have systems supporting growth, as opposed to breaking under the strain.
Carla was clear about how the planning should happen, “Integrate workforce planning into business planning. It should not be a parallel exercise. And invest in pipelines early, especially for roles where market supply is constrained.”
Cornerstone is the platform they chose to support this planning and preparation. “Hydro Hub enables data-informed workforce conversations between the People and Culture team and business leaders. It provides a structured view of roles, skills, and learning across the workforce,” Carla explained. With that visibility comes the options of mobility. Lynn added that “Having visibility of skills within our own talent is important because it enables us to do skill mapping, allowing us to rely on internal talent, rather than external, to meet our evolving and growing needs.”
Without systems in place, workforce readiness depends on individual effort rather than organizational design. Ultimately, it’s about removing the friction between intent and execution.”
Carla Cations
Head of People and Culture, Queensland Hydro
AI to augment people, not replacing them
Queensland Hydro's approach to AI reflects the same deliberateness that shaped its technology decisions from the start. Governance frameworks and guardrails were established before expanding use, and their vision that AI should augment human capability, not bypass it is consistent. For Ashlen, that means moving beyond what he calls “decorative AI” and toward functional AI that removes menial work, surfaces insights, and supports human decision-making rather than replacing it.
With Cornerstone, they already have functional AI capability. The performance module includes AI-assisted drafting that helps employees structure and refine their own self-assessments, with the final voice remaining entirely their own. With completion rates for performance reviews at 98%, performance conversations have evolved, while keeping the person at the center of them.
Queensland Hydro’s larger opportunity lies in the convergence of AI and skills data. When AI can surface a cross-system view of an employee's capabilities and match it against organizational needs and learning pathways, development becomes personalized at scale, and targeted recommendations built around what a specific person knows, where they want to go, and what the organization needs next.
AI is so powerful that it can surface things you aren't even aware of - pulling together your current skills from across business systems and surfacing what learning opportunities would be best suited to your capabilities and where you want to go. I see that being the future.”
Stephen Hill
HRIS Project Manager, Queensland Hydro
One word
When asked to sum up what Cornerstone means to Queensland Hydro in a single word, Stephen Hill's answer was immediate, “people.”
People is the word that ties the whole story together.
- The security evaluation mattered because people's data needed to be accurate and protected.
- The lifecycle coverage mattered because people needed to be supported from day one.
- The implementation mattered because people in the P&C team, in IT, business leads and on site needed a system they could trust and actually use.
- The AI roadmap mattered because it genuinely removes the burden of menial work and surfaces insights for people.
Queensland Hydro is still in its early chapters. The workforce will grow substantially. Projects will move from planning to construction and into long-term operation. The demands on every function, people, technology, and compliance will evolve with it. Hydro Hub supports the organization where it is today and builds the foundation for everything that follows.
