Alternatives to Layoffs With Credit Karma HR Leaders Colleen McCreary and Ashleigh Anderson
In this episode of Redefining HR, I speak with Credit Karma Chief People, Places and Publicity Officer Colleen McCreary and Vice President, Head of Global Talent Acquisition, Ashleigh Anderson. This episode is a first for Redefining HR, as we speak with a CPO and head of talent acquisition together.
We discuss their work at Credit Karma and specifically the alternatives to layoffs that they’ve enacted. Colleen and Ashleigh discuss how their unique approach to redeploying and reskilling talent has helped them avoid layoffs.
Colleen and Ashleigh first worked together at Microsoft in the 1990s. Both have had extensive careers in HR and have seen how important the relationship between HR and talent is for workforces, especially during the past two-plus years.
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Ep 140: Alternatives to Layoffs With Credit Karma HR Leaders Colleen McCreary and Ashleigh Anderson
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Adapting to an Acquisition and the Pandemic
Right as the pandemic was beginning to take hold in February 2020, Credit Karma was announcing that it was being acquired by Intuit. No one knew what would happen next with the acquisition, much less everything else going on with the pandemic.
“We had a lot of ambiguity right off the bat. And then, every company sent everybody home at the beginning of March due to COVID safety concerns. Within two weeks, we were able to start to see very quickly that our partners were tightening,” Colleen says.
Revenue dropped, and the pressure from Credit Karma’s board was intense. But Kenneth Lin, founder and CEO of Credit Karma, and Colleen aligned quickly on doing what they could to avoid layoffs.
“I also was on a management team, with Ken included, who had never been through [layoffs] before. They’d been at companies that did layoffs, but they were never the decision-makers. And I, unfortunately, had,” Colleen explains. “I had talked about the weight of that, what it did to your culture, what it did to the organization. We’re a company whose mission is to help people make financial progress. You can’t think of anything worse than randomly taking away somebody’s job.”
Colleen notes that while the company was profitable during that period, it was burning through cash quickly. That said, she argued that Intuit was buying Credit Karma because of the people who built the technology and business. And this is when Colleen turned to Ashleigh to find alternatives to layoffs.
Avoiding Layoffs During a Pandemic
Credit Karma looked to help people make their own decisions about whether to stay, rather than force the issue through force reductions. The company announced that pay cuts were coming, giving employees a short time period to decide whether they wanted to stay.
Meanwhile, Colleen and Ashleigh decided together to pause recruiting efforts and prioritize their people over profit. “I spent probably about eight weeks with a giant Tetris board,” Ashleigh says, “and I had gone out into the business to literally every single vertical, every horizontal, to talk to leaders and say, ’Hey, what are the projects that are still gonna be impactful and meaningful to our members? What’s the work streams that we can put people on?’ Tell me what we need to get done.’”
Ashleigh took that information and dug through backgrounds, resumes, feedback and other information to help employees find new roles — saving jobs while also growing the company.
“I don’t think that I have ever felt better about work that I’ve done for a company that I’ve worked for than I did at that moment because we were saving people’s livelihoods,” Ashleigh says. “And a lot of these folks were not gonna be people who could leave Credit Karma and find another job the next day because a lot of these roles were business lines that weren’t happening elsewhere, either.”
Through this approach, Colleen and Ashleigh were able to redeploy employees rather than cut them loose.
Rethinking Growth Paths for Your Employees
Finding alternatives to layoffs can have longer-term benefits than simply laying off your employees. I believe that layoffs are a short-term remedy that is executed without much consideration for the long-term effects on organizations.
Credit Karma’s approach is a great case study for chief people officers to understand, and Colleen shares that it’s the company’s “best growth story” they’ve ever had.
“There are very few times in an employee’s life that they can just get to try something out that they really wanted to try and get paid for it. And we all talk about career growth is important and ‘oh, you can move around,’ and that’s a benefit of being at bigger companies,” Colleen says.
Through these redeployments, Colleen and Ashleigh say, employees gained a greater appreciation for their co-workers across departments.
This approach also emphasized the importance of internal mobility and whether managers buy in to that concept.
“I think it did two things for us. When everyone was struggling to rebuild their recruiting team, ours was already there,” Ashleigh says. “They were still in the building, right? We just started to bring them back. And two, I think it put a completely different lens on that internal mobility conversation across the whole company. And so we don’t have managers blocking internal moves.”
Credit Karma weathered the pandemic and ultimately completed its sale to Intuit in large part by keeping its talent, putting people first and helping them find new career paths while strengthening the company.
“If you’re gonna take a chance on somebody, why wouldn’t you take a chance on somebody who already works here?” Colleen says. “We have a proof point that you can do that — you can bring in people from the organization who don’t have the same skill set and make them successful. And I think that narrative is so critical for where we are at right now.”