UNLEASH America: Driving talent mobility with data

Talent has never been more mobile.

The US is approaching a year of the ‘Great Resignation’ and recently saw its tenth month in a row of more than four million resignations. Similar trends are occurring elsewhere in the world.

Research shows that a leading cause of the ‘Great Resignation’ is a lack of career development or internal mobility opportunities.

A study by Lever found that 67% of 1,200 US workers would quit if they were offered no internal mobility at work – 20% want employers to prioritize career development in 2022 and 41% planning to ask for a role change this year.

At UNLEASH America 2022, Credit Karma’s head of talent Ashleigh Anderson shared how the fintech company implemented an internal mobility program during the pandemic.

Spoiler: data and analytics are essential to Credit Karma’s approach.

Data, insights and internal mobility

In 2018, Credit Karma went through a shift in its HR and people strategy when Anderson joined the startup.

She oversaw an overhaul of recruitment, as well as introducing a $5,000 professional development budget per employee per year.

Then COVID-19 hit, and Credit Karma was faced with how difficult decisions – to lay people off or to lower everyone’s pay? They look the latter route and reduced all employees’ pay by 15%.

At the same time, they were asked to move 10% of workers to different jobs and departments in response to a crisis business situation, which Anderson described as “when shit hit the fan”.

This was the beginning of its internal mobility program, and it saw a mindset shift in the business.

“We totally reset the way that the business interacted with recruiting, how we saw internal moves”, according to Anderson.

It also reset the focus from job titles to skills, which is something that Novartis’ René Gessenich spoke about at his session at UNLEASH America 2022.

Two years on, what were the results? Anderson was very clear of the need to track everything – tech like Greenhouse, Workday and CultureAmp helped Credit Karma here.

10% of the company moved roles, and 46% completed changed career paths because of the internal mobility program.

In the 2021 CultureAmp survey, 79% of employees said they had good career opportunities at Credit Karma – this is up from 73% in 2019.

81% said they were developing professionally in 2019 – this rose to 84% in 2021.

Anderson concluded: “People want to own their careers, they want to see progress in their development.”

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