How Pave Helped Credit Karma Save Time Operationalizing its Promotion Process

Summary Key Wins Background Challenge Solution Looking Ahead

Summary

Credit Karma is a personal finance company that allows customers to check their credit score for free and receive bespoke financial offers and recommendations.
Credit Karma’s promotion cycle process became increasingly complex as the company scaled, prompting them to seek out a solution that allowed their team to make consistent, clear, and trackable decision making and improve operational efficiency.
Since implementing Pave Compensation Planning for their promotion cycles, Credit Karma has had greater clarity around promotion cycles, and has improved employee retention and engagement.

Key Wins

Modernized its promotion process (and ditched 30+ spreadsheets) by building its comp philosophy and process into Pave
Reduced time spent on admin tasks related to promoting employees, such as communicating compensation information tied to promos
Improved the flexibility and speed that supports the decision making in a promotion cycle leveraging internal frameworks, leader input, and a purpose-built platform with easy access to all the relevant compensation information

Background

Credit Karma is a personal finance company that allows members to check their credit score for free and access financial offers and sets of recommendations like credit cards, personal loans, and more. Since launching in 2007, Credit Karma has worked to combine technology with data to help make personal finance easier for everyone. Acquired by Intuit in 2020, Credit Karma currently has over 1,700 employees across offices in New York, NY, Charlotte, NC, Oakland, CA, Los Angeles, CA, San Diego, CA, and London, England.

Challenge

Credit Karma was looking for a way to better execute its promotion cycles. Promotion cycles at Credit Karma require input from a variety of stakeholders, including the executive team, team leads, HR leaders, and the managers of eligible employees. Over time, this cross-functional process required over 30 different spreadsheets containing key business information. This led to various operational inefficiencies, such as poor tracking of key data, version control issues, and comprehensive feedback.

Wanting to get ahead of any risk, Credit Karma set out to find a tool that could streamline the organization’s promotion cycles. The Credit Karma team hoped to find a new tool that could unify compensation and HR data in one interface and make it easy for business leaders to access and utilize the information.

“Systematically, you need a place that keeps track of changes, so you can avoid errors and missed opportunities. We wanted a tool that was a single source of truth where business leaders could enter in promotion recommendations and adjustments, and automatically kick off an approval chain.” – Wendy Blakeman, Director of Compensation, Credit Karma

Solution

Credit Karma chose to implement Pave to automate many elements of the promotion cycle so the organization could spend less time on admin and more time making informed promotion decisions. The company chose Pave because Blakeman felt the design and UI could help her team accomplish tasks more quickly.

Pave’s implementation team even customized Credit Karma’s software to account for all internal requirements and processes. The Pave implementation included:

Support for promotion cycles
Custom permissions for all HR leaders
Pay rate formulas that pre-populate information based on employee location, level, and title

Since modernizing its promotion cycle through Pave’s scalable software, Credit Karma has been able to:

Reduce time spent on promotion cycles. Blakeman estimates HR business partners have cut the time they spend on admin tasks related to promotion cycles by one-third thanks to Pave. Further, the time spent on these tasks is now used more efficiently, since Pave has cut down on admin work and provides easy access to relevant information.
Make even more informed promotion decisions. Pave built Credit Karma’s compensation philosophy into the software during implementation, eliminating the need for tracking information in spreadsheets, which, in turn, reduced possible errors. This allowed the Credit Karma team to work more effectively by seeing how promotion decisions impacted budget — leading to improved decision quality.
Improve manager education around promotions. Credit Karma wanted more formal approvals and visibility into how promotion decisions impacted the budget. Having a purpose-built system with an approval chain and auto-populated data has given managers more understanding around how promotion decisions happen — empowering them to take greater control of the process.
Track DEI metrics. Pave’s compensation planning tool provides users the ability to track who is being promoted by gender and ethnicity, helping ensure Credit Karma is maintaining a fair and equitable workplace.

“With Pave, HR leaders can now easily go in and see who’s approved for a promotion, their new compensation, and how it impacts the budget. There’s much less back and forth. We didn’t think we could get something like this up and running so quickly, but the Pave team understood our needs and worked to ensure it was ready for our next promotion cycle.” – Wendy Blakeman, Director of Compensation, Credit Karma

Looking Ahead

With Pave fully implemented for promotion cycles, Credit Karma is now looking for additional ways to derive value out of the Pave system, such as using Pave for budget planning and creating training sessions for managers on the Pave software. Credit Karma would like all of its managers to be capable of using Pave in a self-serve way going forward.

‍“The feedback across the board has been positive. HR leaders find the system easy and intuitive.” – Wendy Blakeman, Director of Compensation, Credit Karma