Ambitious, Indeed

Indeed’s new CPO, Priscilla Koranteng, is starting with a bang. The former Kellogg's HR and diversity exec returned to tech less than one month ago with major plans to transform Indeed’s people team. Already, she’s shared her vision to help Indeed hire 4,000 new employees this year and fast-tracked the expansion of the company’s abortion travel policies following the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Despite the tech industry’s floundering, Koranteng has strong beliefs that now is the time to supercharge your hiring. She spoke with Protocol to discuss what she views as her top priorities in her work at Indeed right now.

Why you might not want to separate diversity from the head of HR function:

• “I myself as an HR professional challenged the status quo and said I would never be a stand-alone chief diversity officer. I want to own parts of HR, so I became a head of Talent, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for that reason — to really drive equity within the ecosystem of HR.”
• “It’s not a stand-alone position; HR has evolved. So you will begin to see companies embed DEI into everything that they do … You cannot separate it.”

How Indeed is expanding its abortion travel policies:

• “[O]ur company had already in October made some adjustments to our travel benefit for our employees, but this week we were able to enhance that benefit by putting it into a health care plan, actually, and that benefit of $5,000 travel for our employees became $10,000.”
• “When things like a political decision, elections [happen], what happened with the pandemic or the racial unrest, HR is at the front and center of all that to help the organization accelerate its response.”
• “And everything that's happening around us in the world is impacting people, impacting their personal lives, and it's impacting their professional lives.”

How to navigate today’s talent market:

• “I've been in a transformation environment, so I know that sometimes you have to scale up, sometimes you have to scale down. And so, yes, some companies are going through that.”
• “What happens is also that it kind of opens up the talent pool on the outside a little bit. It opens up the talent pool somewhere else.”
• “[A]s we think about talent regardless of the state of the company — whether it's in high growth or a steady state or a big transformation is happening — it's how you look at your workforce in a way that really supports your culture.”

Read the full interview.

The state of startup comp

This week, my colleague Sarah Roach wrote about the shifting landscape of startup comp for Source Code. She cited a new report from Carta showing that adjusting pay based on where workers live is happening a lot, despite the debate over location-based pay. Here are more insights from the report:

• Engineering accounts for almost half of all payroll spend for companies valued between $1 and $10 million.
• Terminations are rising, making up 29% of departures in May 2022 (the rest is employees leaving by choice), compared to 15% in August 2021.
• Head count expands as valuations increase, though not always linearly. Only 12% of unicorns have fewer than 250 employees. The average head count for companies valued over $1 billion is 700.

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Making moves

UKG has appointed Chris Todd as CEO. Previously he was president of the company. Chairman and former CEO Aron Ain is transitioning to executive chair.

Glassdoor has a new chief economist to help crunch the numbers on the Great Resignation/Great Hunkering Down or whatever it is. Aaron Terrazas joins Glassdoor from Convoy and also previously worked at Zillow.

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