Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi

Human Resource Management

End Term Project
Company Name – Adobe

Submitted to – Dr. Priyanka Jaiswal

Submitted by – Prasanna Pande
Roll no. 31B
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 Introduction
Adobe Systems Inc. is one of those rare Silicon Valley tech companies that has managed to
stay relevant for more than 30 years. Millions of computer users enjoy Adobe products like
Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Reader, helping the company grow to 14,000
employees and roughly $5 billion in revenue.
And the company is still evolving. As of 2021, all new versions of Adobe software have
transitioned to the Creative Cloud, the company’s cloud-based subscription model, which
freed its software engineers to implement more aggressive upgrade cycles and release new
versions of products as soon as they become available.
Since then, the company has been growing rapidly, hiring roughly 1,000 new employees
every quarter, said Jeff Vijungco, vice president of global talent. This rapid-fire hiring has
kept Vijungco on his toes, first as a head of talent acquisition, and now as the person in
charge of making sure all new hires have what they need to thrive. “When you hire 4,000
people a year, ensuring their onboarding tees them up for success isn’t easy,” he said

Adobe Recruitment Strategy

 Inclusive recruiting practices
 To generate interest from diverse pools of candidates and create an inclusive
and welcoming interview experience, we make sure our interviewers come
from diverse backgrounds.
 Our internal bias training programs help our hiring managers and interview
panels mitigate potential bias and make sound hiring decisions.
 Our global Diversity & Inclusion talent acquisition trainings help Adobe's
recruiting team strengthen their skills in sourcing, attracting, and engaging
diverse candidates.
 Sourcing candidates in a variety of ways
 We sponsor and recruit at numerous conferences, including AfroTech, Black
is Tech, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (U.S. and India),
Lesbians Who Tech Summit, Women Hack, Women in Product, and Tapia
Diversity in Computing Conference among others.
 We also partner with Management Leadership for Tomorrow, UNCF, National
Society of Black Engineers, Vets in Tech, BreakLine, HBCU Partnership
Challenge Braintrust, Project Hired, GEM and other organizations to source
great talent.
 Recruit at a broad range of colleges and universities.
 Universities are among our greatest sources of diverse talent and fresh
perspectives. We engage with historically black colleges such as Clark Atlanta
University, Morehouse College, North Carolina A&T State University, and
Spelman College in addition to Hispanic-serving institutions.

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  We also reach out to campus student clubs like the Black Business Student
Association, Society of Latino Engineers and Scientists, and Women in
Computer Science.
 And we partner with United Negro College Fund (UNCF).

Hiring Needs of Adobe

 Stickiness of Hire
 Vijungco joined Adobe in 2008 as a recruiter and fully admits that his talent
development credentials were slim when he was offered the talent
leadership role in 2013. “I led talent acquisition, not talent development,” he
said. “Putting me in this role was a stretch.”
 Adobe leadership disagreed. For years, Vijungco had established himself as a
thorn in hiring managers’ sides because he was never willing to just start
recruiting every time a manager requested a new hire.
 First, they had to sit down with him and explain why they wanted to hire
someone from the outside, whether there was a clear need, and why they
couldn’t coach someone on their own team to fill the gap. “A lot of times, we
found that it was a performance or coaching issue; if we hired someone new,
we would just be adding to the problem,” he said. If they insisted, Vijungco
then challenged them on their hiring criteria.
 Vijungco’s talent acquisition strategy is what made him attractive for the
development role. When he took the position, one of his first goals was to
integrate talent acquisition with talent development to create a seamless
onboarding experience that set employees on a career development path
from day one. He started by changing the way recruiters engage with new
hires.
 Recruiters are sales-oriented and measure their success by things like time-
to-fill a role, but once the job is filled, they quickly move on to the next one,
Vijungco said. That created a gap between hiring and onboarding. To close it,
Vijungco added a new performance metric for recruiters around “stickiness
of hire.”
 To ensure new hires stick around, recruiters are expected to stay with them
through the first several months of employment to create a more seamless
transition from candidate to productive employee. Recruiters now work
directly with the human resources and talent development teams, involving
them in weekly meetings to discuss short lists of candidates for key roles,
what each person brings to the table, and where they may need
development or coaching to fill gaps. “It gives them more context for the
person once they are hired,” said Trisha Colton, senior director of executive
talent search.

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  As soon as a candidate is selected, their recruiter works with HR and their
hiring manager to create a career development plan that includes short- and
long-term performance goals, development needs and a meeting plan to
connect them with people they need to know to succeed in their jobs. The
recruiter also shares their perspective on what the new hire will need to
succeed based on the weeks they spent recruiting them.
 Recruiters continue to follow up with their new hires, touching base in the
first few days and then every few weeks to be sure they have what they need
to do their jobs. “Our goal is to set them up for success in their first 90 days,”
Colton said. “That’s the time frame when most new hires are still making up
their mind about whether this is the right fit.”
 The decision to make development part of the recruiter’s job helped to
reinforce the learning culture at Adobe, and it lets new hires know they will
have opportunities to grow from the start, said Liz Quinn, director of global
talent development. “By day two, we are talking about their career plans and
how we are going to help them succeed,” she said.
 Further, Colton said it doesn’t require a lot of extra time from recruiters. It’s
more about involving managers and HR in conversations that were once only
held by the recruiting team.

 Learning in the Cloud

 Along with integrating recruiters into the talent development process,
Vijungco also revamped the company’s approach to learning. Following
Adobe’s strategic move to the cloud, he pulled much of the company’s
leadership development content out of classrooms and put it online.
Facilitators were on the road 120 days a year, teaching the company’s
signature Leading@Adobe course to 20-30 managers at a time — if they all
showed up. “We were hitting about 5 percent of our population. That was a
problem,” Vijungco said
 Instead of implementing a lot of self-paced learning, the team used Adobe
Connect — the company’s mobile Web conferencing software — to create a
series of virtual labs and online classroom courses that employees could take
from their offices. The content and the trainers were the same, but the reach
and impact was much greater.
 At first, the facilitators thought teaching in a virtual environment wouldn’t be
that different from teaching a course online. Not true, said Justin Mass,
director of digital learning. Facilitators had to learn how to adjust lighting,
queue videos and manage chat rooms all while they are on the air. It required
a significant behaviour change.
 To ease them into the new learning environment, Mass created a digital
facilitator boot camp to ramp up their skills. The development team also
provided employees with access to a library of online training modules on a

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 variety of topics from lynda.com and Harvard Manage Mentor, and business
book summaries from get Abstract.

 Usage Data Soars

 Once the digital content was in place, the learning and development team
worked with the information technology department to develop a reporting
tool to track content usage rates and create dashboards to highlight results.
They report usage rates to leadership, identify trends in content usage that
might suggest skill gaps, and help managers understand what learning their
people are accessing and who their biggest users are. “Moving to digital
forced us to develop a real data strategy,” Mass said.
 That data tracking strategy enabled Mass’ team to compile statistics that
demonstrate impressive uptake in the new virtual content. In 2015, more
than 8,000 employees completed the digital Leading@Adobe course — up
from just 500 managers in 2013. More than 2,800 new hires attended the
digital new hire orientation via Adobe Connect. The company has seen
“stickiness” of new hires rise to almost 100 percent, up nearly 10 points from
five years ago, Vijungco said.
 The development team is now working with IT to link content usage data
with other HR data so they can further parse results by geography, title,
manager and other demographics. “It is just one more way the talent
development role at Adobe has shifted,” Quinn said. “Now we act more like
consultants to the business.”
 For companies interested in following in Adobe’s path, Quinn said to
“deconstruct so you can reconstruct. The opportunity to learn and grow is a
promise we make to all our employees.” Integrating recruiting with
development and moving learning is helping the company fulfill that promise
on a much grander scale.

Training and Development at Adobe

Once the digital content was in place, the learning and development team worked with the
information technology department to develop a reporting tool to track content usage rates
and create dashboards to highlight results. They report usage rates to leadership, identify
trends in content usage that might suggest skill gaps, and help managers understand what
learning their people are accessing and who their biggest users are. “Moving to digital
forced us to develop a real data strategy,” Mass said.
That data tracking strategy enabled Mass’ team to compile statistics that demonstrate
impressive uptake in the new virtual content. In 2015, more than 8,000 employees
completed the digital Leading@Adobe course — up from just 500 managers in 2013. More
than 2,800 new hires attended the digital new hire orientation via Adobe Connect. The

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company has seen “stickiness” of new hires rise to almost 100 percent, up nearly 10 points
from five years ago, Vijungco said.
The development team is now working with IT to link content usage data with other HR data
so they can further parse results by geography, title, manager and other demographics. “It is
just one more way the talent development role at Adobe has shifted,” Quinn said. “Now we
act more like consultants to the business.”
For companies interested in following in Adobe’s path, Quinn said to “deconstruct so you
can reconstruct. The opportunity to learn and grow is a promise we make to all our
employees.” Integrating recruiting with development and moving learning is helping the
company fulfil that promise on a much grander scale.

Adobe Performance Appraisal and Performance Evaluation

In 2012, Adobe abolished annual performance reviews in favour of a lightweight approach
we call Check-in. Consisting of informal, ongoing conversations between managers and
employees, Check-in focuses on the future, not the past, with a goal of inspiring everyone to
bring their best to the company.

 Why did Adobe adopt this new program?

At a time when we were transforming our business with an innovative new sales model, our
stale performance management process threatened to slow us down. Performance reviews
took up about 80,000 hours of our managers' time each year, causing a significant drag on
focus and productivity. And by stack-ranking employees and rating their skill levels, the
reviews diminished morale and motivation, and led to spikes in voluntary attrition at a time
when we couldn't afford to lose talent.
Check-ins are addressing these shortcomings with forward-looking conversations that make
employees feel valued and supported, and that encourage real teamwork and improved
productivity.

 What was hard about getting Check-in off the ground?

The biggest challenge involved creating a new mindset. We invested heavily in change
management to help our managers take ownership of the process and establish a culture in
which employees would welcome and act upon ongoing feedback. Another big challenge
was that some employees were initially uncomfortable with the idea of a performance
management process that had so little structure and documentation. We also had to build
our managers' skill sets around compensation planning for our annual Rewards Check-in
process.
With time and training, we've made significant progress in helping both managers and
employees become comfortable with Check-in. We continue making investments to ensure
that the experience is a great one.

 How have Adobe made it a success?

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We've learned some important lessons on our Check-in journey. Here's why we think we've
been successful:
We’ve partnered closely with our executive team. Check-in needs to be role-modeled from
the top.
We've made big investments in our managers' capabilities and development.
We’ve communicated early and often. We engaged employees in a dialogue before we
made the move and we've communicating progress regularly.
We’ve built a centralized Employee Resource Center that has helped us scale the program.
We’ve taken global differences into account, working with legal entities like regional work
councils and vetting any concerns early.

 What results have Adobe seen to date?

Since rolling out Check-in, Adobe has redeployed the time managers spent administering
the annual review process to more impactful Check-in conversations and important business
priorities. We saved an estimated 80,000 manager hours spent on the formal review process
in the first year of Check-in, and with headcount growth since then, we believe we now save
more than 100,000 manager hours each year. We’ve also seen a drop in voluntary attrition
and an increase in involuntary departures from employees who aren’t meeting
expectations.
Our annual employee surveys also attest to the success of Check-in. Between 2012 and
2015, we've seen a 10% increase in the number of employees who say they’d recommend
Adobe as a great place to work, a 10% increase in the number who say they receive ongoing
feedback that helps their performance, and a 5% increase in the number who say their
managers are open to receiving feedback from them.

Before: The annual

performance review After: Check-in

Setting priorities Employee priorities set at the Priorities discussed and

start of the year and often not adjusted with manager
revisited. regularly.
Feedback process Long process of submitting Ongoing process of feedback
accomplishments, soliciting and dialogue with no formal
feedback, and writing reviews. written review or
documentation.
Compensation decisions Onerous process of rating and No formal rating or ranking;
ranking each employee to manager determines salary
determine salary increase and and equity annually based on
equity. performance.
Cadence of meetings Feedback sessions inconsistent Feedback conversations
and not monitored. Spike in expected quarterly, with
employee productivity at the ongoing feedback becoming
end of the year, timed with the norm. Consistent

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HR team role
Training and resources
performance review employee productivity based
discussions. on ongoing discussions and
feedback throughout the
year.
HR team managed paperwork HR team equips employees
and processes to ensure all and managers to have
steps were completed. constructive conversations.
Manager coaching and A centralized Employee
resources came from HR Resource Center provides
partners who couldn’t always help and answers whenever
reach everyone. needed.

Organisational Structure
For digital implementation projects, there is usually a centralized team structure which is
implemented. There are individual teams which have a team lead which then reports to the
head of digital, ecommerce lead or the product owner.

The following diagram shows an example of how the organizational structure would look:

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 Conclusion
Best practices for hiring the best people. Diverse employees drive the success of Adobe.
They cast a wide net to help increase the number of qualified women and underrepresented
minorities they hire, and they also look for promising candidates beyond the tech industry.

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