Company was recently acquired by private equity, some uncertainty. Prior to that, Smartsheet went over 1 year without a CPO, which led to a bit of deterioration in the culture while I was there. Sr Leadership seemed to de-prioritize the people functions, and culture related KPIs went away. Smartsheet also went through multiple rounds of layoffs in the year leading up to the acquisition.
Unfortunately, management at this company is a "have / have not" scenario. Some business units have management who are well-qualified, treat others with respect and contribute to a positive environment. Other units have poor management and unfortunately have shown a history of hiring the wrong people into those positions and moving far too slowly to correct issues with managers.
For recruiting specifically, there didn't seem to be any focus from leadership on methods to track performance. Decisions seemed to be made based on anecdotal data: who knew who, who had been around longest and most familiar to senior mgmt, etc. This really stung when it came time for recruiting layoffs, because it felt like they went the easy route and drew a line through recruiters based purely on tenure or the function they were supporting, rather than on performance. A few recruiters who they kept around consistently had open reqs with hundreds of untouched applications sitting for weeks, old reqs with unclosed pipelines, active job postings missing required language, etc.. It is something I would never do, I worked hard to have clean pipelines, fine-combed all my reqs and job postings for every detail, and never kept candidates waiting - or worse, ghosting candidate applications completely. But in the end my hard work really felt unimportant and overlooked, because of how they went through with layoffs. If performance was tracked in any kind of organized way, I believe the outcome would have been different.
