PIPs are disingenuous. If you get put on one, find a new job as fast as possible, HR exec says.
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Nolan Church, a former recruiter at Google and DoorDash and ex-chief people officer at Carta, about his experience of putting people on PIPs. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I've spent my career in recruitment. From May 2012 to early 2015, I worked as a recruiter for Google Access. Then, I became the head of recruiting at DoorDash and later the chief people officer at Carta, a pre-IPO equity management company for startups.
DoorDash was the first place I encountered performance improvement plans or PIPs. They're a way of giving a low performer a chance to correct a performance problem before termination.
When I joined as the head of talent in March 2015, I was the company's 50th employee. This was a key leadership role for HR and recruiting. We were setting a company precedent for how we wanted to manage our employees.
As we started encountering low performers, we needed to figure out how to manage them. So we talked to former or current heads of HR at other companies to understand how they thought about performance management.
