Talent & Culture Strategy at Adobe: Continuous Feedback, by Design

This article is part of MokaHR's Talent & Culture Strategy series, which profiles how leading companies build their people strategies.

In the autumn of 2012, on a long-haul flight to India, an Adobe executive named Donna Morris — then Chief Human Resources Officer — was asked by a journalist what she would do to disrupt HR. Jet-lagged and off-guard, she said the company planned to abolish annual performance reviews.

She hadn't yet told her team. She hadn't told the CEO.

What followed was one of the most widely discussed management experiments in modern corporate history. Adobe had spent 80,000 manager hours a year on annual reviews — the equivalent of 40 full-time employees doing nothing else. Internal surveys showed employees left those reviews feeling less motivated than before. Voluntary turnover spiked every February, as people processed disappointing ratings and began updating their CVs. Morris and her team decided the process was producing the opposite of its intended effect.

The new system — called Check-In — launched company-wide by late 2012. Within a year, voluntary turnover had dropped 30%. The 80,000 manager hours were reclaimed. More than a decade later, the system is still in use. It has become one of the most-cited examples of performance management redesign in HR literature, studied at Stanford Graduate School of Business and benchmarked by companies across industries.

Adobe's talent & culture strategy is, in many ways, the story of that one decision — and what it revealed about how organisational design shapes behaviour.

Adobe has appeared on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list for more than two decades — a record that spans the company's transformation from a desktop software business into a cloud subscription platform. It ranked #15 on Glassdoor's Best Places to Work 2024 (US) and #19 in 2025, with an overall Glassdoor rating of 4.1/5 from more than 10,000 employee reviews. In 2025, Fortune named Adobe among the World's 25 Best Workplaces, ranked 20th globally. Gloria Chen, Adobe's Chief People Officer and EVP of Employee Experience — a 25-year Adobe veteran who took the CHRO role in 2020 — was recognised by N2Growth as one of the top CHROs of 2024.

How does Adobe attract and hire talent?

Hiring for values first

Adobe's four core values — Genuine, Exceptional, Innovative, and Involved — were established by founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke in 1982 and have remained largely unchanged. They are not marketing language. At Adobe, they are the criteria against which hiring decisions are made and performance is assessed. Recruiters are trained to evaluate cultural alignment explicitly alongside technical capability, and hiring managers are expected to make the case for both before an offer is extended.

This creates a coherent approach to talent acquisition at a company that employs over 30,000 people across 75 locations. For HR leaders benchmarking against Adobe, the lesson is less about the specific values and more about the discipline of using them operationally — not just aspirationally. A value that does not filter hiring decisions is a marketing statement, not a talent strategy.

Adobe recruits through campus partnerships and graduate programmes, a robust internship pipeline, and experienced hire channels for technical and creative roles. The company has sustained a particular emphasis on diversity in its hiring pipeline: underrepresented groups make up approximately 11% of its US workforce, supported by targeted outreach, inclusive job description practices, and partnerships with historically underrepresented communities. The company's employer brand — reinforced by its consistent placement on Glassdoor and Fortune lists — reduces the cost of attraction in competitive talent markets like San Jose, New York, and Seattle.

This approach sits in contrast to Shopify's more radical hiring model, which emphasises extreme selectivity and a deliberately small headcount relative to revenue. Adobe, operating at far greater scale and with broader product complexity, requires a different balance between selectivity and volume.

How Adobe retains the people it hires

Adobe's retention strategy begins before an employee's first day. The company offers up to $10,000 per year in education reimbursement, a Wellness and Learning reimbursement benefit, and access to CareerFest — a company-wide career development event. These are not unusual at large technology firms. What distinguishes Adobe's retention approach is the structural decision it made in 2012: to tie retention not to compensation or perks, but to the quality of the manager-employee relationship itself.

The Check-In system is the mechanism. By requiring regular, documented conversations between managers and employees about goals, feedback, and career trajectory, Adobe created a process that surfaces disengagement before it becomes resignation. Employees who feel stuck, undervalued, or uncertain about their path are more likely to surface those concerns in a quarterly Check-In than to raise them in an annual review. The data bears this out: voluntary turnover dropped 30% in the year following the system's introduction, while involuntary departures — of underperformers identified through more regular honest conversations — increased by 50%.

The takeaway: Adobe's retention strategy is not a benefits programme. It is a management discipline, enforced through process design.

📄 2025 AI Recruitment Casebook Adobe's Check-In model works because it generates continuous data about employee engagement and career intent — the kind of signal that AI-powered HR tools are increasingly able to surface at scale. To see how companies across 10 industries are using AI to improve hiring quality, reduce time-to-fill, and build more predictive talent pipelines, download MokaHR's full AI Recruitment Report. Download the free report →

Trusted by: Tesla · NVIDIA · McDonald's · Nestlé · Schneider Electric Trusted by 3,000+ enterprises | 30%+ of Fortune 500 companies

How does Adobe develop and manage employee performance?

The Check-In system: what it is and how it works

Check-In has three focus areas: goals and expectations (Adobe's term for OKRs, reviewed quarterly), ongoing feedback (which can be requested from any colleague at any time via a centralised digital platform), and career development and growth. Sessions are called by the employee or manager as needed — there is no fixed schedule — and are deliberately informal. There is no mandatory paperwork, no numerical rating, and no forced-distribution ranking.

This last point matters. Adobe's old system had required managers to sort employees into performance tiers with fixed quotas — a small percentage could be rated "high performer" regardless of actual performance distribution. The system created unhealthy internal competition and gave managers a convenient excuse to avoid honest compensation conversations: "I rated you highly, but HR wouldn't let me give you a bigger raise." Under Check-In, managers receive decision-making authority over compensation, including access to market data and role-specific benchmarks. The accountability is theirs.

The digital infrastructure supports the model. All goals are documented in a centralised platform, visible to both manager and employee, and can be updated in real time. Stakeholder feedback can be exchanged with anyone at any time and is stored centrally. Employees have access to Adobe's Career Discovery tool — a data-driven internal platform that shows where people in similar roles have moved within the company — making internal mobility visible rather than accidental.

A comparable shift in management philosophy has driven strong engagement outcomes at Microsoft, where Satya Nadella's growth mindset transformation similarly depended on redesigning how managers interact with their teams. Both cases demonstrate the same principle: performance management is a design problem, not a policy problem.

Development and learning infrastructure

Adobe's approach to employee development sits alongside the Check-In system rather than being embedded in it. The company offers up to $10,000 annually in education reimbursement for employees pursuing formal qualifications or long-term learning. Personalised learning paths — tied to individual career goals and aligned with Adobe's business needs — are available through internal programmes and external partnerships. The company also runs mentorship programmes and skill development workshops across technical, creative, and leadership domains.

The Accelerate Adobe Life programme provides structured development support for employees at key career transitions, combining focused feedback sessions with targeted stretch assignments. Adobe's Lab82 — originally a physical space at the San Jose headquarters — has evolved into an internal research engine examining how Adobe employees work, with findings applied to the company's hybrid and remote work strategy.

Key workforce and performance metrics

The takeaway: Check-In's longevity — over a decade in operation with no sign of reversal — is itself a data point. Performance management redesigns that fail tend to fail within two to three years, as organisations revert to familiar structures under pressure. Adobe's system has survived multiple leadership transitions, a full business model transformation, and a global pandemic.

What can HR leaders learn from Adobe's approach?

Adobe's talent strategy is not a technology play, a branding play, or a benefits play. It is fundamentally a management design play. The principles behind it are replicable without Adobe's budget or brand recognition.

Replace the annual review with a cadence, not a form. The failure mode of most performance management redesigns is substituting one form of paperwork for another — adding quarterly check-in templates to an annual process and calling it continuous feedback. Adobe's system works because Check-Ins are decoupled from ratings, rankings, and compensation decisions. Managers have something genuinely useful to say in each conversation because it is not a performance tribunal. If your organisation is considering a similar shift, the design question is not "how often?" but "what is the conversation actually for?" Structured recruitment and performance workflows that separate development conversations from compensation decisions can create the same structural clarity at scale.

Make internal mobility visible. Adobe's Career Discovery tool does something deceptively simple: it shows employees where people in similar roles have moved within the company. This makes internal mobility concrete rather than abstract. Employees who can see a plausible internal career trajectory are less likely to look externally. Most organisations have the data to build something similar; few have structured it for employee consumption. Talent analytics platforms can make career path data visible across the organisation, turning retention from a reactive intervention into a structural feature of the employee experience.

Give managers real compensation authority — and train them to use it. Adobe's move away from fixed-tier ratings was only credible because it simultaneously gave managers meaningful discretion over pay decisions, along with the market data to exercise that discretion fairly. Without the latter, manager discretion becomes manager arbitrariness, which is worse than a rigid system. The design implication: compensation authority and compensation transparency need to move together. AI-powered screening and benchmarking tools can support this by providing managers with role-specific market data at the point of decision, rather than requiring them to request it from HR.

As a point of contrast, P&G's performance system operates on a fundamentally different logic — using quarterly W&DP reviews and cross-team calibration as infrastructure for a 99% internal promotion rate, rather than to drive individual development conversations. Neither model is universally superior; the right design depends on whether the company's core talent challenge is pipeline depth (P&G) or engagement quality (Adobe's 2012 starting point).

What is it like to work at Adobe?

Adobe's culture is described consistently by employees through a few recurring themes: access to leadership, creative energy, and a sense that the company's products and mission are genuinely connected to the work. In employee reviews on Glassdoor, comments about "fireside chats with executives," "the best benefits I've seen anywhere," and being "challenged and growing" appear repeatedly alongside more critical observations about pace of change and the pressures of a company managing AI transition at scale.

The benefits package is competitive by any measure. Adobe offers a sabbatical programme, generous parental leave, healthcare coverage, the $10,000 annual education reimbursement, and the Wellness and Learning benefit that covers gym memberships, mental health support, and personal development spending. The company's hybrid work model — studied and refined through its Lab82 research programme — includes designated meeting facilitators for cross-location teams and structured "stretch breaks" embedded into remote meeting culture.

Adobe's approach to diversity and inclusion is programme-heavy and data-driven. The company tracks representation across gender, race, and ethnicity, publishing data annually in its corporate responsibility report. Underrepresented groups make up approximately 11% of the US workforce. Employee network groups — covering communities including women in technology, LGBTQ+ employees, and employees with disabilities — are active and company-supported.

The honest tension in Adobe's employer story is AI. The company that built Firefly — Adobe's generative AI platform, which generated over 15 billion images in its first two years — is also navigating the workforce implications of the tools it is selling. For creative professionals and designers employed at Adobe, the question of how AI changes their roles is not abstract. Gloria Chen has spoken publicly about Adobe's commitment to positioning AI as augmentation rather than replacement, but the transition is ongoing and the outcome uncertain. HR professionals evaluating Adobe as a benchmark should note that its celebrated people practices were built in a period of rapid headcount growth; how those practices hold under a more constrained hiring environment will be a genuine test.

Frequently asked questions

What is Adobe's Check-In performance management system? Adobe's Check-In system replaced traditional annual performance reviews in 2012. Rather than a single high-stakes annual event, Check-In involves frequent, informal conversations between managers and employees — at least every other month — covering three areas: goals and expectations (Adobe's equivalent of OKRs), regular feedback, and career development. There are no numerical ratings or forced-distribution rankings. Compensation decisions are made through a separate annual Rewards Check-in, decoupled from the development process. Since its introduction, Adobe has reported a 30% reduction in voluntary turnover and savings of 80,000 manager hours per year.

How does Adobe attract and hire talent? Adobe recruits through a mix of campus partnerships, internship programmes, and experienced hire pipelines, with particular emphasis on technical and creative roles. The company hires for values alignment — its core principles of Genuine, Exceptional, Innovative, and Involved — alongside functional capability. Adobe has maintained a sustained focus on diversity in its hiring pipeline, with underrepresented groups comprising approximately 11% of its US workforce. The company has appeared on Glassdoor's Best Places to Work list consistently since 2009, which supports its employer brand in competitive talent markets.

What employee development programmes does Adobe offer? Adobe offers up to $10,000 per year in education reimbursement for employees pursuing long-term learning. The company provides personalised learning paths tied to individual career goals, mentorship access, and skill development workshops. Its Career Discovery tool — a data-driven internal platform — shows employees where people in similar roles have moved within Adobe, making internal mobility more transparent and accessible. Adobe also runs CareerFest events and provides a Wellness and Learning reimbursement benefit alongside its formal L&D programmes.

What are Adobe's most recent employer recognition awards? Adobe has appeared on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list for more than two decades. It ranked #15 on Glassdoor's Best Places to Work 2024 (US) and #19 in 2025, with a 4.1/5 employee rating on Glassdoor as of 2026. Adobe ranked No. 20 on Fortune's 2025 World's 25 Best Workplaces list, and appeared on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For — Europe list, ranked 36th. Gloria Chen, Adobe's Chief People Officer and EVP of Employee Experience, was named one of the top CHROs by N2Growth in 2024.

See also

• Talent & Culture Strategy at MICROSOFT

• Talent & Culture Strategy at P&G: Building from Within

• Talent & Culture Strategy at Shopify: Subtraction as a Competitive Advantage

Ready to redesign your performance management the way Adobe did? MokaHR's platform gives HR teams the structured workflows, continuous feedback infrastructure, and talent analytics needed to replace cumbersome annual reviews with something that actually works. Book a personalised demo →