Although innovation has always been a prominent part of Mastercard’s business, the payments technology company recognized a growing need to reinvent its approach to recruiting and retaining tech talent globally. The solution? Reimagining its hiring process in the same way it would launch a new tech product.
Mastercard’s tech talent leaders brought the mechanics of agile development to HR. They pulled together a cross-functional team to create what they called the TEAM (Talent Excellence Always-on Model) approach. The effort was designed to establish a faster, more consistent hiring process for tech roles to meet the company’s evolving needs. Starting as a small pilot, similar to a minimal viable product (MVP), the TEAM approach has since expanded into a global program.
In an interview with McKinsey Partner Suman Thareja, Mastercard President and Chief Technology Officer Ed McLaughlin and Executive Vice President of People and Capability for Technology Charman Hayes discuss their journey and the impact the new TEAM approach has had on job candidates, Mastercard’s HR team, and its tech function. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Suman Thareja: Ed, what is it like to be a technologist at Mastercard?
Ed McLaughlin: Over the last 20 years, we’ve gone from what was seen as a card company to a leader in e-commerce, mobile payments, and tokenization. Today, we’re using advanced AI techniques to combat fraud and are working in areas like quantum encryption and agentic commerce. The throughline is that technology enables and animates what Mastercard does, and all technology comes down to the people who do it. So when we present our technology strategy to our board of directors, we always say that, in the end, any tech strategy is simply a people strategy.
Suman Thareja: With that perspective in mind, Charman, can you share why Mastercard needed to reimagine its tech talent attraction and retention strategy?
Charman Hayes: We had a business case process in which each role we wanted to replace had to be approved individually, which sometimes took months or even quarters. Managers and candidates had very different experiences with the hiring process depending on their location, business function, and role. We recognized that to be more competitive, we needed more consistency, pace, and scale. That’s how the TEAM model came to life.
Suman Thareja: Many companies think of talent as a cost center. What was Mastercard’s mindset at the time you decided to change your tech talent strategy?
Ed McLaughlin: Technical talent is one of our strongest assets—and you think about assets fundamentally differently from how you think about cost centers. The attitude we took toward tech talent was to focus on how we can hire the best people and create an environment where they can do their best work. That became the business case: thinking about tech talent not as an expense but as an asset we wanted to invest in.
Starting with strategy and sprints
Suman Thareja: How did you get started?
Ed McLaughlin: I think this is essential for any organization. We started with a better understanding of who we are as a company and what type of people we want to attract. We overhauled how we talked about ourselves and about technology in the outside world. We got louder and more specific about our hiring narrative in the right places, saying, “If you want to do important work, build globally scaled technology, and take advantage of some of the richest data sets and most advanced AI, Mastercard is the best place for you.” Subsequently, our applicant response rate improved by 400 percent.
Second, we took a design-thinking, customer-centric view of our processes across locations and geographies. We recognized inadequacies across locations and geographies. As a global company, it was critical to look enterprise-wide at the whole process and work together across our different offices to improve it and create a North Star, candidate-centric journey.
Next, we focused on raising the bar. Too often, in a cost center model, people talk about filling the seat and time to hire—not about who you’re hiring, which is the ultimate goal. We developed a strong system of guilds—communities of practitioners focused on professional excellence and knowledge sharing across the company—where a guild is not a job description but a connection point for a craft or passion. Our guild model enables our best people to participate in the recruiting process—not necessarily for jobs on their teams, but to bring people into Mastercard as part of their guild, with an emphasis on uplifting the whole organization. The guilds have helped us with setting the bar, interviews, onboarding, training, and development.
Last, and probably most importantly, we constantly inspected and adapted. We asked ourselves what was working and what wasn’t, and how we needed to course correct along the way.
Suman Thareja: How long did it take you to get this new model up and running?
Ed McLaughlin: We shared with our stakeholders that our ability to recruit and retain the right talent was an enterprise risk. That became a galvanizing moment. And rather than having some long, multiyear think tank type of effort, we took an agile approach and started with two-week sprints—leveraging our learnings from product development. How do we incrementally start delivering in two-week sprints? How do we identify issues and quickly unblock the team? How do we get the right leadership around it? How do we dedicate the teams and make sure the funding is there?
In the first 16 weeks, we dedicated a team, empowered them, and created a globally aligned North Star journey. That internal team started with about 24 people—from recruiters to hiring managers and leadership—and quickly grew to around 90. We pivoted to pooled hiring, automated metrics, created new interview artifacts, and trained interviewers—and that’s when everything started to come together. Then we iterated from there.
We built a process for pooled hiring that enabled us to move faster while still bringing great talent in the door, posting general roles to bring candidates into a multitude of similar roles. We piloted the process in our St. Louis Tech Hub, one of our largest global offices, and got feedback. As we saw success there, we started rolling it out across more job families and locations. Within months, we were seeing real value, and within two years, we were really flying. We have over 1,200 trained interviewers and conducted over 3,800 technical screening interviews last year.
Suman Thareja: The hiring managers were important stakeholders in this process. What was going on with them during this period?
Charman Hayes: As we established our cadence of biweekly sprints and implemented the process in a new location, we had close partnerships with the hiring managers at every step. We had up to 90 people—including Ed, HR leaders, engineering leaders, and hiring managers—involved in our sprint demos, all taking shared accountability.
Ed McLaughlin: We had a lot of managers with teams in multiple locations across the world, so they couldn’t be physically present or control the process for every hire. But they had an emotional need to feel like they were participating in the process. So we built in the ability for hiring managers to see the candidates as the last step in the pooled hiring process and say, “Yes, these are the people I want on my team.” Giving the hiring manager that sense of ownership in team building was important.
Making agile work for HR
Suman Thareja: Can you tell us more about adopting an agile approach to HR? It’s a fairly unusual thing to do.
Charman Hayes: We thought about why agile has been so effective in delivering products to market faster in technology, and we thought, “Why not use this for HR? Let’s make our HR practices better and bring them to market faster.”
Using methodologies that have been successful in tech for many years, such as design thinking and sprints, in HR was impactful. We established pods with colleagues from various disciplines, including HR, recruiters, hiring managers, marketing and communications colleagues, and technology executives. We embraced two-week sprints and the fact that we would be managing a backlog of work, because we couldn’t complete everything in a sprint and needed to prioritize work. We agreed on what we would accept and what we might leave on the table for the next round.
One of the keys to making this successful was that we started small. As Ed mentioned, we started with an MVP in St. Louis; today, we have nine pods around the world serving as operating units within a globally consistent framework. Of course, there is some latitude to handle various risk, compliance, or audit requirements that vary by region. But having that central global approach has allowed us to unlock scale.
Ed McLaughlin: We’re continually improving the approach, rather than having a single system in place to force a process on people that doesn’t match their needs. We have consistency across our major tech hubs in seven cities across the globe for the most essential roles—which is critical not only for getting people into the organization but also for enabling them to move within it. Someone from Pune, India, can work in New York, or someone from St. Louis can go to Dublin—and we’re all working together from the same common footing.
Suman Thareja: So your HR operations are role modeling the way an IT organization naturally works?
Ed McLaughlin: It’s a very similar rhythm. In any good agile technology process, you get to working software as fast as you can. With our hiring program, it was a constant effort to add value quickly without having everything figured out, but knowing where we wanted to go. There was a lot of emphasis on process, but it was never about the process. Too often, these types of exercises can devolve into a giant, wall-sized flowchart of who does what. This was always driven by people first.
Navigating the challenges alongside change
Suman Thareja: Level with us a little bit: What were some of the hard moments as you went through the journey?
Charman Hayes: The hardest part in the beginning was asking managers to let go of control over every single hire on their team. But once they started to see the quality of the candidates and the consistency of the process around the world, they were able to embrace the change.
The second challenge was around our size. We are a large organization, with more than 35,000 employees operating across more than 200 countries. When you think about that in terms of technology talent and hiring, we had to make sure we executed this program and process flawlessly across regions. That continues to be an opportunity for us.
Ed McLaughlin: Another was almost an existential question. We found that across teams, there were differences in how a software engineer and other roles were defined. We had to make sure the expectations of the candidate and the team they were joining matched. So we had to take several steps back and say, “What is this job at Mastercard? Is it consistent across teams? Is it consistent across the company?” That helped us tremendously.
Having everyone agree on the essential skills for certain roles has also benefited our ongoing learning and development investments. As we put together a compelling narrative for why Mastercard should be the best place for people to work, we also had to make sure we were living it. Our culture—the Mastercard Way—emphasizes creating value, growing together, and moving fast to achieve our goals and make a positive impact in the world. We strive to be the place where the best people choose to be.
Measuring the impact
Suman Thareja: What other types of impact have you seen from embracing this new model?
Ed McLaughlin: When you’re building a product—and this is another form of product—there’s always a tipping point where people stop telling you why they can’t use it and start asking what else it can do for them. What we’re seeing now is a virtuous cycle with more job families being pooled into the program and more locations wanting to participate. We’re getting more ideas from hiring managers about how we can continue to improve it. People who become your strongest advocates help the effort continue to build on itself.
Charman Hayes: One way to measure success is through results. TEAM hiring now accounts for 35 percent of all hiring at Mastercard—and we’re so excited about that. Our aspiration is 50 percent, so we still have room to grow.
The other measure of success is the experience of people going through the process. We have seen satisfaction rates of 92 percent among job candidates and 98 percent among hiring managers, which showcases a significant improvement compared with the structure we had in place before.
Another big win is better information about the holistic hiring process. We now have dashboards that give us real-time data to help us make decisions, particularly at the hiring manager level.
Scale-wise, we’ve gone beyond technology with TEAM hiring, and we’re now using the model in our consulting services team as well.
Ed McLaughlin: To Charman’s point about satisfaction, one of my favorite survey results is that more candidates who didn’t get the job responded along the lines of, “Hey, that was a great experience—can I take another shot?” The idea that the process was positive and engaging for everyone—even the people who weren’t ultimately hired—shows us it really is working across the board.
Expanding the effort
Suman Thareja: What’s next on the journey?
Ed McLaughlin: We’re really excited about our talent recruitment and retention journey and view it as a competitive edge. Whereas we once saw it as an enterprise risk, we now see it as a competitive advantage. We can bring other job functions outside of technology into the program. As we continue expanding globally, starting with a TEAM hiring approach in new countries will be incredibly powerful.
There are other opportunities along the career continuum. How do you adapt this approach to internal candidates and promotions? As the company becomes dynamic, how do you get more fluidity across the business? It’s important to think not just about hiring but also about retention. Have we lived up to the promise we made to people that this is the best place for them? This is important for our ongoing learning and development investments as AI is changing the nature of work.
Suman Thareja: One final question for both of you. What advice do you have for other leaders who are thinking about their talent strategy holistically?
Ed McLaughlin: I’ll go back to where we started: use technology strategies and people strategies. Becoming agile, building APIs, and leveraging quantum technologies and AI algorithms—all of that is available to everyone. The real question is who you are and the purpose you put into using technology. Make a real commitment to your talent; give them the environment and the learning and development opportunities to flourish.
I have a visceral memory from early in my career running a technology start-up. We didn’t have a product. We didn’t have revenue. We didn’t have customers. All we had were the people who showed up. It’s important to never lose that feeling of commitment to your people. Don’t think about hiring as a cost center or filling a seat, but as an investment in building a team that prides itself on how it works together to power economies and empower people.
Charman Hayes: My advice is to reimagine solutions. Bring in best practices from the business, particularly from technology. The same methodologies that solve technology problems can solve HR problems as well.
Risk-taking is also important. We had several setbacks that we learned from and grew from. It’s important to work in environments where you can safely experiment and come up with innovative ideas—and leveraging best practices can be very successful.
The last thing I’ll say is that co-ownership and partnership between HR and the business are essential. Working hand in hand with the business to make sure you have joint accountability and shared objectives will go a long way toward transformation.
