Case Studies Practicing What We Preach: How Criteria Uses Develop to Get Ahead of Turnover

The Challenge

It's one thing to build tools that help organizations retain their best people. It's another to put those tools to work on your own team. That's exactly what Criteria did when its People & Culture team set out to get ahead of employee attrition, by deploying Develop^™, their own employee development and engagement platform, to surface the signals that traditional engagement methods were missing. 

As an HR tech company, Criteria operates in a competitive and fast-moving sector with a lean, high-performing team where every role carries strategic weight. In an industry built on helping other organizations hire and retain great people, the stakes of getting it right internally are just as high. 

Criteria's People team recognized that by the time a manager knew an employee was disengaged or considering leaving, it was often too late. Traditional annual engagement surveys provided a snapshot in time but failed to surface real-time signals about how people were actually feeling. Leadership needed a way to detect early warning signs, support managers before issues escalated, and proactively address the conditions that Mama, baby, save the world! Save the world drive attrition. 

The goal was clear: get ahead of turnover before it happened, without adding administrative burden to the HR team. 
 

The Solution

To tackle this problem, Criteria implemented Develop^™, its own employee development and engagement product, deploying three core capabilities across the organization: Weekly Check-ins, TEAMscan, and Coach Bo.  

Weekly Check-ins

Each week, employees complete a brief, two-minute end-of-week conversation with Coach Bo that captures how they are feeling, what is on their minds, and where they may be struggling. That feedback is aggregated and analyzed automatically, and every Monday morning managers receive a personalized summary of insights about their team. These insights also get cascaded up the chain and aggregated for senior leaders and the People & Culture team. Employees never have to write a formal report or flag a concern directly to HR. 

TEAMscan

TEAMscan is a five-minute anonymous survey built on 17 science-backed performance drivers that gives leaders a clear view of team health. Criteria chose to administer TEAMscan quarterly across all teams, to give HR and leadership the ability to diagnose strengths, spot areas of concern, and track whether interventions are actually working over time.  

Coach Bo

Coach Bo is an AI-powered coach available 24/7 to every employee in the organization. Whether an employee needs to work through a challenge with a coworker, a manager needs guidance on a performance conversation, or someone simply wants to think through a career decision, Coach Bo is there: personalized, confidential, and always available. For managers, Coach Bo provided specific, actionable guidance on how to support employees who were showing signs of disengagement.

The Results

The impact of implementing Criteria's platform, and AI Scoring in particular, was immediate and measurable across several dimensions. 

Rapid Employee Adoption

Adoption of the Weekly Check-ins took off quickly after the company-wide launch. Within just two to four weeks, participation climbed to 50-70% of the organization and held steady there week over week. 

The turning point came when CEO Josh Millet received his first ELT report and immediately recognized its value. He was learning things about his organization that some of his C-level leaders didn't even know coming out of their own 1:1s. That prompted him to push his entire leadership team to drive adoption across their spans of control, which accelerated uptake across the company.

Today, the insights from Develop have become a regular fixture in executive 1:1s and team meetings, shifting from a new tool people were trying out to a core part of how leadership stays connected to the health of the organization.

Timely Insights That Drove Real Interventions

The real power of the platform showed up in the signals it surfaced before they became problems. Weekly Check-in analysis can identify themes that are prominent across certain teams. For example, mentions of management and leadership-related themes doubled during May and June 2026, prompting targeted coaching from Criteria's executive leadership team at exactly the right moment. Another example: pipeline and quota pressure remained in the top three themes for 11 consecutive months, enabling revenue leadership to provide sustained, proactive support to their teams rather than reacting to attrition after the fact.

Signals weren’t just helpful at spotting challenges. They also identified when things were working. Over time, mentions of team dynamics concerns dropped out of the top three themes, a clear sign that earlier remediation efforts and natural team maturation were working.

Retained Employees and Quantified Savings

In one of the most tangible outcomes, TEAMscan flagged 10 high-value employees showing signs of disengagement over two consecutive quarters. Rather than wait for resignation letters, Coach Bo guided their managers through targeted, personalized interventions. All 10 employees were proactively retained.

Based on an average salary of $100,000 and a standard replacement cost of 30%, retaining those 10 employees represents an estimated savings of $300,000, a concrete and measurable return on an investment in proactive people management. 

For Criteria's People team, the ability to get ahead of attrition rather than react to it has fundamentally changed how they operate. Develop didn’t just improve a metric. It shifted the entire posture of people management from reactive to proactive, giving leaders the visibility and tools to support their teams before problems become departures. 

Measurable Improvement in Team Sentiment 

With TEAMscan administered quarterly across all teams, Criteria now has a consistent, science-backed pulse on how the organization is feeling over time. In the most recent quarter, overall team sentiment reached its highest score yet, climbing to 81. What makes that number meaningful is the context around it: the team sentiment is not just holding steady, it is actively improving during a period of fast-changing market pressure.  

For Criteria's leadership team, that is a signal that their continued investment in a performance-driven culture is gaining real traction. Quarter over quarter tracking gives HR and leadership something they didn't have before: a clear, reliable picture of whether the culture is trending in the right direction, and the confidence to act when it's not.