Karen Callahan

Karen Callahan is the current advisor at Edify. Before that, they were the director of talent development at SurveyMonkey from August 2014 to May 2019. In this role, they oversaw learning, employee engagement, and other talent management programs. Karen also transitioned the global employee population to a continuous feedback performance management process with quarterly check-ins focused on growth, impact, and goals. Additionally, they built and managed a team that delivered new hire onboarding, manager and leadership training, professional development training and support, and compliance requirements.

Before SurveyMonkey, Karen worked at Google from December 2007 to July 2014 as the senior program manager for IT Residency Program. In this role, they managed fixed-term, training, vendor programs for global IT organization. Karen was also a member of IT Leadership team and helped scale high-quality, high-touch support in Google’s rapidly changing internal environment. Additionally, they grew fixed-term IT Residency Program to a sustainable rotational training program with 90% of program grads accepting top-tier roles in Google and across the IT industry. ITRP continues to be a significant diversity talent pipeline for Google because of their efforts. Lastly, they led budget and headcount planning for Corporate Ops and Support teams and presented annually to CIO on staffing and organizational health.

Karen Callahan received a BA in Applied Statistics and Sociology from Northwestern University. Karen went on to study Documentary Writing and Radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.