Led Klarna’s hiring strategy during hypergrowth—aligning 25 teams, supporting 3,700 hires, and working together with the CEO & COO to build systems that could scale.
Introduction
Building the structure that helped Klarna scale without breaking.
Klarna is Europe’s biggest fintech unicorn, redefining how more than 100 million people shop and pay online. With 3,500 employees globally, Klarna needed to double its headcount to meet product and market expansion goals. But hiring at that pace exposed serious cracks. Teams were duplicating efforts, processes varied across pipelines, time-to-hire was slowing down, and leaders were stuck in firefighting, decision loops, and admin instead of focusing on growth.
I led a cross-functional team of 13 across org design, talent acquisition, analytics, engineering, and ops. Our mission: help 25 hiring teams move faster, stay consistent, and raise the bar—without losing control. We tackled everything from interviewer quality and workforce planning to candidate experience. We mapped what was working, fixed what was breaking, and created fast, practical solutions to keep Klarna hiring at pace.
We exceeded our targets—making 3,700 hires in a year while increasing speed, consistency, and alignment.
After that, I was asked to join a taskforce reporting directly to the CEO and COO. The goal? Take what worked under pressure and build it to last. We reimagined Klarna’s staffing model from the ground up—starting with a clear vision of what “great” looked like, and ending with a system leaders could trust and teams actually used. What we built became a foundation Klarna could scale with. It aligned leadership, supported better decisions, and raised the standard for hiring across the company.
Highlights
Making Smooth Hiring Decisions
Klarna’s interviewer training was a bottleneck—three-hour sessions run by consultants, with no way to scale. I redesigned the experience end-to-end. We trained talent acquisition leads as facilitators, raised the bar on quality, and rolled out a blended model: 90 minutes of self-paced learning, 75 minutes of live practice, plus ongoing peer support. New interviewers completed the full course, experienced ones got a streamlined refresher. The result? A scalable system that halved time-to-ramp, upskilled internal TA teams, removed consultant dependency, and gave every pipeline a faster, more consistent way to hire well.
Pipeline Owner Forums
Each pipeline built its own hiring process and trust in central processes were low, creating invisible friction. Hiring performance varied wildly, data was fragmented, and systems couldn’t improve because no one was using the same version. I launched the Staffing Pipeline Owner Forum to fix that. We shared early updates, pressure-tested ideas, and surfaced what wasn’t working. Outside the forum, I met 1:1 with every pipeline owner to shape our roadmap around real problems and needs, not guesses. This resulted in faster adoption, fewer escalations, and stronger alignment—not just on paper, but in how hiring actually worked day to day.
Staffing Playbook
High-volume hiring is easy to get wrong. We wanted to do it right, and do it better. I worked closely with the CEO and COO to design Klarna’s first company-wide hiring playbook. This wasn’t just a set of checklists. It was a complete, end-to-end system. The playbook covered candidate profiles, evaluation criteria, process flows, interviewer guides, onboarding materials, and more. We co-created it with hiring teams, tested it in one pipeline, made fast iterations, and scaled it across the company. It became the foundation for hiring at Klarna, enabling teams to move quickly, stay aligned, and hire with confidence.
Testimonials
“Shermaine joined as an individual contributor but was quickly recognised as a leader in the Staffing Domain. Shermaine was a much-appreciated leader, guiding, coaching, and engaging her team during a challenging hypergrowth period. She has a unique skillset where she is both deeply creative and innovative, while having a strong ability to deep-dive into details and apply an analytical mindset.”
Frida Jones, Chief Enterprise Officer
Epidemic Sound (Ex-Klarna)