Cornerstone has completely lost its way. Leadership feels disconnected from market needs, and the CEO appears more like an investor-appointed figurehead than someone with a real product and company vision. A CEO who has also has internally communicated biased world-views, offending staff in the process.
The strategy shifts constantly, not because of insight or clarity, but because the company is reacting to whatever trend is loudest that quarter, and right now, it’s AI. They’re building AI features out of pure FOMO, not because they understand what customers need or how these features should meaningfully improve learning. I understand the pressure as their legacy software no longer has a place with the new generation of buyers.
The internal culture is deeply unhealthy. People who make noise and stay visible, speak the corporate speak, get promoted; people who think critically, innovate, challenge assumptions, or bring original ideas are pushed aside, even when leadership say they encourage this.
It creates an environment where “yes-men” rise and mediocrity becomes the norm. The lack of psychological safety is palpable, and leadership turnover is constant, every few months someone major is replaced, reshuffled, or exits quietly.
The irony: Cornerstone sells HR tech, LMS, and LXP solutions meant to help organizations grow talent, but they can’t even use their own systems internally. In my time as employee, nobody even read my self-assessments or did the software guide me as an employee. If you can't eat your own dog food, then what are you about?
Their legacy software is so rigid that they cannot manage their own processes properly with it - things break all the time. Knowing how the tech and data actually work behind the scenes, I wouldn’t recommend it to any serious enterprise that cares about stability, long-term scalability, or data governance.
Diversity of thought is shrinking rather than expanding. Promotions and advancement often feel tied to internal politics, including cutting people out of the loop or even forbidding employees to speak with peers, rather than competence or contribution, and the resulting culture becomes more homogenous, less innovative, and more inward-looking. Ideas are stolen and presented back to the very people that originated them, and are then casted aside. Engineering leadership is making product decisions and wreaking havoc doing so.
