Creating a Culture of Learning to Fuel the Future of Work | Steve Cadigan | Part One 

Full Transcript

Malika:

Welcome to the Skill Shift, a podcast for organizations that want to future ready their workforces. Brought to you by D2L. I’m your host, Malika Asthana, senior strategy and public affairs manager. Each episode we’ll speak with guests from some of the most innovative businesses around the world about their unique approaches to learning and development.

They’ll share specific actionable insights into how they’re preparing their workforces for the future and the ways they’re addressing skills gaps in their industries. You are listening to the Skill Shift. Steve Cadigan has been at the forefront of global talent strategy and company culture for the past 30 years.

He’s known for his role in scaling LinkedIn from 400 to 4,000 people in just three and a half years. He’s also a bestselling author, has advised executives at more than a dozen companies, and is a self-proclaimed talent hacker. Steve’s focus today is to help leaders and organizations build winning talent solutions to compete in an increasingly complex digital economy. Steve, welcome to the Skill Shift.

Steve:

Hi, Malika, great to be here.

Malika:

We’re so happy to have you here. So we were joking with our producers right before this started, that we should have started recording in the small talk section because we had some great nuggets there. But you shared something with me that really stuck with me, which is when you’re meeting with companies right away, you ask them one question. Can you share with our audience what that question is?

Steve:

Yeah, and it’s interesting. I have clients all over the world, South America, Europe, all over North America, and I always like to start with understanding what their concerns are. And two, every single person says the same answer, which is, “Steve, my biggest challenge is I just can’t find the people I need as fast as I used to be able to and when I do and we hire them, they don’t stay as long as they used to.”

And that’s not surprising to me anymore because I hear it again and again no matter what the industry or geography is. And so I followed up with another question, which I think is bigger than, “What’s your biggest problem?” once I know that that’s their problem. And that is, “Okay, so people are leaving faster than you would like?” “Yes.” So the next question is, “Do you think that is ever going to change and the next five years, the next 10 years, do you think people are going to stay longer?”

And the look I get of just resignation and remorse, but recognition that, “No, they probably won’t.” And I said, “Okay, so given that, given that you believe they probably won’t stay, and that’s an unachievable goal that you regrettably, we’re not going to be able to do like we used to, what are you doing differently?” And that’s when I get the deer in the headlights, “Uh oh, we’re not sure what we should do differently because we’ve never faced this before.”

Right? And it’s really, it gets to the architecture, which is what I hope we’re going to get into in the conversation today. The architecture of work was built for a much slower pace of change. And the pace of change now is just, it’s not just coming from one place, it’s coming from so many places. The need new skills, the need to address a dynamic where people aren’t staying as long.

So what do I do if people aren’t staying as long? I can fight to keep them longer, or I can bill to expect that they probably won’t stay five years. Maybe they’ll just stay two or three. And this isn’t in every single industry.

Like in the medical profession, I don’t want a surgical staff to be turning over, right? Or if we’re putting someone on the moon, I don’t want staff. But in a lot of technology companies and more and more companies are increasingly adopting a bigger feature of their portfolio is technical, right? Because software is driving a lot of the advancements for businesses. They’re finding that this turnover is just continuing to rise.

Malika:

Right. I want to take it back to the learner or the employee themselves because I think so much of the time when we hear this, it’s from the business owner or business leader perspective. We’re trying to fill these jobs. They may be existing jobs that have transformed or new jobs that are coming up. People just aren’t skilled enough. We can’t find them. What have you heard from the employee side of things? What do you think is pushing them to leave? What’s motivating them to look for new positions to leave their companies?

Steve:

Yeah, great question. I think there’s probably several features, but one in particular that is a new reality that we’ve never faced before in the world of work. And that is everyone in every profession can see more opportunity than they’ve ever been able to see before.

Think about the transparency to not only can I see what jobs are open, I can see what their culture’s like, what their benefits are like, what their employees are feeling like, who left, why they left, where they went after they left, how long people are staying, I can see every company’s turnover statistics. I have more visibility to other opportunities than any time, but I also have with that greater depth of understanding of what I can do with my skills and experiences.

When I started out of school, this is pre-internet, pre-cell phones. I know it’s crazy. And people say, “Did you ride a dinosaur?” No. But back in those days you found something through a classified ad. And my kids jokingly say, “Dad, everyone knows you’re the old guy in the neighborhood because you get a newspaper delivered here.”

Malika:

Likewise, but yeah.

Steve:

Right? And so now I can on my phone see thousands of ways and pathways that I never even considered before. And not only that, we have an increasing set of platforms where people don’t have to work for someone else. They can create value for themselves, whether it’s producing a YouTube video or music on a SoundCloud or a TikTok influencer, for example.

And that proportion of opportunity is growing and it’s getting a lot of attention. So as a parent, this makes me super excited that my kids have more choice than in any generation ever before. But there’s also a dark side that comes more choice, and that is more fear of making the wrong choice.

And so I think what’s driving a lot of the turnover is people are going to, “Oh my gosh, I see this company’s doing this with their people, or they’re working on that cool technology or that interesting product, or they’re driving a change in, I don’t know, clean energy or sustainability, and I want to go do that.

Am I really growing as fast staying here? Maybe going somewhere else is going to be greater for my future.” And that anxiety, the fear of missing out on something, I think is driving a lot of uncertainty. That’s creating people to move in, not only just changing jobs, but changing career paths in a degree that we’ve never seen before. And we’re also seeing that play out at the university level, particularly in the United States where I do a lot of work.

More and more people are electing not to go to a four-year school. We are seeing more people change majors in colleges than any time in history. And that’s fascinating. So I always tell employers, the pool of people you’re hiring from is bringing a whole different outlook in addition to your demographic of workers is changing. And listen, I’m from the old school of I don’t want you looking at another job. Or, “Oh, you have three dentist appointment this week. Oh, you’re definitely interviewing.” But now it’s like you can’t stop that.

Malika:

Yeah. Yeah.

Steve:

Right?

Malika:

I love the way that you described it as anxiety because I think that’s exactly the right word. There’s such a fear of falling behind. I almost wonder if it’s actually a fear of missing out or fear of falling behind because there’s so many more complex challenges that feel very urgent these days, these overlapping crises, whether it’s affordability when it comes to cost of living, housing or groceries even, cost of gas, all these types of things.

And you’re starting out and you’re saying, “Okay, I have to pay my time for 10 years in order to be able to move up the challenge.” Well, that goal post keeps moving further and further away, so how can I actually take charge of my own career and go forward? So I think that’s really the right word.

Steve:

Yeah. And you know what’s interesting? Just reflecting on what you’re saying about anxiety, think about the last three years and the narrative on artificial intelligence. I finally, after so many people came to me and said, “Steve, what do you think of AI?” I finally said, “Okay, let me do some research before the holidays.” I prepared a few classes and workshops around artificial intelligence to try to help people feel more comfortable. But every single person I talk to feels behind.

And this technology, well, it’s not. To call it a technology, is really under calling it, just showed up yesterday. But we all feel behind and we have no real use cases showing that this is crushing it or creating all the gold that everyone’s expecting it to deliver. And so that’s on top of it now, for executives, “Should I be using, leveraging AI and how do I do it and where should I do it?” And so this is, again, most of the narrative that we see in the media is AI is going to take jobs away.

Right? And so I’m counseling all my executives. If you’re first implementation of AI is to eliminate jobs, good luck getting people to stay longer. If that’s really important to you. Because they’re going to see that your AI fascination is more interesting to you than how you can make the work experience more human. And I think that’s the ultimate challenge that we have with AI is we’re already feeling behind.

We don’t need something else to further distance our relationship between worker and employee. We need something to make that more fulfilling and energizing, and maybe we can leverage AI to find out how to get a deeper connection with each other, how to have more meaningful experiences rather than let’s use it to replace people. Oh, yeah, that’s really going to get people excited. Right? So now we have a new layer that’s entered into this whole conversation.

Malika:

We’re trying to get the conversation about company culture. We’re trying to get these conversations about retention and trying to give people incentives to stay at the company and feel like they can grow here. But there’s that very real challenge of our company is rapidly disrupting on itself, whether it’s technological advancements or waves of retirements to come.

And those two business units, the HR function and the business leaders combine, I think they’re coming together a lot more than ever before because you’re realizing that human capital is actually one of your most important investments as a business.

Steve:

I mean, if you’re in a business today, you’re creating value through people. Right? And if you really want, I think to create disproportionate value is, I think we’ve been talking about this forever. My whole career is like, “Oh, people are really important.” Of course they’re important, but if you say it’s important, but you’re not acting like it’s important, it’s going to show. Right?

And so I spent my whole career with every company I ever worked for saying, “Oh yeah, people number one here, but you’re going to have to be a 90-day probation after you start. Oh, you’re going to have to have all these six levels of approval on your expense report, even though you only spent $25 for a meal at McDonald’s or something.” And we’re having all these blocks of distrust in the experience, which is not backing it up. Like, “Oh, we really trust you, but we’re going to have to put you on a performance warning because of this or that.” Right?

And so I think that this is probably the one place where I see a lot of organizations misunderstanding it. And I have great fortune, and it wasn’t because of me. I think I had a great leadership team. At LinkedIn, the belief was, and believe it or not, it was probably six years in, we finally realized, “Oh, we’re a network for professionals. We should probably be the best place a professional’s ever worked because we’re a network for professionals.”

So we said, “Well, what does that look like?” Well, it should be the greatest most enriching learning experience of your professional career. And that’s not going to cost us anything, just being creative in how we say, so if I’m interviewing you, I say, “Malika, what do you want to do?” Okay, if you come here, I’m going to help you realize wherever it is you want to go, however long you’re going to be here.

Having an honest conversation versus most employment conversations starting from a place of, “You promise to stay here a long time and I’ll promise to employ you here a long time. We both know we can’t live up to that, but let’s start our relationship on a false foundation.” And what I loved about LinkedIn, and we had a bunch of executives that would start the interview by saying, “When you leave here, what do you want to do?”

So we can help position you, shape the experiences that get you wherever you want to go. And if you don’t know, that’s fine. We’ll expose you to lots of different things. Because we’re in Silicon Valley, we know you’re not going to stay, and that’s okay. I feel like 10 years in Silicon Valley is like 10 months. You’re not going to get people to stay. But as we talked about a little bit off-air, I think where organizations are stuck is they’re using a paradigm that says, “For me to be successful, I have to have people stay a long time.”

And that’s not necessarily true. If you look at the tenure of people at Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, lots of other technology companies, and granted they’re technology companies, their median tenure, and Tesla, add Tesla to the list, the most over benchmarked company in addition to Google, and add Google to the list, their median tenure is three years.

Some of the most creative, innovative, most valuable companies in the world are doing it by building a model that I think accounts for more fluidity. And that’s a challenge, but it also, I think helps address the fact that, which is what we want to talk about today, more and more organizations are recognizing, “I need new skills faster than I ever had.” Right?

Malika:

Yeah.

Steve:

So you’ve got a couple of choices when you face that dynamic. I need new skills. I’m going to hire new skills, or I’m going to upskill my staff, or I’m going to have some kind of blend with that. And that’s where organizations have to think. And the reason technology companies are not struggling as much is because they’ve built on crazy. They started by pivoting and changing the business strategy. And all these legacy companies that have been doing this for a hundred years have not built a culture of appreciating and recognizing that we always have to reinvent. We always have to change.

That’s why Tesla is destroying the automobile entrenched legacy players. Right? Tesla’s median tenure’s under three years. They don’t make as much money, they don’t sell as many cars, but they’re 10 times more valuable than all the next competitors in their industry. How is that possible? Well, because they’re all about change and growth and doing new things, right? And that’s so counter to how we’ve all been taught businesses should be built. Right?

Malika:

Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go more into the LinkedIn story because I think it’s such an interesting one. So I think when you joined LinkedIn, they had 400 people.

Steve:

That’s right. About five years old, 400 people.

Malika:

Yeah. You scaled to 4,500 in three and a half years. Tell us about the ride.

Steve:

Absolutely insane. I was a, to appreciate this story, I was a big company refugee most of my career. And when you’re working in big companies, you’re basically tuning and fixing what other people did before you.

And when I walked in the door at LinkedIn, there was no infrastructure. I was the first sort of full-time human resource staff member. There was a few recruiters and most of the other staff were contractors. And so they said, “Well, we need to get smarter and would you help us build this?” I thought to myself, “Well, how hard can that be?” I’ve seen every mistake in the book. I’ve made every mistake in the book. What a great opportunity to build from nothing, except I was overlooking one critical thing.

I’d never done it before. I’d never built a company. So the first week at the company, there was a huge fight among the executives on should we do performance reviews? And if we should, should we have ratings? And if we have ratings, should it be three scale, five scale, seven scale, to the fourth decimal place? And if we do ratings, should we tell the employee the rating? Should we not tell the rating? Should we do it quarterly, twice a year, once a year?

And I’m looking at, I’m thinking, I’m looking at these like, “Wait a second, you guys have been around five or six years. You’ve never figured this out?” They said, “No.” And so we debated and debated and debated, but what was great for me as a traditionally trained human resource person was to strip down HR to the studs and start from nothing, and ask yourself, “Why are we doing this? What’s the point?”

Malika:

What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?

Steve:

That’s right. And the problem that we’re trying to solve, we believe with performance appraisals is to achieve higher performance. That’s why we do it. But the problem is, most people’s experience with performance appraisals is it’s a horror show. Right?

And no one’s trained on how to do it really well, and the manager can’t sleep before they have to do it. And the employee’s like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to get told something that the manager never told me all year, and it’s going to be a big surprise, and we’re just going to be in this death spiral of negativity.” So we iterated and played around over a couple of years, and we didn’t like this. We didn’t like that.

So finally, this is one of those examples of what you do when you build from nothing, is we said, “Well, let’s just have quarterly conversations, keep them lightweight, but have it focused on what’d you do the last three months and what can you do the next three? And really be constructive and focus on strengths.” But that, I mean, it was really, really hard, man. I can’t even tell you.

You have more to worry about. There’s more things on fire. We went into, in the four years I was there, we went into from two countries to 17 and from two offices to 26.

Malika:

Wow.

Steve:

And three new product lines. But the learning I have that I think I really wanted to share with you today is that we’re in a new industry. There’d never been sort of a business like LinkedIn selling a data of insight around people to help you mine it to find really good talent. Nothing like that had really existed before.

So we didn’t have a pool of competitors to poach from or people who’d built it before. And it also meant that we had to design new work, new roles and new org structures and put people in roles that they’d never done before. And here’s what I learned, and this is where I, and I’m focused on trying to finish a book on this right now, which I’m super excited about.

What we discovered by putting people in roles that they hadn’t done before, or they had big components of their jobs that they’d never had experience in, is the energy that unlocked when we gave people something new to do was mind-blowing. And people were so excited, “Well, you’re trusting me to do this?” “Yeah.” “How do I do it?” “We’re not sure. Figure it out. We believe that you can.”

And that was probably the biggest learning for me as someone who was staffing this company, is that I needed people who were able to build, not people who could sustain an already operating function.

We had a few executives that we made a big mistake hiring who had really good experience managing a billion-dollar business, but they didn’t build a billion-dollar business. And they came in and they were terrified. And they would say, “Where are my six admins?” And we’re like, “Er, we don’t have admins here. You got to do that or you got to find a way.” Because scrappy and we are not making any money right now, so we have to figure it out.

And that is a big shift. But to steer back to what I think’s really important for our conversation is I think we have in a world where we expected people to stay longer, we have overlooked the fact that when you give something new to someone, that they can learn on the job. That newness and the excitement that you unlock and the energy you unleash is powerful.

And I think more often than not, it mitigates the lack of experience that someone’s bringing to something. And we’re way under calling that. And I think that’s why Silicon Valley so great, because there’s more people doing stuff they’ve never done before than any density of geography in the world. And that’s one big feature. But no one talks about that.

It’s all about, “I need you to stay in the same job for good reasons, because I want to be confident and I want to trust you, and I want to know you know what you’re doing, and I want to have good long relationship with my customers. And so I want to keep you doing the same thing for a long period of time.” And it’s suffocating. And in a world where you need to grow and learn that, I’m hurting myself if I’m keeping you doing the same thing. You follow me?

Malika:

Yeah, absolutely.

Steve:

But that’s really hard for leaders who are used to that to make that shift.

Malika:

Yeah. Well, and it’s also about you look at job descriptions. We’ve had the same conversation with a couple of different guests on the podcast. This idea that the job description or the job ad is the same 15 skills that were written with the original posting for our listeners. Steve is yawning right now because it’s so true. It’s the same 15 skills that were with the original posting, the posting when the job was first created. It hasn’t evolved at all to reflect any new job responsibilities.

And it’s not really about the actual core skills that you need to be successful. That should be constantly changing, and the person in the role should also have the ability to kind of play with that. But it is about hiring for potential instead of just looking, “Okay, you have all the check marks of the credentials and the years of experience and the network and the people that I’ve shook hands with that I can confirm that you can do this.”

And I think the really interesting thing that you’re sharing about this story, yes, it’s a technology company story. It’s also a startup story because when you’re at a startup, whether you’re four or 48 people, there’s not enough people to do all of the jobs and have the specialization in one little aspect of things. You have to be sort of wearing multiple hats and trying to do the best you can to get the deliverables.

Steve:

A hundred percent. And don’t get me started on job descriptions because it’s just like performance reviews. But listen, a job description is a snapshot of the job yesterday.

And I can tell you as a lifetime recruiter, that rare have I ever received a job description and hired someone for it and had that job description be true three weeks later. It’s always changing. And this is what I’m trying to really help people understand is are you hiring for learning velocity? Because you know the job’s going to change, you know the market’s going to change that we’re in. We need people that can grow and adapt. Are we focused on assessing for that?

Or no, you’re not, you’re focused on, most companies are, making sure that they’ve done it like this and you’re going to put them in the same job and suffocate them that they’ve been doing their whole career versus seeing have they self-taught themselves something new? Have they been on the company’s sort of leading edge product development cycles? What’s going on there? Because you know the job’s going to need to change, but we’re not assessing for that most of the time. Right?

And I think that’s a big miss that when I-. And this is what I tell a lot of college students, I’m like… who are self-selecting out of, “Oh, I’m not qualified.” I’m like, “Listen, most of the time, we’re lucky if we get 70% of what we’re putting in the job description, that is a best case scenario. And so if you’re 50%, go for it, or you’re 40%. Because you may have some things that they don’t recognize, but the job, they’re not going to find someone who’s a hundred percent.”

And this is also one of the factors that when we started the conversation by having this conversation with leaders who are saying, :I can’t find the people with the skills I need.” And so do you think you’re going to be able to do that better in the future? Probably not. Why is that? Because skills are always changing. Right. So why don’t we hire for learning velocity? Why don’t we hire for measuring someone’s capacity to grow and learn?

And at LinkedIn, we stumbled on that. That was part of the interesting story, which I think is sort of open my eyes to, oh my gosh, we built a 26 billion business that Microsoft bought after about 15 years with most people doing stuff they’d never done before. And I was sort of like example Exhibit A. Most people had ever led in my career was probably, on my team was maybe 20, and now I’ve got 200. And I didn’t want 200 people, but here I am managing a scale and a complexity that I had no experience doing.

We had a CEO who’d never been a CEO before. We’d had no executive who’ve ever worked in the recruiting industry, had never taken a company public. And we did it on a world-class level because as a leadership team, we’d never done it before. And this is whole counter to that, “Well, you have to have experience.

You got to know how you’re doing it.” When I left LinkedIn about 10 years ago, I can’t tell you how many people approached me and say, “Oh, we’re going to go public. You’ve got a great track record. Would you like to do it?” I’m like, “I didn’t have that experience before. Go look for someone who hasn’t done it because they’re going to be hungry and they’re not going to be encumbered by how it’s supposed to work.”

Malika:

That’s exactly right. Because it’s not a plug and play situation, and every company culture is different. And what I loved about this story that you shared about the performance reviews is it’s not just about trying to get to the right problem to solve, but it’s about having that candid conversation and that trust that we’re trying to accomplish something together.

When we’re talking about even investments in learning, what’s your message to HR and senior leadership on that kind of thing? It sounds like a lot of what you’ve been talking about with your clients is taking things down to the studs, making sure that we’re trying to solve the right problem and then becoming bold. What does that look like when it comes to learning investments?

Steve:

I think we have to solve, before we can really get to the learning, I think we have to solve something even more important, and it should have been solved already. And that is what skills do our people have now? I go into companies and they say, “We got a recruiting problem.” I say, “Okay, well, show me all the skills that all your current people have.” They go, “What do you mean? We don’t have it.”

You can’t tell me you have a recruiting problem if you don’t know all the skills and abilities, capabilities and experiences of your existing staff. You don’t have it, you can’t tell me you have a recruiting problem. You have an awareness problem, and we need to solve that because so many people walk out of a company when they could have done something else, but the company doesn’t know that they could have done that, and they’re not aware that there’s a place that they could have applied their skills in a different way. And that’s just a self-inflicted wound. And so before we can get into development, we need to start with skill awareness, right?

Malika:

Right.

Steve:

And what that looks like. And whether it’s some sort of micro certification, I don’t know. But that the future is skills right now. The future will be skills. It won’t be jobs. You have a portfolio of things and your capacity to learn new things and apply those skills is going to make you infinitely more valuable in the future. And that’s how I see this needs to play. And so I think if you’re listening to this and you’re an organization, are you aware of the skills that your people have?

Because internal movement, that’s going to solve so much more and mitigate that stress you have on external hiring, but you’re going to have to do a little mind shift around someone has to all this, maybe all their internal knowledge is more valuable than you’ve recognized or believed that it could be. Right?

So that’s how I, I mean, I really feel that’s a big one that we’re just skipping right by. Let’s just go to learning. Well, how do we know what they should learn? How do they know what they already know?

It’s such an important stepping stone to that. And whether we’re going to get into, I know when I was at LinkedIn even 10 years ago, we’re thinking about, “Should we be in the skill credentialing universe?” And I think there’s some merit to that. And some background check companies that I’m working with are looking at how can we validate that you know this or that? Right?

And I think that could be really, really helpful because then if you know really what skills you have, you can do something like this, a story I’ll share with you. So again, back in the LinkedIn days, we needed to hire these Python developers. Okay? But guess what? Because we’re LinkedIn, we could go and see there aren’t any Python developers out there at the scale we needed. We need like 50 and there’s, I don’t know, a thousand in the world. And so we did something then because we’re LinkedIn, we went and said, “Well, the people who are doing Python now, what skills did they have before Python?

What were they doing? And is there a correlation that we could draw between the skills that they had before they learned Python to give us a higher level of confidence that they could be good with it, they would like it, they would enjoy it?” And we found a pattern. And then we mapped that to our employees and we found about 15 people that had the attributes that gave us a good level of confidence they could probably do this really well and learn it really quickly.

So we tapped them on the shoulder, “Would you like to go into this six week bootcamp, learn this new language?” And they looked at us like, “You would do that? Do I have to do my day job too?” “No, we’re going to take you out of your day job because we need this tomorrow.” Right? And so that sort of forecasting an anatomy of skills can be super powerful, right?

Malika:

Right.

Steve:

But most people, “Oh, need a new skill, got to go to the open market.” And so that capacity to grow is one of the most core muscles any organization should be focused on right now. You are not going to find that fully baked skill out in the open market anywhere near as fast as you used to. So you got to be in the business of growing skills. That’s got to be a superpower more than recruiting if you can do that. And I know people, “Well, Steve, we haven’t built our budget to do that.” Well, you’re going to have to figure it out, otherwise you’re going to constantly be behind.

Malika:

Yeah. And I think it’s also about giving people the choice for them to self-identify. If you’re able to share the high in demand skills that are needed at your organization, whether it’s now or in the future, you don’t even know what people could be interested in. There could be someone in a completely different profession that says, “I’ve always wanted to do this, and give me the opportunity, I can take it on.” And then you prove yourself.

Steve:

Yeah. You know what I don’t understand? And I hope someone who’s listening right now takes this idea and runs with it. I don’t understand why on the first day of your job in any organization, you’re not put in front of a computer and said, “Steve, here’s how qualified you are for every job in the company. We know you. We know every job, the needs of every job. We know all the skills that are needed, here’s a…” and gives you a graph of your 10%, 20%, 50%, 80% qualified for every job in the company.

Why don’t we do that? Because then you’re not judging saying, “Oh, well, you’re only HR, so here’s only the HR jobs.” Maybe I want to go into internal comms, or I want to go in PR or at LinkedIn, maybe I want to go into product development because you’re making products for my peers. So how qualified am I? And then you can, leveraging your technology, you can say, “Oh, well, you want to go there. Well, here’s the experiences you need to have. Here’s the courses you need to take. Here’s people who have those skills that could be mentors for you.” Now it’s like, whoa, now you’re playing the long game. You follow me? But nobody has that, because that’s not how we thought about it.

Malika:

Right.

Steve:

Right? And I can’t sit here and point fingers because I didn’t build it. But I’m sitting here going, “Why doesn’t that exist in every single company that we should know how qualified you are for every job?” Because if you do that, you’re going to blow candidates away. Like, “Whoa, you’ve mapped who I am with every job here?” Because then I’ll probably say, “Oh, you missed out this and I have this skill, and you don’t have it in there.” So now you gamify it and you’re giving me an incentive to give you more information about me.

Malika:

Yeah, absolutely. I want to repeat back a couple of the things you’re saying. So old strategies for talent won’t work in the new digital economy. We need to be able to transform. Leadership looks really different and culture is paramount. I think those are the four things that keep coming up across the conversations. That’s a great place to end. Steve Cadigan, thank you so much for your time.

Steve:

Thank you for having me.

Malika:

Thanks for listening to part one of our conversation with Steve Cadigan. Stay tuned for part two.

Resources Discussed in the Episode

• Workquake by Steve Cadigan