LinkedIn's First CHRO Steve Cadigan on AI Mistakes & Opportunities

Speaker A: Because that's the pressure we had building LinkedIn. We're in the shadow of Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter. They could outpay us, outbid us out, work environment us out. There's an on site childcare center and Lady Gaga's coming for breakfast today. Like, they just crush us. And they made more revenue in a, uh, day than we made in a year. And so we had to get on our game because we're a recruiting company that was struggling to recruit.

Speaker B: Your calendar is stuffed with hiring manager one on ones. Your inbox full of requests to demo that brand new ATS you've been hearing about. You got got 10 open roles to fill. Your CEO, uh, keeps asking you about talent IP. And what's all this about AI? The modern talent pro does five jobs in one. And how are you supposed to level up your career and get truly great at finding, hiring, retaining and developing top talent while making sure you hit all your monthly goals? Well, the easiest way is to ask someone who already did it.

Speaker C: The bigger you enlarge your sphere of

Speaker A: influence, the more likely you are to

Speaker C: have allies in the organization who will think of you.

Speaker A: Another little sizzle, and I'm really giving away a lot of my dimes here. Our people are the creators of our product, the connectors to our customer. Uh, our people are everything.

Speaker B: This is Talk Talent To Me, podcast land's number one destination for in depth conversations with the most elite professionals and talent in HR. I'm your host, Rob Stevenson, and I'm bringing in VPs of talent, chief people, officers, CEOs, and everyone in between. They all come on the show to do one thing. Talk Talent to Me. It's real, it's honest, it's off the cuff. It's happening right now. Welcome to Talk Talent To Me.

Speaker C: Welcome back to Talk Talent to Me. It's me, your humble host, Rob, coming to you from a attic beat lab in Denver, Colorado, surging through space and time to fill your ears with the sweet, sweet sounds of recruiting, HR talent and organizational growing advice. And I have a really awesome guest for you today. Where do I begin to introduce this man? He's had a fascinating career. He came up in HR companies like EA and Cisco. He served as the very First CHRO for LinkedIn.com. i think they do like career profile social. I think that's what they do. I'm not sure I need to refresh it. Uh, but he was instrumental in their hypergrowth and, uh, ultimate ipo. Since then, he's been serving on boards, he's been serving as A professor. He's been writing books and he's been working at his current firm, Catagan Talent Venture, serving as a talent hacker and advisor. The man is Steve Cadigan. He is here with me. Steve, welcome to the show. How are you?

Speaker A: Hey, Rob, Good to see you. Glad to be here. Looking forward to it.

Speaker C: How do I do with your curriculum vitae there?

Speaker A: Yeah, fine, fine. I always like to, you know, set the expectation low and then we can try to, uh, uh, you know, exceed it. But no, it's, it's great to be here and I'm very proud of the path that I've walked to get here.

Speaker C: Yeah, I can't wait to hear all about it. And in particular, it does feel like you have maybe two lives like the prior LinkedIn post. LinkedIn, and you're at this point now like we were serving on boards. You've served as a professor. How do you kind of decide where to spend your time and what to work on? Because it seems like you maybe have that luxury.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, it's been really interesting, Rob. When I was riding the train from organization to organization over my operating, I call it my operating career, starting back, you know, right out of college, uh, tripping into stumbling into HR as a 22, 23 year old, never knew what HR was, never even heard of it, and just love, uh, at first sight for me. But when I was going from big company to big company over the course of my career, you have a script, usually you show up and you say, and you're told, hey, we want to get this done or we want to do this better, we want to do this differently. And when I stopped doing that and started doing my own thing a little more than a dozen years ago, I didn't have a script. And I didn't think it was going to be as challenging as it was, you know, to sort of say, okay. And what I started to do was just field inbound stuff like, hey, can you help us with recruiting? Can you help us with advice? We're trying to build a competitive product or an integrative product to LinkedIn. What do you think? And what I did over probably the first five or six years, Rob, is just meet with people I hadn't talked to in a long time that I had great experiences with, you know, people that I'd lost touch with because I was so busy and I listened to my heart and I try to ask myself, hey, when am I getting excited? What kind of people, what kind of ideas, what kind of situations and what I gravitated towards was people facing hyper growth, people trying to build a high performing culture in a rapidly changing world. And that's really what got me excited. And then from there I started really listening to people, uh, talking about how fast the world of work is changing. You know, we need new skills and turnovers up and how do we build talent strategies for a world that's evolving. And that's, you know, what I based my book upon. So it was sort of a process that I went through. I didn't have a master plan. When I stopped working at LinkedIn a dozen years ago, it was more, I need to take a breath. I've got some serious PTSD going through hypergrowth. I was on, uh, you know, talking to some friends recently and they said, how come all the people that were the, the first Chro at, you know, at Netflix, at Google, at Facebook, at Twitter, you guys like, you're not in the game anymore. I'm like, well, trust me, you know, it's like it took a while to peel off the body armor, uh, from some of that, some of that crazy, which was thrilling and terrifying. Right. But you know, I think, you know, to answer your question, it's just been a process of iteration for me to kind of arrive at, uh, hey, this is where I'm at. And I have a great joy right now. And I think for me, my evolution of, you know, career success has become one where I just define it pretty simply. I get to do what I want, when I want, with who I want. And that is a real luxury that I have in this chapter of my journey. Um, so it's been a process.

Speaker C: When your friend called out that the first tier chros of all these tech companies are no longer quote, in the game in your case, you are though, you're still using that skill set, you're still advising organizations, you're still influential. But is it that you've like ascended the need to be in an organization? It sounds like you're indexing on like flexibility and what you want to work on. Um, but maybe is it you have nothing to prove, like what circumstances would you go back to a Chro role?

Speaker A: Great call out, Rob. And I think for me it's probably a couple things. One, when you're, when you're fielding interest in helping multiple organizations and multiple industries in multiple countries, that's really appealing to me than going all in on just one. Okay. And so that there's a bit of a draw there, like, I don't know that I want to sign up for just one. When I have the opportunity to have a laboratory with so many different experiments going on. Right, that's, that's really great. Secondly, that was incredibly stressful, Incredibly stressful. And I don't know that I want to invite that into my family's life again. And, uh, for example, I mean, a big reason I left LinkedIn was I had three young boys that were twins that were probably at the time I left, they were five and my eldest was eight. Okay. And I was the only kid on, uh, kid. I was the only guy in the executive team. I was one of the oldest guys on the LinkedIn executive team, but I was the only one with three young kids. And I would be home, but I wasn't home. And that ate me, my stomach and my heart out like a rat from the inside. I just missing games, missing graduations, missing, you know, moments that may seem trivial to some people, but for me it was just really. It was hard. And so a breaking point for me, I'll never forget it. It was Halloween. This is 2013. It's Halloween. And my son says, dad, it's Halloween. You're gonna be home early tonight. And I'm like, I think it was like a Friday night. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm definitely coming home early. He goes, eight o', clock, nine o'. Clock. That was early for him. You know, I was like, you know, and I was like, what am I doing here? You know, And I had reached financial independence at that point, you know, thank you, LinkedIn, and thank you all the members who are listening for driving the share price up to, you know, ridiculously high valuations that none of us, including the founders, including the investors, ever thought it would realize. Right? So you've got those two things, like, hey, I don't need to do this. And the other thing is, I had thought about Rob. Honestly, like, man, I've learned so much here. I could be so valuable. With all the lessons of hyper growth, I was tempted. Uh, a couple of organizations reached out to me and I was like, man, I would love to apply all the things, learnings that I. Things I'd screwed up or things I would do differently. But I was like, no, I'm not inviting that full contact universe on my family again. I just can't do it.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's. It's totally reasonable. A, ah, lot of people don't make that choice. A lot of people, ah, go right back in, like another rodeo, you know, um, and it's hard to step away from that momentum and impossible to ignore the financial independence Part of it though you and I both separately kind of described it, what you're doing now as a luxury. If that hadn't happened, if there wasn't such a great outcome, you know, at LinkedIn, would you still be right doing the corporate thing? Possibly. It's impossible to know.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: But to the folks out there who have ever hemmed and hawed over the price of a LinkedIn recruiter seat, just remember that now Steve gets to spend Halloween with his kids. So it's, it's some good is coming from it.

Speaker A: Amen. Amen. Yeah.

Speaker C: So in your, in your current role at uh, or I guess it's just,

Speaker A: it's just me, me and the gold retriever, my security force. Yeah. Mhm.

Speaker C: You're uh, you're, you're CTO and head of security. The golden retriever, your current setup, you get to see lots of different talent organizations. Right. That's part of the idea is that you're um, you're investing in some HR startups. You are acting as a, I ah, think you describe yourself as a talent hacker, which I enjoy. And so you get to see how a lot of folks are, are building talent orgs right now. I'd love to know the good, the bad and the ugly of it. When you take stock of an org, what are people doing where you're like, that is wrong and needs to be fixed. And what are people doing where you're like that is awesome and it's going great.

Speaker A: Uh, the that is wrong category comes to mind just because there's so much the that is wrong is impossible to

Speaker C: state how much people are bricking this. Go on.

Speaker A: Yeah, And I'll, and I'll start with. And I'll encourage people to go check my, my post feed because I posted a conversation I had with uh, an AI recruiting co founder. Okay. And uh, reached out to me and this happens weekly. You know, I'm a founder, we got this product. Would you just, you know, meet with us? You know, whether it's, you know, for investment, whether you can just give us feedback, whether it. Could you be a door opener? Is this something, you know, would you like to do a partnership or like if you, if, if we, if we do a deal through a door you open, you know, we'll give you a percentage of the revenue, blah, blah, blah. So this was just another one. And I don't know, there was something interesting about. He goes, here's what I'm trying to solve. And it was using AI in the recruiting funnel. Okay. And so I asked him you know, first give me exactly the problem that you think is there, that AI is going to. Your AI, you know, magic solution potion is going to solve. And then B, tell me how much recruiting have you done in your life? Okay. And. And so he says, well, the problem he identified was a really good problem. We think a lot of quality people are getting missed because of overworked, overtaxed, poor recruiting processes. So we're going to have two rounds of AI based interviews where we're going to be able to really find magic in someone. Okay. So that on his face is kind of okay. The problem of people getting missed and skills getting missed and talent getting missed, that's worthy of being solved. But to eliminate a human from the first contact that someone has with your organization and introduce a bot, you know, to like. And then he didn't answer how much recruiting he'd done. And I said, listen, I'm not sure that this is something I'm interested in. I wish you well.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And then he didn't let go. So, you know, I. We've got so many people trying to solve something worth solving, which is recruiting. That is, you know, even the best organizations right now say they probably get it right 70% of the time. But most of the AI is being used, I think, to solve a volume problem, not a quality problem. You know, that's why I was like, okay, let me. Are you going after quality here? Uh, you're harming the candidate experience, compromising it. I'm not sure that's something I want to spend my time on. You know, so and so I published that conversation and he saw it and I was like, hey, this is really good. He's like, whoa. You know, he says, can I chime in on that thread? I'm like, you, uh, know, of course you can. You know, I didn't call you out. I didn't call. I said, here's what the founder was trying to do, which is worthy. I'm not sure this the right way. I think I had, I don't know, 80 or 90 people comment on that, which is not common for my posts. Right. That's just a lot. So I hit a nerve. And he'd never done recruiting before. I was like, bro, you don't. You haven't lived in the house, huh? How are you gonna make a better house? Just like all these, you know, people telling HR how to run that have never done hr, you know, and, you know, with all due respect, Josh Burson, you've never been an HR generalist for a minute of your life, you know, and yet you're making millions of dollars telling people how HR should work. Anyway, I like Josh. I almost worked with Josh for, for a while. Um, and he was a great partner in the early days of LinkedIn, too. So. But that's just interesting to me. Right? So that's what I think is wrong. This story aside is AI is being used to remove humans from a process and I think deliver a, you know, poor quality experience for the company and for the candidate. That's probably the biggest thing that's disappointing me right now. The thing that is getting me really excited is the. That AI is getting used to uncover talents and skills and possibilities for people that sometimes they don't even see and the company doesn't even see. Right. I feel like the biggest tension in the world right now is this. We need people to learn new things fast. And most companies that we see in the press are going the, let's recruit those new skills. Let's not build them, let's recruit them. Meta letting, uh, 8,000 people go and saying, we're going to use those millions to pay millions of dollars to get a bunch of you difference makers in the AI world, hopefully. Right. Even though our plan to build the metaverse was a complete failure and we've renamed our company after a failed strategy, but that's, you know, that aside. And so what I, what I think is really cool. And Prudential Insurance, I'll put a plug in for them. Their CEO called me out one time and I was like, shaking my finger at a bunch of insurance CEOs that had called me to the room to say, you know, hit us between the eyes with, you know, what you think we're not doing right with talent Strategist. And you guys are so uncreative. And I worked in the insurance industry, so I wasn't, you know, an outsider. I was an insider. And the head of Prudential says, hey, come on over. I want to show you something that we're doing here. We're using AI, and this is something, by the way, anyone who's listening, that every company should do. I didn't do it, so I can't say that I did what they're doing there to solve a turnover issue. Uh, where the. As the CEO described it is we have people leaving that probably could do something else in the company and they don't know it and we don't know it. So I don't want anyone to walk out the door that before they're aware of all these other opportunities. That they have. So what they do now during your new hire orientation, I'm told, is they sit you down and say, welcome to Prudential. By the way, thank congratulations for working on our marketing department. But if you're ever interested in doing something different, we've mapped your skills and experiences in education to every job in the company. Not every job in marketing. Every, every job in the company. So you can see on a graph, every job are, uh, you 0% qualified to 100% qualified. And if you see something you're 40% qualified for and you want to be 60% qualified, which makes you eligible as an applicant. Here's all the courses, the classes, the mentors, the coaching, the online learning, the projects you can take on to make yourself more relevant because you've got a journey that you want to take and we want to be a part of that journey, whether it's in your department or not. So that is miraculous to me that we've got an insurance company showing us real creativity with awareness of skills for the, for the individual as well as the collective organization. And that I think has really got me super excited, you know, and that, and that every organization should be building that right now. We have got to eliminate the siloed thinking around, oh, you're hr. Well, I guess you're the only thing that you're capable of doing is hr, which is just bunk, right?

Speaker C: What an amazing differentiator too, if you're a candidate to know that there is that sort of thoughtfulness and that this is mapped for you. There's a choose your own adventure here in a way that has not been real any other org. Like if you wanted to move departments previous to something like this is a lot of pushing this rock uphill. And probably they'll only ever see you as a marketer even though you might be somewhat qualified to do other roles. A fantastic differentiator. And my, my, uh, reaction that was like, well, it's Prudential. They have tons of resources. They can build something like this. If you're, you know, if you're ahead of Town, a 200 person company, do you have the ability? And now my. I believe you do. If you can afford to shut yourself in a room with Claude for 10 hours a week, you could hack on something like this and, and get something that approximates it if you have the grit.

Speaker A: Right. And so let me expand on what you just said and talk about another thing that gets me super excited about the moment that we're in right now. The choice that talent has today to Build a path that doesn't rely on working for someone else is greater than ever before. And that's great for organizations because it puts pressure on them to be more intentional about why someone should work there. You know, if you've got a universe where talent can see, I can go make a lot of revenue on my own, whether as a content creator on Canva or, you know, I'm making photos and selling it to Adobe Photoshop or whatever. There's so many things you could do right now. That means that organizations, if you want people to help you build value and create, you know, a great organization, you're going to have to be much better at giving people a reason to be there rather than you're lucky to have a job here out of the Tony Soprano HR playbook. You know, you're so lucky to be here. Like, excuse me, you're lucky to have me. And so that I love that pressure in this moment. I really do. And because that's the pressure we had building LinkedIn. We're in the shadow of Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter. They could outpay us, outbid us out, work environment us out. There's an on site childcare center and Lady Gaga's coming for breakfast today. Like, they just crush us. And they made more revenue in a day than we made in a year. And so we had to get on our game. Cause we're a recruiting company that was struggling to recruit. And most organizations pre pandemic had never faced that sort of aggressive frontier. Not just to hire, but to hire great people. Which is really, you know, uh, most of my recruiting career has been in high tech. And it's the toughest that traditionally it's been out there. Now that is everywhere. Retail, good luck finding people. Restaurants, good luck finding people. And it's not just finding people, it's finding really great people. Right. And so that is a good pressure that I see in the mix that's forcing people to raise their game.

Speaker C: You know, the leverage tilts back and forth between, uh, hiring organizations and talent. And there's economic factors there and tech factors. One that comes to mind is just the rise of remote work. Before the pandemic, there's like, oh, we would, we would never hire someone remote if someone was a great candidate, but they needed to work remote two days a week, we would pass. And then after 2020, you kind of can't afford not to. One, it's like clear that remote work can be effective and two, too many other companies offer it and it's too valuable a perk. For you to just ignore it. We've seen tides change, we've seen expectations about what talent can and should bring to an org change in real time. The remote, uh, work is a meaningful example how things have shifted. Another one, uh, like when we speak about how one can really, in a world of where you used to have to try and join a rocking ship, now you can strap on a jetpack, uh, and be more independent, service lots of different organizations at once. The trappings of the 9 to 5 have sort of dissolved a little bit. And part of it is, is how much more efficient you can be with some of these tools that are coming out. I'm talking of course about like, LLMs and uh, vibe coding, blah, blah, blah. And I want to just throw a javelin through some of the hype with you, Steve, because speaking of these, these timelines playing out in real time, I feel like we have shifted from this is going to be super disruptive. SaaS companies are all getting totally flattened. We're going to be able to lay off a ton of our workforce and not lose a single step because the, whoever is left is going to be so efficient with AI. That has not really come true. And just this week there was this example. Ford rehired, I think like 400 senior engineers who, they thought, oh, this is, this is just going to be AI, and then they had to kind of eat crow over that choice. And so I would just love your take on, um, where we are with AI disrupting work, because it feels like there is a little bit of a lash back from the inevitability that we were hearing over the last couple years.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've given this so much thought and talked to many people about this and I feel like it's a very human moment. And I think where we are derived from this moment where I've never seen that in my entire time, uh, in the world of work. I've never seen something happen like this where there's new technology and everyone feels behind before it's even been implemented and before there's any sort of real track record for us to base any insight upon. Right. So, and, and I jokingly said this in a LinkedIn post recently. I said, isn't it interesting that the expectation for AI is to, to deliver you more insight and more intelligence and yet all the decisions to replace people with AI was not made with any insight or any intelligence and all the data is saying the opposite. And I'm not saying that from a Luddite perspective. I'm not saying that from an Anti technology. I'm saying that, like, wow, people are feeling really behind. This is visceral. You talk to any executive right now that I'm worried my competitors moving faster than we are. I'm worried they're, they're deploying stuff quicker than we are. Oh, you know, whoa. And, uh, and then you talk to some people in companies like, we're not allowed to touch this stuff. We're using like a 1970s Ford Pinto that is some co pilot version of Microsoft watered down, and we can't really go out and search outside our firewall in meaningful ways. Or even students in universities like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, don't touch that. It's cheating. And then they get some, uh, speaker, their graduation going, hey, it's all about AI.

Speaker C: But boom. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: You know, like, do you know the, the kind of candidate experiences new grads have had, which has just been so really alienating, like AI. My first contact's been miserable at university and then my first job. Right. And so, but I, what I want to get to is this point of, like, the hype and what's behind. What's behind it is this real visceral sense. Like, man, this is really powerful. We all know it is. We don't know how to use it. We don't know who's using it better. But we do know from some of the reports from people like McKinsey, who seem to have a pretty good reputation with, you know, insight and intelligence, that, hey, they published their state of the union of AI the end of 2025, came out in December. And the key findings were, hey, we looked at, you know, Thousands of companies, 88% people are deploying AI, 33% are seeing, uh, some, you know, noteworthy, uh, movement with profit, and only 6% are seeing a real significant bump in profit. Okay, so, okay, what's the 6% doing is the question. And so they said, well, the 6% are augmenting people with AI. Yeah, that's where it's happening. The, the insight and the intelligence. And so we just don't know the optimal relationship between technology and humans yet. We just don't know. And we don't know for millions of different roles and jobs, that mix is going to look different. Right. I'll give you a great, uh, real life example. So in Portugal a few months ago, that's my biggest client is the city of Lisbon. Right now, they're trying to build some really great homes for European, uh, entrepreneurs or global entrepreneurs, saying, come to Lisbon. It's beautiful. I go over there about two, three times a year we get a cohort of eight to 10 companies and we talk about hyper growth and all kinds of stuff. And so I'm at the launch this past February of the new cohort, and one of the old cohort, uh, CEOs comes up to me and goes, hey, I got a question for you. I got a CTO who is very hesitant about AI adoption. And I got all these entry level engineers that are running circles around him with what they're experimenting with relative, uh, to AI. And his question then was, how much patience should I have with my cto? Like, how much time should I give a seasoned senior technical talent to figure this out? And that's not as simple a question as it seems on face value, because it turns out there's a need for real, healthy skepticism about AI right now. And even the AI product producers are walking back a lot of their, oh, 18 months. All white collar is toast. Entry level jobs are gone. And I've been very aggressive, as you know, in my voice around. Let's let the entry level people go. And let's eliminate internships. You mean that talent group of people who is probably the most adaptable generation in history, having been educated through Covid, probably is more fluent and more capable of being fluent in AI than any generation of history? Let's not let them get into our company and let's fire the people that are the easiest for us to fire, the ones we haven't hired yet, and let's just eliminate all those entry level people. Uh, well, that is turning out to be the worst strategy ever because you're cutting off your, your potential future and you're basically saying, we're not building for 100 years anymore. We're just going to, you know, try to survive some AI tsunami that we have no control over. And that's the real damage, I think, is leaders feeling passive and feeling like they're victims, not owners of the moment. And, uh, so that's really, that's really problematic. So I kind of know how we got here. But the end. The answer is just go back to what you know is true. You know, make sure you're testing this stuff, make sure you're understanding it before you flip the switch on some really, you know, you cut your new grads and interns, that's a three year recovery now. Okay, three years. Even if you flip it tomorrow and say, let's go do it, well, then you got to gin it up. Then you got new grads going. Well, why'd you cut it before, you know, why would I go to you when these people never cut it? Maybe you're going to cut it, you know, See what I'm saying? So it's not so, so simple. So that's, that's a big problem. You also have Anthropic and, uh, I don't know if you know, Lars Schmidt. Lars just took on the head of recruiting for Anthropic. And I was joking, uh, with him. So what's your pitch at Anthropic? You know, come here, but don't get comfortable. Like, you know, like, come here and help destroy your career. Like, how does that work?

Speaker C: Get it on the last 18 months of knowledge work, right?

Speaker A: And then the ultimate, and these are facts, the ultimate what did you say? Moment is consulting. Management consulting is going to be the first casualty. Just like court reporters going to be the first casualty. Well, it turns out AI cannot handle all kinds of weird stuff going on in a courtroom. You know, it can record stuff that's happening, but some of the stuff doesn't make any sense when it's recorded and someone isn't there brokering what's really happening, you know. And so all these companies are now hiring thousands of Ernst and Young, Deloitte McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group consultants. Why? Because they realize the adoption of AI is more of a human cultural challenge than a technical challenge. And I think, and this is a very, very oversimplifying it, you've got software engineers building these AI products and systems and tools and resources, misprojecting that every other job is kind of like software. It's going to be massively changed when there's hundreds and hundreds of jobs they don't understand the context of. Right? Just like you've never done recruiting, how can you build a recruiting solution? Right? And we did this at LinkedIn. We had our salespeople going to sell to recruiters, people who've never recruited before. And they were just missing it like, no, man, they need a hug. They don't need to hear about how great the tech is. These people are getting their teeth kicked in because they can't meet the demands of, you know, um, unreasonable hiring managers. Right? Last thing I'll say in this, I'm speaking as a user of AI right now. Don't think that that AI product is cooked or fully baked. That product is basically a child that was birthed in the world by these AI companies. Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and were the foster parents. We gotta raise that thing, not them. They're not raising it we gotta raise it. And so if you think, like, all the regulation that needs to go in there relative to privacy, you know, think about how AI can easily allow us to find things out about candidates that shouldn't be found out about. Like, were your parents divorced? I can find that pretty quickly. What's the value of your home? I could find it out really quickly right now. That's probably creating some biases and some elements in the decision process that I don't know that a lot of people are thinking about right now. And so who's going to build the guardrails for that? Not the companies making the products, and definitely not the government who doesn't have the people who understand the AI well enough to put in really smart guardrails. So who's doing it? Well, it turns out European nations are doing it, and Germany, you know, is kind of leading the pack and doing some really interesting things, and China's even doing some really interesting things. We saw a law pop out in California recently where, you know, they're going to create very strict limitations around you can, you cannot replace a human job with AI unless you meet some of these guidelines. So we're starting to see. But it's really, it's kludgy and it's laggy and I don't know how it's going to play.

Speaker C: Yeah. Over on my, uh, dormant AI podcast, probably once every three episodes, I would quote Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park. You spent so much time wondering if you could. You never asked whether you should. And this question of where guardrails should come from, the government at best case, is going to be slow, and the companies building it have no incentive to make guardrails unless there's some sort of market pressure. Uh, and so when you say that AI usage is not a technical challenge, a cultural one, you are saying that organizations need to be deliberate and thoughtful about, uh, their expectations for how this should be used. Not thinking about the question your client in Portugal asked you. How long should I give my team, my senior employees, like, what is the reasonable expectations for them to be spun up on using this? Like, no, no, it's on you to, to set up the arena for, like, here's how we use it. And those examples you gave of, like, oh, you, uh, know, I could use AI to find out how much your house is worth, uh, really quickly. These are the same kinds of, I guess, ethical questions you make when you design a talent philosophy, when you decide things like, we're not going to do external references because it doesn't Trust in our process. And it could out somebody like, that's an ethical choice you made. Right. And that is something you have to determine, AI or not. These are the sort of nuanced decisions you make when you decide how you're going to recruit. And AI fits into that neatly. Mm, mm. Mhm.

Speaker A: Does 100%. And you know, it gets me to the point where I feel and the advice I'm giving people is, listen, you need to build your own personal AI philosophy. And you need to have a, uh, sense of what that looks like in your organization. And if you don't know, if you don't trust that you have the right skills, capabilities and experience to do that, go find people in your ecosystem that can help you build that. I sort of feel like every project that's leveraging AI right now should have like a nutrition food label on it. You know, what's the impact to our people? What's the impact to uh, the market? What's the impact to our culture? Is this a fit with our culture? You know, what percentage is like taxing our, you know, our goodwill, you know, and what could it be? And so, and it's tricky because there is like, hey, we need to do that. But also we got to experiment, you know, and the companies that are winning right now are the ones just experimenting. And uh, the challenge with experimenting is most people don't like unknown situations. They just don't. They, they don't like, like, are you gonna reward me for this if it goes sideways? Like, are you gonna ding me for it? I don't know. Right? Just like when you, when you get a new boss, you don't know if you can trust them until your first performance review happens. That's when you see all that stuff they're saying, oh, great job, great job, Rob, great job, you're awesome. Like, well, you gave me like meets expectations. Like, that doesn't fit with the rhetoric of what you said to me. Right? And you don't know that until there's a big fat number or there's a zero number. Like, does my boss have credibility or not? Right. We just don't know with this, with all these things happening right now, is this going to deliver something or not? And that's pretty scary, right? When you say go experiment, like, well, it turns out that's not as easier as you think it is.

Speaker C: Yeah. Am I in an organization that is safe to make a mistake? And especially when you get to like these experimentations, if you get to the end of all this work and it's like, do I have something to show for it? Do I have this new dashboard or this new way of doing work? You may not. And right. In an org where you are, you have short term, you know, okrs and goals and things that you have to hit, you may not be in an org like that. How do you evaluate that? How do you evaluate if you're in a place where you could tinker on something behind the scenes and it could result in nothing and it would be okay?

Speaker A: Uh, I mean, that's tricky one. You're gonna have to rely on some collage of glass door people. You know, there people who left that maybe would be more candid about expressing what it was really like in that environment. It really is as fluid an environment as we've ever seen. So I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but I've had situations where I went into an organization and half the people I talked to, like, do not work for that guy. He is nuts. Uh, and he turned out to be the best boss I ever had. I've had situations like that where, okay for you, but for my tolerance or whatever or what, what I connect with is different than you. Um, and so that's. That's hard. I would look for, you know, there's some pretty simple questions like, hey, can you give me an example of somebody, you know, who gets promoted? Like, what skills get promoted? Like, who's getting promoted around here, just. And who gets pushed out? Like, what doesn't get rewarded and what gets. How do people get held accountable for? Because I think the biggest fear I have is more apathy and mediocrity than punishment, if you will. Like, it kind of looks nice and everyone's kind of happy, but they're not making hard decisions, right? Like, I want to know that I'm in a place where the elephant in the room can hopefully be called out. And that's something that people really reward. Like, you know, so give me a sense of like a company town hall. Like, what happens in that? Is it just like all applause or like, do you like, reward the person? Like, hey, I'm not sure we should be doing that. Uh, that's the kind of environment I want to be in. And you know, I had a whole chapter in my book about this kind of like the. You need, you need healthy skepticism in this moment right now. And if everyone, you know, oh, you're a detractor. Like, if that's how your constructive feedback's getting met, that's going to be poison in this moment. Right now. And the companies that were built on command and control are really struggling right now with how do we shape an environment where people can experiment. A good friend of mine is a wealth advisor, and he was doing these internships and he's, you know, got a university where one of his sons went to. He's like, okay, I'm going to take three students from that school every winter semester for, you know, for a virtual internship. And he goes, and I'm looking at this like a, uh, just a gravy train for me, because I'm just saying, I want you to just, AI, look at this. Everything I'm doing, because I know that I'm a digital, you know, AI immigrant and urinated, like, just. You've got full permission, you know. But we are in a regulated environment. I may, I may say we can't do some of the things you're suggesting,

Speaker C: but you're going to have to sign some stuff.

Speaker A: But that's right, that's right. And I'm not giving you access to all my, you know, precious gold, but that's what I want from you. And I think that's the moment that, that our organizations should try to invite is how do we get people who are really sort of ahead of us on this to come in, in a safe, constructive ways. They just go loose, like, tell me where I could, you know, do things better, save time, maybe, you know, delight my customers more dramatically than. Than I may be thinking I can do right now.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Steve, we are creeping up on optimal podcast length here. Uh, uh, this has been fun, man. I, I'm, I'm encouraged by your sort of measured, slightly skeptical, more realist take on how AI is going to disrupt or not on why it's a cultural issue rather than a technical one, for sure. And, uh, before I let you go, though, I, I want, I want to kind of roll back the years a little bit. Let's say that you were forging your career in some of your, like, earlier IC HR roles, your earlier director HR roles. If you were doing that right now, uh, in this day and age, how would you be attacking your career and then so that you could kind of move onwards and upwards and be ambitious in the way that you have been.

Speaker A: Wow. I'm not, uh, I not thought about that. So that's a wonderful question. My head immediately goes to. I want to sit down with every one of my leaders and managers of people right now and map there, do a SWOT analysis of AI. Like, what do you, how do you Know, how's it going? What are you afraid of? What can we do better? Like what? Because I think we've got an opportunity to move from advisor to our co architect, co pilot on the future work. And that's where I'd want to be playing. Like, uh, I want to. I want to find everyone in my company that knows more about AI than I do. And I want to be, you know, buying them lunch every day. I want to be listening. I want to be at their, you know, uh, a seat at their table to sort of soak in as much as I can about what opportunities we have and what are the threats that we're facing right now. Because everyone's afraid right now. Executives are afraid. You know, talent's afraid. And that's not how greatness happens in moments of great fear. Right. So I want to. I want to try to get a pulse on where there's some levers that we can play. And I want to make sure that I'm really ramping up the human capacities of my organization. You know, the human skills, I think, are more important than ever. And those are ones, you know, conflict resolution, clear communication and influencing people. Like, those are so powerful. I'm trying to. You know, all my boys turned out to be business majors, and I'm like, I know you want to take the cool class on whatever, but I'm telling you, a sociology class is going to really benefit you right now. You know, relating to seeing how different cultures react. And I said, the. You know, one of my sons wants to be, uh, and get really into investing. You know, the greatest investors know more about humanity and world. The world history and all the interconnectedness than they do some formula about, you know, some regression analysis.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know. Right. And all that stuff. So. And I think they've all become finance people just to terrorize me one last time is their human human resource. Dad. But whatever. But I think that is where I would want to play. I want to learn more about it. I want to see how I can help my leaders get through this moment and bridge it and build something really amazing. And then I want to try to make sure that we are eliminating as much of the fear that's in. That's in the pipeline that I'm seeing, uh, uh, come out of the pores of every. Every part of the organization. You know, and it's because I feel like we ForGot Change Management 101 is like letting the employees go have a moment and say, yeah, no, I don't think this is going to work. Uh, so that's, I think that's where I, and you're making me as I'm talking about, I was like, wow, this is a really fun opportunity for an HRIC that's sitting there like you got so much that you can do to elevate your, yourself and your organization. I think now more than ever before.

Speaker C: I love it. That's really encouraging. I hope the folks out there can hear that and weave that into their own career goals and aspirations. Steve, this is fantastic advice, uh, you share with me and I've really chatting with you and I'm leaving it more, uh, inspired and excited about the current world of work, which um, is really the best case scenario I think for one of these episodes. So at this point I'll just say thanks for being here, man. This has been a real delight having you on the show.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for having me. And thanks for your, your show and what you're doing and the way you're spreading ideas. I think it's, it's timely and it's needed.

Speaker C: So.

Speaker A: Yeah, right on.

Speaker C: Thank you so much, Steve. And to all of you out there in podcast land, I've been Rob Stevenson, Steve Cadigan's been Steve Cadigan and you've all been amazing, wonderful. Talent acquiring human resourcing people, operating Munchkins. Have a spectacular week and happy hunting.

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