Dart Lindsley Live on Shally's Alley

You are live on Shelly's Alley. Welcome to the first episode in May 2025, and in celebration of a new month, we are taking a slightly different direction and reconnecting with some folks from, from back in the day, and, um, you know, introducing a few guests that are, that are not the traditional TA leadership. Our special guest today is Dart Lindsley. Dart and I worked together at Cisco in— let's just put it this way— at the turn of the millennium, right? And we were some of the last few recruiters to survive the, the, as Dart was referring to it earlier, the apocalypse, the recruiter apocalypse, uh, where Cisco had basically become one of the, you know, meanest and most aggressive recruiting organizations that had, you know, for example, established one of the first sourcing teams with me and things like that, and then just decided to just gut everything. And Dart and I were kind of left standing there, um, and were forced to choose slightly different paths. But we all, you know, found a, a, a home that we liked and we enjoyed. And so nowadays, Dart is Well, I would say part philosopher of work and part architect of transformation. He's the CEO and founder of a company called 11Fold. That's 11Fold.com. I'll put the link up here in a minute. But he started out at actually way back in the beginning as a criminal defense investigator, which I think I was going to ask you this question. Is that kind of the skill set that brought you into sourcing? Because you went from, you you know, investigation to sourcing to recruiting to, as we were talking about earlier, change consultants, strategic process leadership, and now your work with designing work itself. Is being an investigator kind of what got you into sourcing?

It is. Absolutely. It is. I was looking for a job after graduate school, and I'd been a criminal defense investigator for 6 years. And I started calling around, and I called a recruiter. And I said, look, I'm looking for a job. And they said, what are you good at? And I said, I can find people and I can interview them. And they said, well, you're good on the phone. You want to be a recruiter? I was like, what's that?

You're like, what's that? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. And this was, you know, the thing about, you know, the big change that happened at Cisco that wasn't mentioned was that that was the dot-com bubble bursting.

It was.

And 24% of people in technology in Silicon Valley lost their jobs. I mean, it was one of the worst downturns in, in people in a specific industry that's ever happened, right?

Yeah, people forget about how bad it was because it just hit that industry.

Yeah.

Um, and you and I have some special insight as to what caused that. Um, if you remember from kind of the, the trickle effect of Ariba Do you remember that?

No.

When we were there, so Cisco used Ariba, which was basically the Amazon of business. You know, all your procurement, everything was bought through that, and including as Cisco was a fabless semiconductor company, you know, they didn't make their own chips. So they procured everything through Ariba. So Ariba goes down and there's all this, you know, backed up inventory. And we end up, you know, kind of holding the bag. Cisco ends up holding the bag on a bunch of hardware. That had already been essentially sold, but then people wouldn't pay for it. Like China, for example, decided they just weren't gonna pay for the contract that they had already bought. So Cisco became this kind of insolvent bank that started toppling all the dot-coms. It was really the, if the dot-com bubble burst, this was the pin that pushed, was this kind of beginning tumbling effect that happened from, uh, from Ariba all the way down to like semiconductors and, and all that. So that was right around that time, 2001, 2002, uh, pretty much. Yeah. And so we made that transition. We used to be at R.W. Stearns, which is a— I don't know if they're still around, but they're— they were— they were— if they're— if you're still around, I apologize. But at the time that I knew them, and for many years, they were the gold standard of of research. A lot of people that went to RW Stearns learned how to do sourcing from Stearns in an executive search kind of way, and they sort of, I want to say, set the standard for that. Would you agree? Back in the day, they were—

I mean, what people may not remember is that there used to be a, uh, the problem used to be very different in, in sourcing. Yeah, which was the problem was you couldn't find people. And then Later, especially after LinkedIn, it became you couldn't filter them. And so you had too many people and you had to filter them and find people who were maybe hidden. Um, but you know what RW Stearns did was it would get the directory of a company by hook or by crook, and, and then people like me would cold call in and create the org chart and extract an entire, uh, resume over the phone, including and we would write it down and we would provide that to the companies that hired us.

And that was, I mean, it was revolutionary at the time because it was basically sourcing candidates from, uh, that didn't yet not exist, but they were, um, they were certainly hidden in plain sight. Well hidden, let's put it that way. So, and then from there, I remember we overlapped at Cisco and then also at Google as well. I was, I was at Google for a while, but then, um, you were at Google later on, I believe.

So, I was at Cisco a long time. I was at Cisco 19 years.

19 years. Wow. So, okay. So, you started as a criminal defense investigator. You became a sourcer. You became a recruiter. You became a change consultant, strategic process leader. And now, you design the concept of work. You're changing work itself. What is the thread that ties all of that together?

For the first 10 or 15 years that I was working in talent, I, uh, had a very traditional view of what talent was supposed to be. So what ties them all together was figuring out how to get stuff done, I guess. But, but there was an evolution of what I believed during that time. So for the first 10 or 15 years I absolutely saw, you know, that, that the job of a talent organization was to acquire an input to production so that we could achieve the strategy of the company. And, and I saw it as a big math problem, especially as I became an analyst, that could be optimized. And so I would do formulas and statistics and process optimization and all these things to actually, you know, make that all work. And it was, it was when I became the head of business architecture ultimately for Cisco Systems that I started to see holes. Right.

So business, so connecting the business architecture with the funnel of talent and then the, and kind of, I don't want to say backend, but like talent coming in and then people actually working and architecting the workflow. That makes sense.

Well, and, and the job of a business architect is, and I was the business architect and my team was for human resources. And so our job was to figure out how, how human resources fit into the business and how it needed to transform as the business transformed. And so business architects, you know, create these gigantic models that describe how the company works so that the company can transform in a coordinated way. So this is by way of saying I became a huge geek. Like I started off a recruiter and I got geekier and geekier and geekier and I ended up this, this very technical role of of modeling how the company worked. And it was while I was doing that that I started to see that we weren't fitting into the business right.

Okay. Okay. You weren't filling into the business right, fitting into the business right. All right. So, you've said, and I'm kind of fast-forwarding a little bit here, but you've said that the real crisis isn't turnover. It's something that I don't know if you coined, but you call the working dead. My question is, who are they and how did we kill them?

So first of all, I'm going to say there's things I like about my own framing of that and things I don't like about my own framing of that.

The negativity, I'm sure, is— Yeah.

I don't think you become a great company by trying not to be bad. That's right. You don't become—

sort of like Google's don't be evil is not exactly the pinnacle of— right, right.

And, and it's sort of like you don't become the best chef in the world by being the best at not giving people food poisoning and not burning your food or whatever. Right, exactly, exactly.

And so, um, but it is true, but it's a good descriptor of what I believe I see, what I— what is invoked on me when I hear that or read that is people that are essentially kind of— I'm thinking zombies, you know, they're checked out, they're punching the time card virtually or whatever, and they're just kind of humdrum. They might be getting by, but they're just not into it. They're not interested in work. They're not motivated by it. I mean, it's the humdrum, you know, a job is a job kind of attitude. That's what I see. And so, it's it's a way to describe that. I believe that's what you're talking about.

I am. Yeah, I am. And, and there's the flip side of that, which is when you're lit up, you know, people will talk about their job and they say, it makes me feel dead. It makes me feel dull inside. And then you talk to people whose, whose work is just— they are lit up and you felt that a couple of times in your career and you know what it was like when that work was kick-ass and, and and you know what it's like when it's not. And so, so yeah, that's, that's the thing that I think we've built a giant machine, uh, to make people feel dead. And, and it's bad business, um, and it's unethical, which is that this is people's lives and we are making people's lives not great.

So you propose that work, you know, the job, for lack of a better descriptor, you know, employment basically is a product that a company, the employer, should take the time to produce just like they would produce a— to design, to design the job as they would design a product is kind of what I'm getting at, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, that's what you propose. So if, if work is a product, um, who's the buyer of that product and what are they paying for?

Yes, right, exactly. And how do they pay for it, right?

What are they paying for and how do they pay for it, right?

Yeah, yeah. So that was my question. So what happened was I was working in business architecture and the model started to show that employees existed in two places in the models. They existed as inputs to production. They're procured like a table or something like that.

Supply chain, talent sourcing.

Exactly.

Exactly.

All that stuff. But they also exist and existed in the model as, as customers outside of the company.

Okay.

And, and we don't normally talk about employees being outside of the company, but as customers for work, they are. And they need their subscribers to work, and they get to choose every single day whether they're going to continue to work, do the big buy, which is continue to keep working for your company, and the little buy, which is to work this hour. And so I, I started to think of it that way, and I said, well, if, if employees are a customer, what are they buying? And so I— if I— they're buying some product, and I didn't know what it was. And so I, I went out and I started asking marketing questions of people at work. And this is important to a TA organization because, because knowing what you're selling is a really important part of the sale. So I, I started using, uh, Jobs to Be Done theory, which was— that was something that was popularized by Clayton Christensen.

Okay.

And I started asking people, what job do you hire your job to do for you? Because a product solves a job for you. And I started asking them, what do you, what do you want? And what I started to hear, some of the things I started to hear were not surprising, which is, I hire my job to make money, sort of, duh. And, and I said, yeah, but what do you need the money for? And people would say, well, they actually had different needs for the money. Some people said, I need the money to take care of my family. I need the money to buy other experiences. I need money to keep score. With how I'm doing. But I started to get a whole lot of other answers, and they got less and less intuitive. And part of the reason they got less intuitive is because they got more and more unique to the person. So I hire my job to give me puzzles to solve, you know, and there's an economy of puzzles inside the company, and I get them and I get to solve them, and that's what I love to do. I hire my job to invent new things or to build my legacy, to make a mark, to leave a mark, to— yeah, to leave a mark. Exactly. But then I say, well, what, what kind of mark? Like, if you polluted more, would that be the kind of mark you want to make? And people say, no, that's not the kind of mark I want to make. I want to make things better. So some people— this actually was somebody you would know, but because it was part of an interview, I can't mention who they were.

Fair enough.

They said, they said, well, I hire my job to pretend. Huh? And, and I said, what?

Okay, pretend.

And they said, I like to go to work and I like to pretend that I'm a vice president.

Okay, okay.

And, and I said, it's a role they play.

Yeah.

And I said, you are a vice president. This person had been a VP of TA at Apple and at Microsoft and Amazon, like all these different companies. He says, no, no, uh, I'm not a— I just pretend to be a vice president. He says, I'm a jazz musician. And he says, I spent so many years on the stage that what I hire my job to do for me is, is to give me a stage and the lights and the adoring audience. And there are like 35 of these different things, and I haven't really reached the end of them. Um, and, and this goes well beyond the standard things that we sell when we sell a job. It goes beyond pay. It goes beyond benefits. It goes beyond title. Sometimes it includes those.

Drive, motivation.

But very unique. Yeah, right. Like, especially in combination, which is so I've taken all these 35 things and I send them out and I say, hey, everybody, tell me which of these things are important to you. And what I get back is that out of 100 people, only 2 people pick the same pattern, the same pattern of needs, right?

Like rank them in some order or whatever.

Yeah.

Yep.

And, uh, uh, and they're deeply emotional, you know.

I mean, that certainly explains, Dart, why some people who don't need to work— and I'm saying that, uh, in a generous way, you know, like some people who are independently wealthy, come from money, um, they don't need to work, but they still take jobs and they still get paid. It also explains why some people have no problem working for organizations that are more of a cause than anything else. And their compensation is not, let's just say, realistic. So, it explains a lot. It also explains why back in the day when you and I were frontline recruiters, why sometimes people would leave an organization and take less pay at another one. So, it explains a lot of that.

It does. And I want to describe a few of the deeply personal ones. Just to show how, how, how deep it goes, how deep they can be. Okay. One person said to me, I, I hire my job to achieve independence. And I was like, financial independence? And she said, no. I— she said, I come up from a country where women are either daughters or wives, and, uh, I don't want to be either of those.

And this is a domain where they get to be them.

They get to be them and they get to know that they have the freedom to do that wherever they go. Another person said, I have my job to pay my debts. Again, I thought that was financial. And, and I said, like student debts? And he said, no. He said, my grandmother worked weekends to put me through college, and I owe my family, you know, my grandmother's weekends. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

And I get it.

And I need to show, uh, that, that they— that I respect what they did for me. And, and so there's a lot of these that, that different people are looking for, and, and we are not as companies equipped to optimize work to meet these diverse needs.

That makes sense. I mean There was a CEO, I can't name names, but I did work for this company for quite some time. And I admired the CEO for, in some ways, similar reasons that John Chambers, our former CEO at Cisco, for some of the same kind of reasons in a way, as far as like he was pretty down to earth in some ways. Kind of hyper-realistic in some ways. So, this other CEO that I'm talking about said, and I'm kind of, it's related to what you're talking about, but let me just give you, try to quote as far as I can remember. He said, "As an employer, as the company that employs you, we have a responsibility to provide to you options to improve yourself, but we are not responsible for improving you. In other words, it is our job to make sure that you have what you need— training, development, education, tuition reimbursement, the things that an employer should provide— but it's kind of on you to go and get that. We're not going to— manage your career. We're just going to give you the tools that you need in order to do it.

Yeah.

So, um, it's— yeah, I mean, I'm connecting the dots between what he said and what you're talking about. You're saying that the, the employer's responsibility is to make the architect the job, maybe to use your word, in a way where this job can be something that makes people, um, feel included and successful. And then there's still also the responsibility that you have as an, as an employee to take advantage of that. So you could, as a company, do everything you can to make the job, to architect it correctly, and people might still not, you know, not take you up on it. But the point is that you can't just— it doesn't randomly happen. People don't just enjoy their jobs because it just accidentally happens that way. If it does, great, serendipity. But when it doesn't, it's probably because the employer is not really paying attention to it.

Yeah. So the way I say exactly the same thing, But the way I say it is that, that, that this is a product that's co-designed and it's co-built.

Yeah. Okay. That's, that's, that's what was going around my head.

Yeah. And one of the things I've realized is that a lot of these things, jobs to be done, are part of, part of the transformation economy. So there's these different economies of products. One is the goods, the services, the experiences. The transformations. Well, a lot of what we want from work is experiences, but a lot of it is transformations, which is that I hire my job to become something new. And the farther out you go away from just the, the goods part of the economy and toward the experience part, and especially the transformation part, the more personal it gets and also the more co-created it gets. You don't, you know, get an MBA, nobody, nobody gives you an MBA. You earn an MBA, right?

Right.

As a transformation. And so, so yeah, yeah, that's right. And, and so what it means is that companies, the kind of situation we need to create is a platform as a company where people have room to move to what they really want.

So yeah, I mean, I thought about this before because I've had, you know, you were talking about jobs that you really like and jobs that you really don't. I've had both. I've had jobs where I was— I don't, I don't, I don't mind admitting this, you know, on the drive home, seriously contemplating driving off of the end of the bridge and right into the, you know, right into the abyss. Never would do that. But it was just like, oh my God, what am I doing? This is so horrible. I just felt bad every day. And so that's the worst case scenario that I've experienced. And then I've had jobs where I'm like, damn, they're paying me for this? Like, I can't even believe— like, it's not even how much they're paying me. It's like, wow, I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this. This is awesome. And so I think, you know, it's to me always been— it's always— I felt like it's always been my responsibility to find that, to find a job where I can feel like I would do this even if you didn't pay me. Not that I don't want to get paid, but You know, that's kind of the feeling. But you're saying that it isn't just my job to do that, my responsibility. You're saying that employers have a responsibility to co-create that in this setting. Um, something that popped into my head as I was reading about this, what would be a— what would a return policy look like? You know, you bought something, don't want it, you want to return it, you know.

Yeah, now that's a really interesting question. I haven't thought about that before. I mean, uh, yeah, there should be a return policy. Um, but I don't know, buyer's remorse. I mean, there is, but you know, it's, it's super hard because you're having to leap from one thing to the other. But inside the company, if you go someplace, you should have a 90-day acceptance, right, if it's an internal move. And that 90-day acceptance should be with the ability to return if it doesn't work, to return to where you were.

Yeah, because I was working with a client where, um, as a consultant, a lot of times what I, what I do is identify gaps that, that are created. It's di— it's basically, think of it as, um, uh, differential diagnose— diagnosis, right? I, I frequently identify gaps that are actually what's causing the problem. The, the client brings me in because there's a problem, or there's maybe not a problem, but there's something they're trying to achieve. So it could be a positive thing, as in we want to do this, right? Um, but then there's always roadblocks, and there's always reasons things, you know, can or cannot happen. And during my diagnostic, I frequently find these little gaps that nobody ever really looked at before. Um, and it's kind of my claim to fame is to be able to find those patterns. And recently, I found a pattern with an employer where they have a, let's just say, above average 90-day bounce rate on employees. And I wanted to understand why that was happening because it wasn't my job to fix that. My job, the problem they brought me in to solve or the opportunity they wanted me to create is different than that. But I felt like that was a significant component because if 30% of the people that start end up leaving within 90 days, that's a third of the jobs that basically need to be reworked, which adds to my funnel. And that does come back to the TA problem that, you know, was being solved. And I tried to understand why that was happening, but as it turns out, they're quite okay with it. And it seems to be somewhat of a, um, par for the course situation where, where people sometimes get into a job they don't really know what they're getting into, even though they've been pretty, pretty clearly explained. They still feel like it's something different, and then they get there and they realize it's not what they wanted. Um, and I don't know if it's even preventable or not. I mean, I guess I'm asking you, yeah, is it possible that sometimes that 90-day probation is there to in fact deter you from staying past the 90 days because it wasn't a good fit and you didn't really see it then.

Um, I'll say it this way. I do think it is the responsibility of an organization, anybody selling a product, to make sure that there is product-customer fit when selling it, especially if it's a big product.

Yeah, like a life-changing job.

Like a house, like a car. I remember a couple of times in my career as a recruiter, um, really successfully selling the crap out of a job, getting somebody into it. They gave up another job that had a, that had a pension, had a lot of different things, did not succeed. And I, and that was a failure. Um, and, and on the flip side, in my career since I started thinking this way, When I interview people, I ask them a lot about what they want from the work, and I judge whether or not I have the ability to give them that experience of work. And I had somebody, I was hiring a Master Black Belt, and I found the absolute perfect candidate. And I asked him, you know, he's mature, he was lots of experience, he was humanistic, but I asked him what he really wanted from work. And he said, I want to help others to know how to do what I do. I want to teach others. I want to create a training program. I'm like, I would love to hire you. I do not have the budget at this time to, to promise you I can give you that kind of work. 3 months later, I did have the budget, and 3 months later, I called him back and I hired him. It was the right job then, and he did the most amazing work. You know, he designed one of the best programs in the industry, and that's because that's what he really wanted to do. And so it was that— was that, you know, is, is acting that way charitable? Well, yeah, it's responsible to the person that you're hiring. But is it good business? Yes, it is.

Absolutely. I think that is the key to making a good match. Is to, you know, it's not just can they do the job, but do they want to?

Yes. And so I ask people, you know, what do you hire your work to do for them?

You.

And I also ask them, you know, what does your job cost you? Because that's another, you know, job-to-be-done theory is really good at understanding the value you get out of work, but it's not very good at understanding the cost. And those times when you were thinking about driving off the road, A lot of times it's the cost of the work, which, which is different from the value that's, that makes it, that pushes that work into impossibility for you. And so some people, what's interesting is that there are things that some people feel is the value of work that other people feel is the cost. So people who love to solve puzzles may hate the stage. People who love the stage may hate puzzles. And if, and if you make me do puzzles all day, that's a cost to me.

If you don't, right, right, right.

You know, and so, um, yeah.

So to, uh, to a company that wants to start designing work as a product and hasn't done this, um, you know, we might have people out there that are intrigued by this and want to kind of go in that direction, what's the first thing that they need to do to start thinking about or just to go on that? What's the impetus that they need to go on that direction?

It depends on who you are. Because I'll say, if, if you are responsible for your whole organization, it's one path. And if you're responsible for a team, it's another. So let me talk about the whole organization. This is a pretty fundamental mental model change. It is not that easy to just flip a switch and start thinking about employees as a customer. We have a very, very long history of thinking about businesses. And in fact, this is the really fundamental thing. So the really fundamental thing is that this transformation is a business model transformation, which is If, if you're the kind of person who's leading an organization, we're going from saying that you're a pipeline model, which is that, that you have one customer, and we're now saying you're a multi-sided business, which means you have two customers, both of whom need to be satisfied to satisfy the other. And so that's a business model transformation, and it comes with organizational change. It comes with role changes. It particularly changes the role of managers. So if you're a manager, you can start doing this for yourself if you lead a team, which is your role that, as it's traditionally framed, is that you are in a control position above the team. And, and that's because your changes— you're responsible for getting as much productivity out of that team as possible. And a lot of the tools that we are given are control tools. Well, this is different because multi-sided businesses in general are orchestrated, not controlled. And so let's take a typical multi-sided business. Uber is a good one.

It's got drivers, right?

Drivers and riders.

Drivers, passengers.

And yeah, you have to keep both happy.

And then, and then Uber itself.

And then Uber is the platform that brings them together, right? And so the, uh, the, uh, uh, you as a manager— and, and the truth is that, that, that's— that, that is an orchestration activity. You're trying to create a situation in which they come together, but once they come together, they have a lot of freedom in how they interact. And you're doing the same thing with your team. You're, you're, you're now orchestrating the flow of value that comes from your team to the traditional customer, but you're also optimizing the value that flows from the traditional customer as work and how it arrives at your, at your team members. This requires two big things from managers. One is that they become brokers, making sure that that's working. And to do that, they need to pick up some design skills, which is the ability to do the kind of need finding that designers do as a part of designing a product, to know what each individual person on the team really, really wants. And then the second thing that you get good at is allocating work based upon what people find is rewarding. And, and you start to, to— and you become responsible also for winning the kind of work that your team really wants to do. And so these are not, um, capabilities that most managers have been asked to develop.

Okay, but, um, do we have the tools for it? I mean, so as a manager, you could do it yourself because you, you could make— you can fake changes in your in your organization, your team, you can do that, right? But do we have the tools for that?

That's in fact what I've been spending the last 2 years developing.

Ah, so geez, I couldn't have lobbed that one better.

I know. So what happened is I spent years going around talking on stages about this, and people would say, love the philosophy, man, how do I implement it? And so, uh, last year I was very lucky to get a Mira Fellowship, which is a fellowship for people with big frame-changing ideas that can make the world better, that comes with some money and support, and started building out the tools. And so, uh, they're pretty simple to adopt. One is need-finding templates, so you know how to ask the questions of your team that you need to ask. And then the other one is tools for allocation, you know, knowing all the work that's coming into your organization and, and tracking over time how it aligns to both what the business needs and how it aligns to what is rewarding for each team member. And that's what my company teaches companies how to do as a whole.

So it's a— it's an enterprise product.

It is not an enterprise product at this time. It is a spreadsheet which you can replicate yourself. And there's a reason for that, which is This is not a management tool, it's a team tool, and the team needs to, to run it and adapt it to their own needs.

Of course, that makes sense because the cultures are going to be different and what you have and what you, what you need. You know, I get that. It makes sense.

It may be an enterprise tool at some point, but what I don't ever wanted to become is an oversight tool. Because what it does is on a monthly basis, everybody tracks how they've allocated their attention across all the categories of work in their organization. And, um, and it could become a micromanagement tool. That's not what it's meant to be. It's meant to be a team— a tool for teams to optimize themselves.

Self-optimization.

Okay, well, and in particular because there's all these, um, sort of attempts from the center to optimize work where, like, so for instance, we're going to run an employee survey, we're going to roll up the employee survey to some big aggregate, and then we hear about engagement, you know, employee engagement, um, surveys. And but aggregate data will never solve the unique needs of each employee, and it's slow and it's inaccurate. And so really what solves it is really small loops. Let's gather the information locally. Let's solve it real time, you know, team by team, almost team by team.

Is there anything, uh, that is a traditional HR talent management process that would just really need to be kind of burnt down and rebuilt to accommodate for this, or does this accommodate Can this be plugged into the existing models?

There's a lot of things that we do that you would never do to a customer in our talent management practices.

Right.

Okay.

So there are some things that would need to be burned down.

Yeah. First of all, let's just talk about how TA would change, not burnt down, but change, which is in our data models today. We have a lot of information about the skills required for work. We don't have any information in our data models about what that work is going to be like when you experience it. So when, when I go shopping on Amazon, what I get is product specifications, product details. I get reviews. When I go shopping for a job, I get the skills that are required from me. And so I'm, I'm getting very little information about what that work is really like. And so, and that's, and that would be like going to Amazon and just seeing a page of, you know, this is the currencies that we accept for this, for this particular product. But there's, but, you know, there are things that are, are very old school. We're going to treat you like an input to production practices. Performance management is one of them. Um, which is, uh, I would— job codes is another. Let's take this one. Job, job, jobs in general are defined at a very high level. And, and so we're going to create a job code, and we're going to tell you the skills that are required for that job, and we're going to tell you that we're going to reward you for getting more like that. So get inside that box. The more you can get inside that box and be that thing that we think you should be, the more we're going to reward you. If you're bigger than the box, we can't really see that. We can't really reward it. And so it's, it's about seeing people as bigger than those boxes. And so I see that there are challenges right down at the data model level in terms of how we, how we think about things.

I'm saying because I'm thinking about it right now and So is— there's these, um, you know, organizations, entities that go around building job taxonomies and stuff like that. Um, are you saying that kind of— it's kind of the wrong way to go?

It's fine for compensation, and that's what those objects are, but not job architecture. Job architectures are generally, um, at the level of compensation. So, so for instance, I worked for a company that had this role called program manager, HR program manager. Everybody fell into it. Were they all doing the same job? They weren't. But what, what was it for? It was to know that all these people are going to be paid on the same compensation scale. And so, and so it's— and also it's entirely about the capabilities of the people, the skills required for the job, not what people actually want and how different they are from each other. So, uh, so should they be done? Sure, for comp. Um, but, but that's not what you're talking about. That's not what I'm talking about, right? And, uh, I think we waste a ton of time, and you might be able to tell me different. Actually, um, I have personally in my career wasted a lot of time on things like skills taxonomies. Yeah, which can be a rabbit hole that I, I have never seen improve the performance of an organization.

No.

And you might be able to say, yes, they do.

But I've been through that a couple times. I'm actually in the middle of that right now because I'm trying to put together, um, a mapping of an intern— so the, the, the, the applicant tracking system um, doesn't really have easily discoverable resumes. Once somebody applied, they're attached to a rec, and you can't really find people, you know, once their recs are closed and all that. So there's a way to automate, um, candidates that have moved— but that have been moved forward and put them into talent pools that become searchable, because you can't search talent pools. And so I've tried to create the, this, the system of, uh talent pools that are at the top level, 10 different categories, taxonomies. And then below that, there's 2 more levels. So it's 3 levels deep. And I tried to map all of the organization's skills into that. The problem is that with the skills themselves change so frequently that it's actually the function really that I'm trying to map. And not the skill. And it's not really a taxonomy, it's more of an ontology that I end up creating.

I hate to do this live, there's somebody knocking on my door. I'm gonna have 2 seconds.

Oh no, no worries. All right, we'll pause. I've just muted him so that, um, we can't hear whatever they're saying here. I'll unmute him when he comes back.

I really apologize. That's— this is an informal show, right?

This—

it is.

Yeah, I just muted you for a minute so we didn't hear what was going on.

Yeah, well, and so, and so I, in fact, that's one of the things I did for Cisco is I created because I love skills. I think they're a great puzzle to solve and I'm here to solve puzzles. It is a big puzzle. Yeah, right. And it's beautiful. And I, in fact, I, for Cisco, I filed a patent on crowdsourced skills ontologies. But what I came to realize is you can— the risk-adjusted value of that sort of work is very low, um, and I'm not even sure it will ever do more than a rough sort of people. Yeah, to get them into the right buckets, essentially.

Literally all I'm trying to do is get them into the right— right, I'm trying to resurface their resumes into buckets that are searchable. That's basically it.

And, and, uh, uh, I couldn't think of any other way to do it. And, and, and a part of the reason for this is practical. It's just practically hard to, to track all the skills, and they change all the time. But the second reason is I am not convinced that I could know all the ingredients of a person as a list and know how that rolled up into their— what they do. That essentially, that how we work is an emergent property, and it's more complicated than our ingredients. So I think rough bucketing is okay, but this idea that, that it's going to be more than that, I think you can waste an infinite amount of money.

Um, yeah, I see what you're talking about, because it's, uh, and, and I see this a lot, you know, this, this might be something related to what you're, you're looking at right now. Um, I see this a lot with job postings where, in fact, I, I had this discussion with somebody yesterday, specifically with a candidate, uh, that we were— so the recruiter and I were, were talking about this particular candidate, and, um, the requirement states that the candidate has to have knowledge of PLCs, programmable logic controllers. But on this candidate's resume It doesn't say the words or the abbreviation PLC isn't listed. It's spelled out in other ways, like brand names of, you know, Allen-Bradley products and things like that. So, it's there, but it's not there. It's there, but it's not clearly visible. And I went back and I looked at because the debate was the hiring manager was passing on this candidate. And I'm like, I don't really think we should pass on him. I went back to look at the person that was previously in the job and how they got the job. And the person who was pre— who just vacated this role had only 3 months of experience with PLCs prior to taking this job. And then they learned PLCs on the job. And those 3 months were as an internship 10 years before. So they, they knew something for 3 months as an intern, 10 years later got a job doing it. And learned it then, but now they want to replace that person with someone who already knows how to do it, even though that skill set was not there when they hired the person who just left.

Right, right. There's— it's also one of the, one of the assumptions of the traditional model that sees you as an input to production. It sees you as not being, uh, self-adaptive.

Not being able to learn the job, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It sees you as not having as much agency as you do. It sees you as being more fixed and unchangeable. And the traditional model sees you as not, you know, having agency in who you're going to become.

Right. The skills you bring in are the only skills you're ever going to have. You're never going to— which, which we know is not the case because this person that vacated the job after a few years and got promoted into another role, they learned PLC on the job, and replacing them should not require the same things that they're doing now because that's not what they required before. So I get it. Yeah. So what— to take a start trying to close the loop here because we're running close on, on time here, and I wanted to back up to try and measure, um, what, what metric metric or metrics could we track if we really care about— I'm going to call it employee engagement even though that's not the term that you use, but about these workers that are not the working dead, right? So, if we really care about this work as a product, what would we measure? You know, how do we— I guess, how do we measure and what are we measuring? Is it employee satisfaction? Is that even like— Is there a a Net Promoter Score of employees or what? What are we looking at?

So first of all, think about what we often measure, especially from a TA perspective. We measure a lot of pipeline measures, right? We look at yield. We look at things like that.

Right. So we're now looking at this as a—

we now have to look at each individual and we have to measure the performance of the product. OK. And so—

Are you getting what you want out of this job? Yes.

And so one of the things we measure is— so the thing I was talking about before where there's a monthly monitoring of— it just takes 5 minutes to collect this information. Here's the categories: work, how rewarding is the work. So, so there's a couple of measures in there, which is how much of our attention is being allocated to what's most important to the company, how much of our attention as a team is being allocated to what our team is best at doing. How much of our attention is being allocated to work that we find rewarding? And if some category of work falls into the yellow or red, what is the time to resolution of the yellow or red? And so it can be super simple, right? The sorts of things that fall into the yellow or the red. I had a case where somebody on the team said, you know, this particular project I'm supporting people in Ireland takes me through breakfast with my children. I provide them breakfast. And somebody on the team said, I'm in Singapore, let's switch jobs. The bubble goes red— I mean, goes green on the chart.

And no longer skip breakfast. Yeah.

And there's like, we just had another one just this last week on my team, which is that One of the categories of work went yellow. It was team meetings. And we said, what's going on, Max? And Max said, you know what, I'm the social media guy, and, you know, in these team meetings we're doing nothing but talk about contracts, and I feel like I'm wasting my time. I feel like I'm wasting your time. We're like, yes, you're right. And so we made it so that all the action items that involve Max happen first in the meeting, and then he gets to leave. Okay, super simple employee work design. You know, thing. And so the question is time to resolution on those. It's okay for something to go yellow. It's, it's okay if something goes yellow. Red usually means harm. This work is harming me. I'm thinking about driving off the road. And so those you have to resolve very quickly. And so, so those are the measures. And there are other measures. I mean, customer churn is a measure of subscription products, which is which is turnover of employees. Turnover.

Okay.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, but, but they're a lagging indicator. It's too late, right?

By the time you leave, it's been red for a while.

What I'm talking about is a leading indicator, which is, which is some work in my life is, um, is not working.

Some work is getting in the way of life.

Sometimes, sometimes it's both of those I just mentioned were One of them, the first one was on the cost side, which is this is costing me breakfast with my kids. But sometimes it's just I, I am— this work is analytical and I'm a creative and I, I can do the analytical work, but I don't love it. In which case you can say, well, how are we going to win the kind of work that you do love? And in the past, when I was at Cisco, I would change the scope of the team so that it would win the kind of work that the, that the people on the team wanted to buy.

And that's a longer-term play where if they're on the team big enough where you can move pieces around.

Yeah. Or, yeah, or, or you have the freedom to be able to, uh, to, to do what I did. I didn't really have the freedom.

Well, it's your team, so I had some liberty.

I expanded the scope sort of surreptitiously. That's also what I hired my job to do for me. So, so yeah, I mean, you start using product measures and, and I think, you know, one that Fred Reichheld really likes is earned, earned revenue. So what that means is essentially returning buyers, not did you win new customers? But it's, did the customers you have re-up, buy again?

Yeah.

Did they buy again? And he's the author of the Net Promoter Score. Did they, you know, would they recommend this work to somebody else? Those are measures of, is this product working?

So that translates into employee referrals and turnover.

It does.

In some degree, although you're still looking for a precursor, not a, not a, you know, not lagging indicator, but yeah. Wow. So if, to wrap up, fast forward 10 years, what would the world's most employee-loved company be doing radically different?

That's a great question today. Okay, so I am not sure that HR is positioned to be a product function.

Right.

They would either have to become one or we would have to create one. But there would be—

let's go for the win and, you know, what's it going to look like?

Um, there would be a work experience function that would report directly to the CEO. Work would be recognized as a product that was a peer to every other, other product being sold in the company. And the work experience, uh, function would be, uh, teaching managers and teams how to run multi-sided as a multi-sided function. And, and they would be granting managers and teams the freedom to take action when they found that something wasn't working for them, those yellows and reds. Right. And so some of it is, is taking rules out of the system is what the WX team would be doing. So for instance, frequently there's a rule that says you know, you can only move jobs every 3 years. That's a bad rule. You want customers to be able to go to the product that they want to subscribe to as much as possible, and you risk some productivity, but you probably get more in the long run. And so, and so that WX team would be a design function. They would be designing a— I'm going to get sort of jargony here— but designing a service system, and that service system would be able to deliver a customized experience to every person in the company through skilled managers who are designers and brokers with the ability to creation.

Yeah.

And, and the ability to, to make decisions and, and, and take action upon what they find.

Yeah. If I feel like in a, in a, in a small business that might be a little bit more organically doable. Like, just, it seems like there wouldn't be so many obstacles. But once you get to be a large employer, a Cisco for example, that may be some pretty radical change management.

Yeah, this is a problem of larger companies, and it's a problem of larger companies because that's what I was thinking. They get so big that you, you have to do things at scale, and you lose the detail of the people on your team.

You have 27 people that do the same thing even though it's not the same thing.

Yeah. And so then they hire people like me and people like you to deal with these scale problems, and we turn it into math. And this is what I did a lot of my career. We, we show them how to become a procurement and maintenance function of people. As opposed to smaller teams where the detail isn't lost. So, so I, I'm a company of 10 and I know every person on my team personally, and I know how they're experiencing their work. Um, that's not the same problem.

Yeah, got it, got it. Well, this has been eye-opening and educational, and I don't want to keep you past the hour here, so I, I want to wrap up and I I do want to ask the— there's always a question I close every show with, and it is, who should be our next guest? Who would you like to see on the show? I know it's hard because you're not in the space directly anymore. But if you could think of, you know my role in my world and it used to be your world. Who or what type of person, in what capacity would you think would benefit from being on this show and could benefit our audience?

Interested in AI?

Yeah.

Vivian Ming.

Okay.

It's fantastic on the topic. I'm about to have Anthea Roberts on my show, uh, uh, in a couple of months, and I think she's fantastic, but she's, but she's less of a generalist than Vivian Ming, and so I think that's— she's really good Any other topics you're interested in?

That's great. No, these are great. I mean, if there was something in the world of connecting the dots between recruiting and this redefinition of work as a product. Yeah. So, like candidate experience or something like that.

Marty Cagan is the world's leading expert, one of the world's leading experts on product management. And so now that the way I've described it, product managers are— managers become product managers along with their teams. Now those skills become really important.

Right, right. Excellent. Well, I will see if I can get any of those folks interested. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule and visiting with us today. Really appreciate it.

It was great to catch up. Yeah, I hadn't seen you in two decades.

It's been a while.

I'm impressed that you tracked me down.

Well, I am a sourcer by trade, right?

Exactly.

Oh well, thanks everybody for joining us. If you want to tune in next week, we have an interesting guest, Terry Terhark. Who is also a veteran in the industry, used to run one of the largest, if not the largest, RPOs, very big in the RPO section, used to be connected with Ayres and a few other brand names you might recognize. And he's now doing the next thing, literally called The Next Thing. So we're going to be having him on the show if you're interested, coming back next week. If not, We'll see you, um, some other time, and be kind to yourselves. Take care, everybody.