Steve Cadigan
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF CAREERS AND LEADERSHIP?
MARIA GEFFERS
Can you tell us about yourself and your journey? When did you realize you wanted to work in human resources?
STEVE CADIGAN
I have a senior in high school right now, and I have twins who are freshmen. We're navigating the big decisions in life. I am a former human resources executive. During my career I got to work in the number one job for my profession. I was the first chief of people officer for the LinkedIn Corporation during their period of massive growth. There's no other job in my profession that I would've wanted to do. It was incredibly rewarding. I met presidents of companies. I interviewed executives and several phenomenal people. I hired thousands of people from six different industries.
I grew up the child of a minister and a social worker. I went to college and had no clue what I wanted to do. I went in knowing more of what I didn't want to do than what I did want to do. I did not want to do what my parents were doing. I love the service they give to the community and value what they do, but I didn’t want to ask United Way for money most of my life. I wanted to be the person United Way asked for money.
I chose history as a major because I enjoyed it the most, but when I graduated with a history degree, I still had no clue what I wanted to do. I did not do any summer internships during college. Nobody was encouraging me to do internships like they would today.
I graduated, and I had one on-campus interview with a company in San Francisco. It happened to be the area where the woman I was dating at the time was living. So, I followed her there. I had no friends, no family, and no network. I interviewed again with the company, and they offered me a job. Then, about a year into it, they moved me from credit and collections to recruiting. At 23, I was fortunate enough to fall in love.
Most of my college time was spent in the gym, not the library. I played three sports in college; baseball, basketball, and tennis. I love competing, and seeing people compete and how they handle different pressure situations. I love coaching.
I discovered that human resources could deliver everything I loved about sports. I could organize teams and coach them. I could try to match employees with managers, decide who is going to work in what environment, and how to optimize that for everyone.
I built that skill over time. By the time I was 30 I had worked in three companies. I decided this was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, so I applied to grad school and got my master’s degree. Then I found a few role models and I loved how they thought. In college I didn’t know what human resources was. I had never heard of it. I was afraid of business. My parents taught me to be afraid of businesspeople, so I was timid at first.
I got an opportunity of a lifetime in the mid-'90s to go into high tech and to become a human resource leader for some high growth companies that gave me phenomenal experience. I traveled around the world. One company moved me to Asia for two years and I ran HR for all of Asia out of Singapore. From there, I moved to Canada, and I was head of a small technology firm based there. I lived there for four years, and then I came back to the U.S.
After coming back to America, I found myself in a company that I wasn't enjoying for the first time in my life. I'd made a real bad choice. Then LinkedIn came knocking and said, "Would you be our first head of HR?" I asked, "Me? How did you find me? I don't know your business. I don't know anything about the technology you’re building. I'm scared to work in a small pre-IPO company. I don't know if you're going to make it or not." That turned out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.
Fast-forward a few years later, I'm sitting in Jamie Dimon’s office at JP Morgan, helping him think through career planning for his staff and building products at LinkedIn to elevate talent that had never been built before. That was an amazing adventure. I did that for about four years. We had one of the most successful IPOs in the history of technology to this day, based on stock performance and growth. 15 years after that company was founded, it was sold to Microsoft for about $26 billion.
I am proud I built a culture there that helped that company realize its destiny. An important part of my job was recruiting and building a culture that was going to help the organization thrive during crazy times. I think a lot of times, as parents and as students we hear people say, "You need to have a plan. You need to know what you're doing." I just did seven college visits with my son, who's a senior. Every tour started with asking students, "What do you want to do?" I'm thinking to myself, "My kid has no clue what he wants to do, and if he did I wouldn’t believe him.”
He started out saying he wanted to pursue science and math. By the end he wasn’t so sure because I kept challenging him and telling him he didn’t know. This is difficult for people to do in the world we live in today. This is what I try to address in Workquake. There is something interesting happening in the workforce. We have more people leaving companies faster than ever before, and people are only staying in organizations for short periods of time around the world, especially in the U.S. Right now, the median tenure for the professional workforce in a company is 4.2 years. For people between the ages of 25 and 35, it's 2.8. That's the median, which means half of that number is less.
Companies must learn how to create value when people aren't staying as long and think about that differently. People, as they enter the workforce, can see more of what's possible than at any time in history. “I can work over here. I can do this.” In the last 20 years we’ve had unicorn startups like Airbnb, Slack, Uber, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They're less than 25 years old and they're successful. Companies like GE lost almost a trillion dollars of value in the last 20 years. What used to be a safe place is now uncertain. People don’t know where to go or what company is right for them.
The truth is, you don't know until you get out there and you start tasting and trying. There are pros and cons to having infinite choices. It’s great because you can see what’s possible, but it’s bad because you’re worried you made the wrong choice. That’s something that we haven’t reconciled with today. When I deal with leaders around the world, I ask them what their biggest problem is. They usually answer that they can’t hire people fast enough, they can’t find the people they need, and the ones they do find don’t stay as long as they want them to. When I ask them why that is, they blame it on the short attention span of millennials. To which I respond, “The children you raised, those millennials? They’re the problem?”
I tell them to take a step back and remind them they might have done the same if they could see how the workforce was working and what options you had 40 years ago.
People couldn’t see that before. We had a classified newspaper that had a regional perspective on what jobs were open. We couldn't see what jobs were open in other states and other countries like we can today. We see everything. It's not a millennial problem. It's a platform transparency issue that people are acting on. This is where it complicates career choices, because there are a lot more.
TOM GEFFERS
In your book there is a story about Coach K and Duke University. He was an incredibly successful coach. His teams always seemed to be in the Final Four. He talks about how when he recruits his players, he has the expectation they will only be there for one or two years and then move on. That’s what he tells his students. How does that relate to corporations? Some will hire people for a short amount of time to help their brand. How does that work in the workforce? What should people getting out of college expect in that time frame?
STEVE CADIGAN
The reason I love that story is because I love basketball. I'm not necessarily a Duke fan. I have enormous respect for Coach K and what he's done year after year, building world-class teams that get to the tournament. The point I was trying to make with that story is that here is an industry that moved from having team members, players, students, stay four years to staying six to nine months a year maximum. Both parties know that.
"I'm going to hire you, Zion Williamson, one of the greatest players to come out of college in the last five years." He was at Duke. He left after his freshman year two years ago, one of the greatest players that we've seen in college in recent years. He and Coach K both knew he was only going to probably stay one year. That was the deal that they had. It's hard for businesses and it’s hard for Coach K. He must build a world-class team three months before March Madness starts. He used to have three years to teach the plays and defense. That turned into two or three months.
If both parties understand the tenure of the relationship is different, then they can have a more honest conversation. Coach K can say, "Listen, I know you're only going to stay here one year. I'm good with it. I want you to stay here versus going to all the other schools who want you to go play there because I think our alumni are some of the greatest. If you don't make the NBA, if you don't realize your dream because you're at Duke, our network's going to help you get a job as a coach, as a scout, as a broadcaster, as an analyst, or maybe you can come back and help me coach. We've got you. I care about you for your career and your life, not just when you're playing for me."
This is what a lot of organizations are missing today. People are saying, "I care about you when you work for me. And when you quit, I'm going Tony Soprano on you. You're dead to me." You can't do that today because people can get on their phone and tell the world, "Hey, that company's horrible. Don't go there." So, Coach K shifted from constantly recruiting to saying, "I've got to get people up and running. I've got to get this team productive fast."
I’m telling leaders in business, "If you have jobs in your company that take six months to learn, you're in trouble because people are showing they are only going to stay two or three years. Maybe you need to design your work differently." This is how we're going to see the world of work change. Coach K wants people who can adapt quickly. He might say something like, "The faster you can learn on my team, the quicker you're going to get my offense, my defense, my strategy, and my philosophy. If you need a lot of time to learn stuff, it's going to be hard for me to get you productive quickly. If you're going to leave quickly, we're both going to be unsatisfied."
That's true in business today. The value and the accuracy of a job description that's posted to recruit people is accurate for about two months, maximum. The job's going to change. You're going to take on new things. You're going to learn new stuff. We're heading toward a future where companies are going to recruit more on what you can learn than what you know. If you believe the accuracy of a job description is finite and going to change, the more people you have in your company who can adapt and adjust. The more people you have in your company that can adapt, learn, and adjust, the greater the probability that your company can adapt and adjust. This is a skill. There is no major in agility. However, schools can deliver agility in how you learn. Instead of one teacher to passive students, we're going to have students work together on projects. We're going to have students teach other students things they know. We're going to vary the learning experience to mirror what the world of work is, which is constantly changing and evolving.
When you're hiring someone out of school, you're not hiring someone to be a student, but that's all you have to go with a lot of times. They’re being hired to adapt, learn, and focus on new things. For applicants, if you can show you have adapted, you've been learning new things, you're intellectually curious, and you have a growth mindset, the world is going to be less intimidating. You know you’re going to need to learn new skills for the rest of your career.
College isn’t about getting you a job. College is about giving you a career foundation, so you know how to communicate, how to lead, how to process information, how to think critically, how to challenge, how to have grace, and how to work with other people. That's what I want people to learn. When I think about my own experience and how I got to the top of the mountain of my profession, I was in the gym more, but I was learning in the gym. I was playing against professors and other folks. How do they handle competition? How do they handle victory? How do they handle defeat? When I'm in the office, that's enormously helpful to me. A lot of parents think, "If you're not in the classroom, you're not learning." That's narrow- minded because the whole experience is about revealing how the work world works.
MARIA GEFFERS
As a teacher of a gifted program, we structured it the same way. We had them work in teams, come out of teams, work together, and meet those challenges. It was okay to fail because that's how you learn. Your greatest learning pieces are when you fail. I can see that pedagogy moving into college. Some of the colleges are moving in that direction, but most of them aren’t. Bureaucracy keeps everything staid. Nothing changes. The college education system needs to keep abreast of what’s going on in the workforce. They’re totally separate ivory towers in a sense.
STEVE CADIGAN
We all have a responsibility to help build a better future. I'm reluctant to point fingers at universities, but they have built a system that rewards tenure. It doesn't reward innovation and helping students unlock greatness. It rewards published papers and longevity. Colleges and universities must figure out a different system. There's a lot of inertia blocking that, because all the people who have that benefit are the people who are going to vote, and they're going to vote negative because they like their security.
The greatest boss I ever worked for didn't spend a day in college. She didn't have that opportunity for a bunch of life reasons. She was a young mother and couldn't afford it. In her later years, she was teaching classes in college. She learned a PhD in understanding humans, and what motivated them. She taught me a lesson I’ll never forget, which is to hire people smarter than you. At first that didn’t make sense to me. I thought they would make me look bad. She told me not to think of it that way. She said they would help me do greater things and that when I had something I wanted them to do, I could teach them.
We were acquiring companies at the time. We were written up in the Wall Street Journal as doing this well. I hired someone who was better than me even though I was intimidated by him. He’s now one of my best friends. He taught himself Mandarin and is an ex-airborne ranger. He was in the 101st and is an unbelievable human being. He's now a superstar at Google and doing his own thing. My old boss learned the lesson to hire people who are smarter than you because she wasn’t taught that was a bad idea. There are benefits of not attending college.
I've worked in some of the most respected organizations in the world over the course of my career. I've been very fortunate. I've also worked for and with people who went to schools I couldn't pronounce, and I never heard of, and they were amazing. So, you can find your way in almost any school. Many of us think we want the brand name to say to impress others at the cocktail party. I think grit, hunger, and the desire to learn is always going to win out.
I've hired people from Ivy League schools who were not fun to work with because they expected to be promoted. They felt entitled. That's why many of my recruiting friends will say, "We're looking for someone who's hungry, not someone who's expecting something." That person could come from lots of different places. I want to depressurize this decision for a lot of folks.
I have a senior in high school, and I want the best for him. My heart is tender because I don’t want him to have to fail or feel failure. He’s going to get rejected by some schools. Our children must learn from that. The greatest lesson my son ever learned was when he didn’t make the traveling baseball team. It broke his heart. All his friends made it and he didn’t. He’s a better person now because he understands what that felt like. Often, we don’t let our kids fail because we don’t want them to hurt, but the hurt builds character.
MARIA GEFFERS
When an oyster makes a pearl, it’s the grit that creates the pearl, which is of value. We tell our students to prove to colleges what they did during the lockdown, so they can show they continued to learn and have grit.
TOM GEFFERS
It doesn’t matter what college people go to. Most employers don’t look at the college, instead they look at the major and what they did with it. Can you talk about your talent development? If someone is a college senior and they’re looking to go into the corporate world and want to be aggressive because they know they are going to change jobs in two or three years, can they go into a job interview with that attitude? Can they talk about what they want to do in the future and use that as a strategy?
STEVE CADIGAN
The psychology of the workforce is shifting right now. The talent today is more loyal to growing than to a company. If people are on the precipice of leaving school, a year ago I would tell them to stay in school, but the floodgates are open now. We have 10 million open jobs and eight and a half million people unemployed in the United States.
I wish someone had told me this when I was ready to join the workforce. I got lucky. There are two or three things I would want in my first organization. The first is having people I can learn from and people moving out of the organization. I worked for an insurance company for four years and no one ever left that company. My network didn't grow. I went to Silicon Valley after that, and within a year, a third of the people I knew were in other companies sharing how they do things and referring jobs to me.
If there are good people I can learn from, I can build my network with, and they are moving on to other bigger and better things, that’s where I want to be. I stumbled on human resources as a discipline. If you have not figured out your discipline yet, and you're still wondering where to go, with HR you can go to any country in any industry in the world and practice your craft. If I am a mineral scientist, I have minerals. That's all I can work with. If you can take my craft anywhere, it will serve you well. You’ll be immune to downturn or anything like that.
When you’re just out of college, you might think you know what you want, but you probably don’t. You’ll want to take into consideration long deadlines, teams going through M&A, organizations that have loud work environments, quiet work environments, organizations that have the bosses in your grill all the time or organizations where you’re given all kinds of freedom. You want to go to a place where you can move around and sample the buffet of different opportunities, different kinds of work, and if possible, different industries too.
Mainstream consulting is such a good start, because their model is, "Come here and then please leave and get a better job." The better the job you get, the more we can recruit more new grads because you came here and you learned. You worked on different projects, went to different countries and different cultures, and experienced different leadership styles. Through those experiences you can decide if the company and leadership is amazing or that the company is a disaster. “The market thinks they're great, but we've gone under the hood and they're just a horrible show.” That information is helpful. The biggest mistake I see college graduates make is deciding to work for a company whose customer experience they like. Just because you like the consumer brand doesn’t mean it's a good place to work.
People in the 2000s went to work for Twitter and they ran from the building screaming. It was very chaotic. They were highly uncomfortable in that environment. So, don't assume because you like Nike that you’ll love working there. You might get an employee discount, but you don’t know how the people move around or how they welcome new people. Some companies won’t even listen to you until you’ve been there three of four years. These are things you don’t see, so be careful when making those choices.
MARIA GEFFERS
Thank you Steve, you’ve shared a lot of good information about human resources and job hunting in general.
