Why Great Hires Fail and How to Fix Talent Market Fit | Ep. 327 with Deepali Vyas of Founder & CEO, Vyas Media & 'The Elite Recruiter'

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1:28choices in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties. Listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

1:40So Deepali, when I was in my corporate environment, what I noticed was people were getting fired. And many times it was because they were not the right fit for the position. But the corporation is like, put them on a performance improvement plan. The amazing pip, put them on that and then basically get them out like whatever, hire slow, fire fast, right? That was like, you know, do these things. And what I always found is as a leader, as I continued to move up, that people were just not in the right position and they're forced to doing a job that did not fit for them. How do you see this? First of all, I think this happens more often than you think.

2:24And that seems to be the age old problem around organizational design, right? When you see people on PIPs, it's not because they were incapable. It's because they were misaligned, right? It was the wrong role, wrong stage, wrong manager, wrong pressure profile. But I think the uncomfortable truth is that, you know, sometimes it's not fire fast, it's diagnosed correctly. So I think the corporate mistake here is corporations assume if someone isn't performing in this role, they're underperforming as a person. And that's flawed thinking, right? Performance is contextual. And so if a person has high potential, but they're in the wrong function, that's a problem.

3:07If they're strategic in an execution-heavy role, also a problem. If they're executional in a strategic role, also a problem. So they're never going to win. So I think the leadership question here is why are they failing? And where would this person win. And that's fundamentally different leadership posture. And I think that there's a diagnostic for this, right? Before you pip someone, figure out what is their capability? Like, do they actually have a skillset that's required? Not from before, but like, what are they really, really good at? And then where's the energy fit? Where does this work drain them versus what energizes them?

3:44If someone would have asked me that early on in my career, Dan, it would have been super obvious where I thrive versus where I am. I suck at details, period, full stop. I suck at it, but I am really good at empowering people, setting big vision, energizing people towards a really big goal. And if they would have seen that early on, they wouldn't have put me in, you know, spreadsheet land, right? Because that's not where I thrive. And then the last part is, you know, well, I talked about autonomy fit, but like the stage fit, right? Like is the company in a phase that matches their wiring, right?

4:25Because sometimes you can be in a high growth company and you're the kind of person that's like, look, I want to be really pragmatic and methodical and whatever. You don't fit there because they want to move fast and break things, right? And so that's where all of these things kind of go wrong and the wires get super crossed. Which leads me to this thought around. Most founders are obsessing over product market fit. You argue about talent market fit. How do you recognize this before you even put someone in a position? So if you're going to interview someone and you're going to match them to a position, and then what do you do the moment they're in there if you're realizing it might not be that fit?

5:08So founders do obsess with product market fit, which is fair, right? But most of them don't think about the talent market fit. And that's why a lot of these great hires fail. So what is talent market fit, right? It's not the impressive resume, the big brand logo, the years of experience, the raw intelligence. It's really the alignment between a person's wiring and the company's current stage and the pressure and the market reality. That's talent market fit, to be really, really clear, right? So here's where founders, I feel, go wrong. They will hire the quote-unquote best candidate, the most experienced operator, the person who crushed it at a bigger company, but they forget that the environment changed the outcome, right?

5:56So I always say this a lot. you can come from a really big branded logo. You really have to ask yourself as a founder hiring that person, did that person, you know, make the logo or did the logo make the person, right? That's a really big difference because could they stand up on their own without the logo? And does that matter for you now, right? So like a VP who thrived in a 3000 person infrastructure, they had a deep bench, they had clear process, they had brand gravity. Those people will typically fail in a 40-person chaos, right? Ambiguous strategy, founder-led decision-making, capital constraints.

6:41Like that VP is smart. They're different. There's different results that they have in that organization, not in this organization. So we had a guest on before, Frances Fry, a Harvard professor, and she helped the transformation through Uber when it was the founder to the new CEO. And I was fascinated to hear about this whole founder-CEO when the company scales, you now need a new CEO because of the fits of the company. What do you see around C-suite fit as the company scales over time? So I have a confession. My team and I, my team actually worked on the Uber CEO search. So life has come full circle to talk about it.

7:36It was really difficult. And where Uber was at the time because it was founder-led, if you think about where they were going at the inflection point that they were, and Francis probably can go more deeply into this, they needed institutional gravity. They needed institutional process. And Dara was one of the few people that had built several companies to a stage that had these institutional processes that could really build world-class frameworks and process and get everybody organized to row in one direction, right? And he had done that over and over again. He also had a bit of gray hair and he also had the maturity and he also had the longer term vision because he had been a visionary previously, right?

8:39Not to take anything away from Travis, but I would say that there is an inflection point that happens. And by the way, like not even just Uber, you know, I'm sure you've watched shows like Silicon Valley, right? And so when those things do ring true in real life, right? The CEO profile has to evolve based on the stage that the company is at, right? And so I just gave you the sort of microcosm version of a VP that thrives in these types of environments won't really thrive in that. The reverse is also true, right? If you have just played sort of quote unquote small ball and you really need to go to this level, what does all of that infrastructure need in order to get to that level?

9:24And you need the right CEO profile. So that's what we're really talking about. It's fascinating. It's very fascinating around what happens with your company as you continue to grow. And also, where would I want my company to even go? And what do I need to sacrifice as a founder? I know many that were kicked out of their company or the board or whoever, investors, remove them and put somebody else in. It's very interesting around what happens with the people as a company grows. But let's say there's a organization, maybe less than 20 people. They're not thinking about people so much because they're still thinking about growing and scaling the organization.

10:06Is there a simple audit or something that they can do to look at their organization to see if the people they do have are correct? The audit, I would say, if you think about it from like a board level, because that's typically why these things, you know, come about. What stage are we actually in, right? Like not what stage we're aspiring to be, but what stage are we actually in? What problems dominate this stage? Is it innovation, scale, governance, turnaround? What is it, right? And then do the leaders in our organization, right? Whether it's, you know, at this small stage, but they're all basically leaders, right?

10:44Does that pattern history match that pressure, right? So does past patterns predict future behavior? And can they handle it? That's the diagnostic. And the hard truth is like, you know, sometimes the most dangerous CEO is not a weak one. It's the almost right one, right? And so that's where, you know, boards and the leadership teams really have to take audit or take stock of where they are. By the way, like you mentioned something earlier, I'm literally working with a founder right now that got pushed out by a board, even though they had had multiple exits, you know, had had 300 million in revenue in their previous companies, but she got replaced by an a man.

11:29And there was a whole dynamic there as well. And there was a reason for that because when they were raising the next level of capital, they needed the face that was going to represent what that next face, what that next phase was going to be. So there's a lot of dynamics that get played out in the boardroom. We just had another guest on who is talking about this issue around many times women founders seem to be removed from their company without them. And I've talked to some really well-known companies before, not on this show, just privately, who if I said their names, people would know them like household names they were all removed from their companies it's great there's a whole group of women that meet up i guess who have all been removed to talk about like what you can do in the future and why do you think this is happening and is it related to what you were just saying around the future of the company is it only is it because there's not a lot of women who are founding you know larger companies what do you think it is so i think that there's a it's first of all, I don't think it's random, right?

12:37High profile founder removals have happened to men and women, but the pattern feels different for women. And there's actually sort of structural reasons that I believe, right? One is the capital dynamic. Venture capital is still overwhelmingly male. That's a fact. Boards are still overwhelmingly male, also a fact. And power networks are still relationship-based. So the tension kind of arises where there's founder vision, board pressure, and growth expectations. And the person with less embedded power losses, that's where the conversation takes place. And women founders statistically raise less capital, have fewer deeply embedded board allies, and they get scrutinized earlier for leadership maturity.

13:27and that compounds under stress. My mind, I'm blown. My mind is blown. I never, the power dynamic. I never, I've never even heard of this, to be honest. Like the power dynamics of what's going, this is why I never. If you're a small business owner, you already know what it takes to keep everything moving. You're juggling customers, invoices, and about a hundred decisions every day. Thankfully, taxes don't have to be one more thing on that list with Intuit TurboTax. You can get your business taxes done for you with a full service expert. TurboTax matches you with your dedicated tax expert who knows your industry, understands your business write-offs, and gives you the personalized advice your business deserves.

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16:40See for yourself at RingCentral.com. RingCentral, voice of your business. ...money because I was too afraid of the power, giving up the power. And I'm a three-time founder, and I have raised money, and it is a slog in the mud. And I do realize I'm a female founder, right? By the way, in my seat raising money, and I raised over a million dollars for my last venture. even just that by the way the zero to million is the hardest i would say i was scrutinized like a series a company versus a seed company as a female founder that's firsthand experience hope it changes because i know the the amount of money going to women is very so we just had um the previous founder of task rabbit who started her own vc firm now to hopefully try and solve this, but obviously it's something huge.

17:41When you look at the future of what the workplace will be, a couple of years ago, this was like the topic everywhere. Will people go back to the office, hybrid? Then all of a sudden it became a topic again. And there was a company recently just laid off 4 ,000 people and said it was because of AI. I'm sure it wasn't because of just AI. But this is really becoming a thing, right? Like a lot of jobs are being lost to AI. And I have a family member who is always never had a problem getting a job. It just took her like two years to get a job. And she's like in a very specific niche job that normally she never has a time without a job.

18:25So how do you see the future of how this is going to play out with obviously AI and robotics just advancing so fast? So I live in the world of data and AI from a search executive search perspective. So, you know, a lot of times even I get a lot of pushback saying, you know, you're the reason why all of this stuff is happening. You're putting these AI officers in these seats and all of the stuff. I think, first of all, I know the company that you're talking about. When companies say that they laid off 4 ,000 people because of AI, it's almost never purely AI. But let me tell you what's happening in this market because I did a video about this recently and kind of connecting the dots here.

19:06There's a few things. At the leadership level, AI is being discussed ad nauseum. I also think a lot of people don't understand AI in depth. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit, which, you know, most CEOs and boards want to take advantage of, but they don't know how. So I call this sort of level one, level two, level three thinking. Level one is have your employees experiment with this stuff, whether it's chat, whether it's, you know, Gemini, whether it's Claude, whatever it is. When you're doing it individually, you are now maybe 20, 30 % more productive because you're using these things with that amount of utility.

19:52Level two is when you think about the workflows in your organization of, hey, my team has to deliver this. So there's a lot of different people in a lot of different places in these workflows that really need to connect the dots via AI enablement to actually get that thing in a place where it is, saves 30, 40 % more time or cost savings or whatever it is. That is the layer that really needs to be built out in corporate America, right? And the third layer is the whole system redesign. What companies are making a mistake right now is there's level one and then there's level three, but the missing middle is where the ROI is really at.

20:39And that's why there's frustration. And that's why you're seeing this overcutting, right? You're seeing all these layoffs saying, well, EA is going to solve everything, but they haven't done layer two. So they think they're just going to redesign stuff. And I guarantee you the people that overcut now will overhire again in the next sort of pendulum swing. So I think that there's a bit of a, somewhat of a misinformation and myths out there. And then, you know, MIT came out with a study saying, you know, 95 % of companies are not getting the ROI on AI. But when you dig in a layer deeper, it's because there's 12 power users of Microsoft Co-Pilot and nobody else in that organization because they haven't really been taught how to do all of these things, right?

21:24So that's the reality. And that's why I did that video on like, these things will only move as fast as budgets can approve, right? Or, you know, roadmaps can be approved. And that's going to be a longer cycle. Now, Block did this, you know, lay off. And I think that it wasn't purely about it, but they're taking advantage of the time where there's sort of cheap capital that's disappearing, there's margin pressure, whatever it is, but they want to signal that they are AI accelerating. I thought of a funny show. We as humans give all of everything, all our jobs to AI and robots. Then the robots become human, they unionize, then they want days off, they only want to work 20 hours a week and then humans have to take back over.

22:10I think that might be what's going to happen. When you, which leads me into, I'm seeing a lot of younger people, let's say in their 20s, taking on jobs that like Claude, for example, who just gave out like billions or hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options to their employees, private options. You could work out like SpaceX and get private options and then it goes public. I wonder how in the next two or three years, they will become multi multi millionaires. Some of these companies I'm seeing, like, if you're getting stock like this, and it goes public, or even it already is public, or they're getting paid$500 ,000 to work at Meta.

22:51I wonder if they're only going to work for a few years, and then stop working. So that's a great point. And a lot of the stuff that I talk about, on my sort of elite recruiter platform when I'm out there is the rise of the portfolio career. I think the traditional career, staying at one company for a very long time is over. And I think the future of work is going to be everyone is sort of stacking skills within these organizations, getting a lot of compensation for it. But I think that they are going to learn and do all of these things and then say, hey, if I can do it here, I can do it across the board.

23:30And so they will stand up multiple income streams based on their expertise. And that's what a portfolio career looks like, where they will eventually become independent consultants. But now the rise of independent consultants and being able to advise or do sprint work or do advisory work or do fractional work with multiple companies, because those companies need that expertise from these very few people, I think you're going to see a rise in the ultimate portfolio career. So it's sort of like single consulting houses, solopreneurs, or they will get their friends together and build this whole consulting collective that goes against all of the big professional services companies that we see today and break those models in half.

24:15The big firms need to watch out. It makes sense. I'm also wondering, because we've been talking with other guests around the wealth transfer. I keep thinking about this. There's like$80 trillion in wealth in the US that's transferring from baby boomers to Gen Z and millennial in the next few years as they age out. They're getting these jobs that could be making potentially a lot of money. If they can take a few hundred thousand dollars home in dividends, I don't know if they want to work because it seems like they want to work for... They want to be passionate workers. They want to travel. They want to dance on TikTok or they want to be content creators.

24:57I don't know if they want to hustle and grind. I'd say older millennials and up, you and I, we got to hustle. We got to grind. But if I'm making$200 ,000 a year and just from dividends or$250 ,000, I'm not sure if I'm one of them, if I'm going to work anymore, which I wonder what happens to that base of probably highly educated, skilled, workers, they are just gone. What do you think? First of all, you are kind to lump me into older millennial because I'm definitely not that. I am much older than you, but I appreciate that. You know, Dan, that's such an honest question and it's layered, right?

25:40Because what you're really asking is if people don't have to work, will they still choose to work? And that happens to a talent and what happens to that sort of talent base, like you said, highly educated. So let's kind of break this down. I think the dividend illusion, right? First, the number of people truly living off of 200 ,000 passive income is still relatively small. And I know that those numbers are like really highlighted. It's still relatively small when you think about like the distribution of it. So here's what social media sort of amplifies. They amplify the crypto wins, the exit liquidity, the creator revenue spikes, the dividend screenshots, all that.

26:20But statistically, I think most people do not have permanent, sustainable, passive income at that level, right? There's a loud minority effect that's happening there. Let's be really real. And I think that work motivation is shifting. It's not disappearing. So like older millennials and Gen X, right? We work from the point of view of like, we need to survive. We need security. we need status, right? The younger cohorts work is sort of optional identity expression, right? It's economic context. So if you grew up during 08 and you were watching layoffs and you see loyalty unrewarded, you're going to equate optionality with safety, meaning I'm not going to work for that one employer that can lay me off one day or go under, right?

27:08And I think if someone truly has$200 ,000 in passive income, here's the interesting part. I think those people will build that passive income. They do have ambition. They understand leverage. They enjoy building. They like status. They like influence, right? None of that stuff is going to disappear. They're going to pivot and they're going to become angel investors. They're going to become fractional advisors. They're going to become creators. They're going to become portfolio operators. They're going to become board members, consultants, whatever. They may not grind 80 hours, But they're not going to vanish from productivity.

27:42And I think this is where I feel, look at me, right? I don't need to work if I don't really want to. I'm doing it out of the sheer sort of passion that I have for it. So I think even this younger audience, this younger sort of cohort that's coming up, they're going to want to do meaningful work. And that might not yield like the comp that we might be used to, but they're okay with that because they have this passive income. back there. And that's where it's going to win. The new equation I'm going to say is income is really leverage plus skill plus distribution. I think that's the equation. I think I've talked to over 1 ,400 people in six years.

28:26I've never heard this before. I like to have a guest on who's telling me something I've never heard before. And really, my mind is suddenly expanded. Like that is very interesting. I could see this whole like, it's like the rise of the gig economy, like the fractional type, like, I don't want to work full time for one job, which I don't blame anyone. I remember the last job that I had, and I was miserable. And they would never really allow me even though I kept they kept promoting me. But every time they promoted me, I was even more miserable than the previous time. And it was like the only option I had.