Ryan Roslansky: Former LinkedIn CEO on Building an Irreplaceable Career in the Age of AI | Career | E396

21:18Hala Taha:That's Blinkist.com slash profiting. I'm wondering how you imagine companies will level up their employees in these skills and also like hire for these specific skills. I think there's a huge market right now, by the way, you know, for anyone listening, if you're thinking about starting something like the education system, which, you know, to a large extent has been built for a different era and is probably past its prime, has never really valued this ability to be teaching these, you know, softer skills. And if those are going to become the hot commodity, I think that as a society, it's going to be incumbent upon us to figure out how to ensure people have these skills.

21:58And it's not a lot of focus for people right now. I think you get them by practicing them like you would anything else. And there's some types of skills, unfortunately, you usually can't do alone. Like, you can't learn to be a great communicator, like, by yourself. You have to sit down and talk to someone and be able to look them in the eye and, like, have a great conversation. I think that, you know, one, it's a mindset shift. at a society level and at a company level to figure out how to like really focus on this. And then, you know, I think upon that, we'll start to see these ways where, you know, hiring against those skills will be much more, you know, commonplace in terms of how it works.

22:33My favorite question right now for what it's worth, anytime I hire somebody for LinkedIn, I have two favorite questions. Like number one, if a friend or colleague of yours had never heard of LinkedIn before and asked you what it was and what it's for, what would you say? and sometimes you get like really really smart people um who have all these amazing like you know technical skills who are like oh i'd say it's like facebook but for professionals it's like okay that's one way to say it um but you know then you get people who are like oh well you know it's a great place you know to create economic opportunity and you know build your brand it's like okay wow like someone that can actually like craft a story and communicate shows me an ability to leverage and use some of these softer skills, EQ, communication, et cetera.

23:20And the second question I love to ask people that are interviewing, now everyone's gonna know these questions, by the way, but it's okay. Tell me about something that you created in the world that never existed. You know, maybe a school club. Like, I mean, not a company or an app, but like anything that you built. And I'll usually get one of two answers. One is the like, oh, what do you mean? Like, what do you mean created that didn't exist? And I think that that's a, you know, that shows a lack of creativity or courage or the thinking that, oh, the world just exists and I become part of it versus I can actually have agency to create something.

23:59Or a lot of people who are like, oh my gosh, let me tell you the list of like the 30 things I've created. You know, I started this club at school and then I did this other thing when I was in college. And it's like, here's the app that I created to help my like parents do their thing. And it's like, okay, like that's the mentality that you're looking for. So you can kind of suss out some of these, you know, more human skills in the process, but I think it's going to become much more commonplace moving forward.

24:19Hala Taha:Yeah. By the way, I love those questions. I'm definitely stealing them. I know LinkedIn has a coaching program. And I know for middle managers especially, their role is going to shift a lot from, you know, just doing meetings and managing the team to actually coaching the team. Can you talk to us about that? So the first thing we try and we've been trying, you know, for a couple of years now, and it's like really successful is people thought we were crazy when we did it is we said every employee has access to a career coach and not an AI career coach, like a real human being career coach with the idea that, you know, going through a process like this, our company can only be successful if people are able to adapt to the transformation.

24:57In order to adapt, you need someone to help you figure this out. You need a coach, a mentor, someone you can go to with questions that's not your manager to help you figure out, like, am I doing this right? Wait a second, where are my skills lacking? Am I communicating correctly, et cetera, et cetera. It's been wildly successful. I think it's a really important thing that most companies, you know, should try and adapt as well. But I guess your second point, which is that this is all adapting. And, you know, if your manager is just someone who thinks that their job all day long is to ensure you're doing your tasks, that job is going to become a lot less necessary moving forward.

25:32What's going to need to be there and be replaced is, you know, similarly someone that can coach you to do your job better, that can coach you to handle conflict, that can coach you to ensure that the system is set up correctly and know how to make hard trade-off decisions. You'll be able to do many more things with these tools than you ever thought was possible. And that's a good thing on one hand and a bad thing on the other hand, because all of a sudden, if you think about, you know, you're building a product and you have 10 people that can now do, you know, all these, you know, amazing things left and right that they didn't think were possible.

26:00At the end of the day, there's going to become conflict at a certain point really quickly. So, you know, that manager's job now becomes ensuring how do you get these people to work together correctly, ensure they're, you know, they understand the lanes that they're swimming in and then handle conflict, which is inevitably going to become much more commonplace when people have much more agency to be building things. So, you know, people have to really understand that to succeed over the next, you know, a couple of years, you can't be operating the way you operated historically in your career. And I think that goes for middle managers as well as quite frankly, almost every role that exists.

26:35Hala Taha:As you know, my show is targeted towards entrepreneurs. And one of the things that I've been teaching them for a long time is the importance of skill stacking and how as an entrepreneur, your stack of skills really is your superpower. So me, for example, it's like I started my career in radio. Then I went to marketing and I hacked Twitter and I had a blog with 100 girls and like knew how to galvanize and recruit and lead. And I turned like all those skills to become a top 100 podcaster and grow a network and all those things. Right. And you've got a similar concept in your book called onlyness.

27:09Hala Taha:And I thought that was really interesting. And it's interesting how that's not only important for entrepreneurs now, it's important for everybody to be more employable. So talk to us about this concept of onlyness and how somebody can ensure that they've got a unique set of skills that's going to make them employable. Let me ask, I'm going to flip it back on you. So, I mean, millions of people would probably love to have built what you have built or to have the success that you have had. Why do you think that you have been able to do it? I honestly think it's those five C's that you were talking about.

27:48Hala Taha:I think I have really great communication. I have really great curiosity and courage and just do stuff without really thinking about it too much. I just do. And so that's the point. That is what is unique to you. And I imagine that, you know, having known you for like a few days now, there's a couple other like really important things there as well that you are uniquely good at. But it's that understanding. Like, again, in a sea of where, you know, skills become more commoditized, like what makes you stand out? If everyone at the push of a button can create a website or, you know, create a mobile app or, you know, do a lot of these things, like what's going to make yours be unique and stand out?

28:30What's going to allow you to go and, you know, win the next customer? So understanding that about yourself is the place to start. Like, what am I good at and how can I use that to my advantage? My guess is most entrepreneurs actually understand that deeply. In order to survive, you have to know what makes you unique. I think most people who are not entrepreneurs don't think like that often. And I think the world of the labor market is going to be shifting a lot. You're going to have to be thinking more entrepreneurially about your career, no matter who you are. And so, you know, finding inside of yourself what makes you unique and really honing that, evangelizing it is going to be the key to success.

29:19And, you know, that's why you can't just be like the same as everyone. You can't just be, you know, the same as everyone trying to apply for the job and think you're going to get it. You have to find a way to stand out right now. And the people that do that are going to be the ones that succeed.

29:37Hala Taha:So I read a story about you that you had a manager once that told you that you would never succeed without him. And Barbara Corcoran, who I think went on your podcast, told you something very similar. So talk to us about your onlyness and also the experiences that you've had that you think gave you the drive to become the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. I think what drives me are probably a few fundamental things. Some are unique and some are, you know, pretty commonplace, frankly. Like, number one, what matters most to me is that I'm working on something that has a positive impact on the world.

30:17Many people are out there building awesome technology companies, you know, awesome social networks. But the core of LinkedIn is that we build LinkedIn as a platform to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And every single one of those words is chosen very intentionally. When we build good products at LinkedIn, people get jobs. They, you know, create, you know, connections with people that they, you know, maybe never knew. They start companies. They learn new skills. We're not a, you know, non-for-profit company. So, like, there's also a business model tied to all of that.

30:51But we build it in a way that, you know, when we do, you know, well as a company, you know, people hopefully, you know, get good outcomes from it. You know, I always talk about, you know, I try and find opportunities that are where we sit at the intersection of doing good and doing well. And every single company in the world, you know, tries to do well in business. But when you talk about doing good, it's often an afterthought. It's, you know, it's the last line of the PowerPoint presentation or it's the creation of a, you know,.org website on the side. But when you can seamlessly combine doing good and doing well in what you're building, I think there's real competitive advantage.

31:28And that really resonates and matters to me. Number two, at least, I think a couple of human skills that are really important for me are communication and storytelling. The amazing, large employee base at LinkedIn, not only do we run this kind of social network at the core, we run five businesses that intersect through it. Being able to talk about LinkedIn as one holistic thing instead of a bunch of five siloed things. how people understand how they connect to the mission, how their work connects to the mission, how everyone is moving forward together, helps to create LinkedIn as one consistent, coherent thing instead of like a, you know, just a massive mess where everyone's tripping over each other and can't get anything done.

32:08And I think fundamentally, that's a storytelling challenge. It's a communication challenge, which is, you know, how do you, you know, set the right frameworks, but also inspire someone to be like, hey, you know, you are this part of this thing that ladders up to helping people find a job. And wow, you know, you know, get up every morning and excited to do that one thing, you know, that makes you part of this bigger system, but we're all moving together as one. So again, I think for me, like, you know, you know, very vision-driven and then communication storytelling have probably been the most important skills that I've had to work on.

32:38Hala Taha:I want to touch on something that you were just alluding to, which is that AI is really leveling the playing field. And one of the things that you talk about in your book is how you're really big proponent of hiring for skills and not necessarily titles. So help us understand how the future is shaping in terms of how people will actually get hired based on their skills, not necessarily their titles, and what LinkedIn is doing to help support that. The largest product that we sell commercially at LinkedIn is a product called LinkedIn Recruiter. It's used by millions of recruiters all day long to search the LinkedIn database to find candidates to come join their company.

33:20If you go back maybe like three or four years, the way that almost every recruiter would start their search is they would filter down by one of two things. Number one, where did this person go to school? Or number two, where did this person used to work? So basically it's like, oh, you know, she went to Princeton, she must be good. Or someone that used to work at Google is probably smart. And when you filter down the LinkedIn member base by those two categories, you quickly go from a billion people down to a very tiny group of people. Then it's a very tiny group of people that everyone is trying to go and recruit.

33:55And that's not good for anyone. It's not good for these same people that are getting, you know, all the job, you know, requests. It's not good for all the members that, you know, are super qualified, but are never getting reached out to. And these companies actually aren't hiring anyone because they're going after a tiny fool and competing after the same talent. So it's not a very efficient nor equitable, you know, you know, use of the labor market on LinkedIn. Recently, we've switched it to in the recruiter tool. The first thing we ask you to do is to actually sort or search by the skills necessary to do the job.

34:28And that's it. Not where does someone go to school, etc. When you do that, all of a sudden you learn two things. Number one, there's a vast labor pool of talent that actually exists on LinkedIn. Not everyone is going after those people. And oftentimes those people are the most valuable people that you never knew existed. So it's a much better, more efficient, more equitable way for the labor market to be running. But the problem is like we can build those tools all day long, but human nature always goes back to, oh, well, that's cool. But like, where did she go to school? You know, or where did he used to work?

35:02So it's as much of a mindset shift as it is a tool shift. But I think we're making a lot of good progress on it. And ultimately, you know, being able to get hired for what you're good at, not who you know or where you went to school, I think is going to be a really important thing for the labor market moving forward. And it's not just like the skills you put on your LinkedIn profile, but it's also the knowledge that you share on LinkedIn, the things that you share in the feed, the insights that you share. I can't tell you the number of times people get new jobs, you know, part-time gigs, speaking gigs, or get invited to like, you know, come to a conference because of something they have shared on LinkedIn.

35:42And so, you know, your reputation, your profile is more than, you know, the things you type in statically on LinkedIn. It's actually the active conversations that you're continuously having as well. It's showing your work, it's showing what you've done. I think even now with AI, you see these people who like frequently, you're like, oh, like, look at this like cool app I bit with AI, or wow, like taught Copilot to do this crazy thing, or today I use like Cloud Cowork and I've like done this thing and you're like, okay, like, why are you sharing that? But these are the people that are actually, you know, getting reached out to for jobs because they're showcasing their ability to be, you know, innovative in using these AI tools.

36:15I think it's really, really smart.

36:16Hala Taha:Yeah. I think that's something in your book you're calling signaling, right? Can you talk us through the three levers that can help you get noticed? I think, you know, first and foremost, you have to ensure that you actually, you know, is weird or, you know, crazy as it sounds, like you have to establish your identity like online and put time and effort into it. You can't just like throw a profile up there, never think about it and expect great things to happen. So that's number one, you have to invest in time and effort in your personal brand. Number two, I think that building a network around that is really important.

36:50I think networking has a bad rap. Sometimes it feels like, you know, like it's an old school way of doing things or I don't want to have to go and like focus on this. But the way that, you know, people find opportunities, get things done is often through people. It's through who, you know, who can I reach out to to get help or who can I reach out to when they need help? I mean, one of the greatest things we see on LinkedIn is someone will ask a question. Sometimes it's really vulnerable to ask a question on LinkedIn, but like, then you'll see this community pile on with ways to help them. And I think that's really unique.

37:24And then last, you know, the evolution of kind of like showcasing who you are and your identity isn't just this like static resume anymore. It has to be through unique knowledge and insights that you're sharing on the platform. Oh my goodness, you don't have to be some crazy like LinkedIn thought leader or amazing, you know, creator like you. You can just be someone who's like, oh, like, you know, I saw a post in my feed and like someone had a question and I answered in the comment. And like, I, you know, I'm trying to help them out. Like just participating in the community is one of the most important ways to get yourself out there and, you know, kind of signal the market that, you know, not only who you are, but you know how to do.

38:01So, you know, these are things that, quite frankly, someone like you or maybe the people listening to this podcast, like, know inherently. But, you know, hundreds of millions of people don't, you know, understand these things and how important it is to be intentional about, you know, yourself and your career. So I think those are really important things to work on.

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42:18Hala Taha:So I have to ask this question because I am a teacher of LinkedIn. I'm one of the biggest creators on LinkedIn. And one of the things that I've been noticing is that there's a huge shift in video. For a long time, we've heard that LinkedIn is focusing on video, but the impressions didn't show that. Now, suddenly, my videos are getting a lot more impressions. And then also, I am a part of this new monetization program, which is really exciting, where brands can basically find my profile and ask me to do sponsorships with them, which I love. So talk to us about your features, what you guys are focused on, what you're pushing, and then also how creators and people on LinkedIn in general are going to make more money on the platform?

43:02Hala Taha:Like, what are the ways, like, how are you thinking about it? Yeah, I'll say, you know, we are a little bit unique in our approach. And that uniqueness may sometimes cause us to be a little bit later to the party than some of the other networks, you know, if I'm being super transparent. You think about LinkedIn is a platform where people find opportunity and make money. You know, like I said, every minute on the platform, you know, 50 people in the world will start a new job because of LinkedIn. It is the, you know, largest labor market in the world. It is where, you know, nearly every company trying to hire someone is actively doing it.

43:43And, you know, on the flip side, everyone getting a job is getting to the platform. So people all day long are getting jobs through LinkedIn. Historically, we focused on, again, the efficiency of that labor market. And it's typically for, you know, a lot of, you know, you know, knowledge and more and more like, you know, frontline roles, but not, you know, unique, you know, like platform based roles like creators. You look at the data and right now there are 4 million people whose full-time job on LinkedIn is creator. I mean, they're not making their living on LinkedIn. and they're making a living somewhere in the world or trying to as a creator.

44:20And, you know, I think we've really kind of woken up to be like, oh, okay, like, you know, we need to ensure this audience can be successful and create an opportunity on LinkedIn as well. And so, you know, we, you know, we're, you know, we're trying and like really kind of investing in the tools that can help people, you know, showcase themselves, you know, not through what has historically on a professional platform been, you know, like long form text, like that's what people like, you know, it's like, oh, it's like, Now it's like short form video or any kind of video. And when we put video on LinkedIn, we get like two reactions.

44:51You know, number one, you know, these, you know, folks that have maybe, you know, are a lot further along in their career or, you know, senior executives, companies are like, oh, wait a second. Like, you know, LinkedIn is not a place for video. That's where you go to these other platforms. Like no video on LinkedIn, Ryan, please. And then like the younger generation is like, thank you. Finally, like my goodness, like I can like showcase who I am now that you actually have video. And so we kind of see this. It's just like the world of work. Like, you know, different generations working together are kind of like manifesting themselves on this platform.

45:20I think more and more video is like, you know, to your point, starting to catch on. Great. Now, if someone like you is going to be investing your time and effort in sharing your amazing, you know, knowledge and insight with the community to help them be more productive, you know, we now have to invest in the platforms and the policies and the programs to help you be more successful on LinkedIn. You know, when you do something, it's like we hear these advertisers, you're like, oh my gosh, like, how do I meet this person? How do I work with this person? And it's like, okay, well, we're the largest B2B advertising platform on the internet as well.

45:51How do we help connect these people so that you can actually make a living off it as well? So we're investing more in actually creation of opportunity on the platform, which creation of opportunity has always been the purpose of LinkedIn. On the platform is a new thing. We see it in creators. We also see it, quite frankly, in a role that is just exploding right now on LinkedIn, which is around, you know, data annotation or, you know, human AI evaluation. And the way that a lot of these AI models work is the following. Like, if you're an engineer working on one of these large language models, like, here's your day.

46:27You maybe pick a topic, like, I don't know, you know, cardiovascular health, okay? and your job is to make sure the model is really good at cardiovascular health. So you maybe write a hundred prompts, you feed it to the model, you get responses back. But you need to know whether or not the model is giving really good responses about cardiovascular health. So the next thing you have to do is go and try and find someone who's an expert in that to kind of look at this and be like, oh yeah, that's right, that's wrong. And that's been a market that's been moving now for a couple of years and really kind of growing.

47:00And now we have that on LinkedIn, which is that, oh, now a cardiovascular surgeon on LinkedIn can, you know, make money on the side by looking at, you know, some of these prompts in the model output, grade them, get it back to that engineer at one of the model companies who can then use that to retrain the model. And, you know, a lot of what, you know, people may not be totally aware of is the reason that a lot of these models are so amazing what they do is because at the end of the day, there's a lot of human judgment and evaluation happening underneath them. So there's a real marketplace for that as well, which is now started to grow on LinkedIn.

47:31Again, to your point of like, how do we create more opportunity on the platform itself? Yeah.

47:34Hala Taha:So cool. And I'm just so excited for all the things that LinkedIn is doing. I've been such a fan of the platform for like 10 years now. So I love it. Your book is called Open to Work. Now, Open to Work on LinkedIn sometimes has a negative connotation, like you're desperate for a job and you've got this like little green badge and everybody knows that you're not employed. Talk to us about the mindset shift of what it means to actually be open to work. First off, we create, you know, open to work is a little green circle that exists on your LinkedIn profile that you can turn on if you want to signal to the community that you open for work.

48:09We started it during COVID when, you know, the market was just, you know, really uncertain and going crazy and, you know, really reshuffling all over the place. What most people turned it on for wasn't just the signal they're opening for a job, but to, you know, start a conversation with the community of other people who are maybe in a similar position. And again, like what's so important to LinkedIn or the job searching process is you're not in it alone. You know, there's a network of people around you that can help you out. Or when someone turns on that green banner and it's like, oh my gosh, I actually know this person.

48:42I didn't know they were looking, but they'd be really good for this job over here. How can I help connect them to it? it's a really strong signal to the community. Just to set the record straight, if you have that green banner on, you are 27 % more likely to get hired. So it's a very, very valuable signal to the market. What I think is more important than anything at this moment in time is the green circle alone. This idea that I need to be putting myself out there, thinking differently, leveraging my network, leveraging the community, adopting, learning new skills is all that matters for the future of work and being able to navigate the transition that we're all going to go through, no matter what your job is in the world of AI.

49:23So open to work more than anything is a mindset shift on my careers in my own hands. I have to put it in my own hands and I have to adapt to the moment around us right now.

49:34Hala Taha:And I know that when it comes to the way that our careers are gonna change, a lot more people will be entrepreneurs. We're gonna be holding more jobs than we ever had before. And there's no such thing as a five-year career plan. Everything is just really experimenting and kind of going where you see the opportunity going. Yeah. I mean, for sure. I don't know if I want to talk about that. I learned, you know, kind of last night about, you know, you were no stranger to like having multiple jobs at once. And I mean, I think that's a lot of the way the market is going right now. And it's not about, you know, it's not about having multiple jobs for multiple upstakes, but like the experiences that you get when, you know, like you can't get experience fast enough right now and learning new things.

50:18So, you know, it's not about having a five-year plan. I think that that's outdated career advice, but the best career advice right now is like, hey, over the next three months, what are the experiences that I want to try and learn and get to help, you know, kind of put those into my repertoire, my profile so that I can go and do new and unique things.

50:36Hala Taha:Well, Ryan, it was such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Your new book, Open to Work. I read it. It is absolutely amazing. If anybody is interested on how to level up their career in the age of AI, I highly recommend the book. So Ryan, thanks again for being on the podcast. Thank you all. I appreciate it. Yeah, fam, I'm so grateful that Ryan pulled back the curtain on where work is actually heading and gave us a real framework to navigate it. The bottom line from today is this. Your job or career isn't under threat, so stop thinking about it that way. Your job is really under transformation and the professionals who understand that shift will be the ones who stay in control and stay writing their own rules.

51:15Hala Taha:Here's what I want you to walk away with. First, stop thinking about your job as a title and start seeing it as a collection of tasks. Sit down this week and list your top 10 to 20 tasks and weekly responsibilities and start sorting them honestly into three buckets. The first, automatable. The second, AI assisted, the tasks that you can do with AI. And the third, the ones that are uniquely human, only you can do. That one exercise will give you more career clarity than any five-year plan ever could. Second, if you're dabbling in AI, that all needs to change. That is not enough. Chat GBT is not enough.

51:51Hala Taha:Depth is the advantage. Spend 20 minutes every single day for the next several months, giving one AI tool real detailed context about your actual work problems. Start uploading your documents, start creating skills, start feeding AI your world so it becomes your second brain. The people who invest in building out their AI now are gonna be the ones operating on a completely different level. I've started doing this and it's totally leveled up my game. I feel like I'm as productive as 10 people now. Thirdly, this is the one that's personal to me because it's how I built everything I have is you've got to double down on your human skills.

52:30Hala Taha:Now is the time to start investing in your communication, your creativity, your courage. Where are you weakest when it comes to your human skills? Start working on that right now. These are not soft extras anymore. These are your core product. This week, I want you to focus on your communication. We talked about how that's the number one job skill in demand right now. So I want you to initiate a real conversation, give somebody feedback, resolve tension, pitch an idea, practice communication like it's a skill because it literally is. The feature belongs to people who know what makes them irreplaceable and then go all in.

53:05Hala Taha:That is your work, Yap Fam. And if today's episode opened your eyes, share it with somebody whose career you care about. Drop us a five-star review on Apple, Spotify, CastBox, wherever you listen to the show. It genuinely helps us reach more listeners. You can also watch the full conversation on YouTube and Spotify video. And you can connect with me on Instagram at Yab with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. And a massive shout out to the entire Yab team. It's been an incredible year. We got nominated for seven different awards this year. We got Best Performing Podcast at the Indie Podcast Awards.

53:37Hala Taha:We got a huge nomination for Best Business and Finance Podcast at the iHeart Podcast Awards. We got a bunch of NYC Awards nominations and wins. I got a Webby Award honoree. I didn't quite get a nomination for a Best Business Creator and so many great awards. So shout out to the team for all your hard work. I couldn't have done this without you. This is your host, Halataha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.