Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. It's very much the one model that we sometimes use internally as well is, how do we operate as marketplaces inside an ecosystem? I think it speaks to the complexity again of the product and hopefully somehow of how we might operate it. I think with your vantage point at being at the center of hiring, a lot is changing within the hiring marketplace in the past, I don't know, year at this point, where it used to be very candidate-oriented, where they had all the power and they salaries were crazy. Everyone's bidding and trying to get people to join their company. Now, it's completely opposite. So many people looking, companies have all the power. I'm curious what you've seen, if that's roughly it, or what you're seeing basically in the hiring market these days. Yeah. Well, first of all, the balance that you're talking about, it is shifting in the sense that there are more seekers in the marketplace now and there are fewer open jobs in the marketplace. Of course, that changes how many applications you get for the job and how you have to look through. I think there's a model where people think it's drifting dramatically to exactly the way it was. I actually think some of the changes that occurred during the last couple of years are actually sticking around. Let me give you a couple examples of where things I think are really changing. The first thing that happened was, and maybe in my opinion, one of the big changes to the world that no one's really talking about it to my degree is the impact of it, but there's been a real move to skills-based hiring. For the longest time, and I'll give you actually a really concrete example, it was March 2020 and we were just watching COVID hit. It was just this heartbreaking moment where in the feed you were seeing all these people, by no fault of their own, starting to post that they've lost their job. We started seeing in our data is you had some areas like maybe hospitality was really getting hit, but some areas like customer service that just couldn't hire enough. You'd think the marketplace would balance pretty quickly. You'd think, okay, maybe these people will start moving to other jobs, but it wasn't happening. A large reason behind this, people are used to looking for certain particular titles, and they didn't start realizing other people could do this job. We made a pretty big push in something we call skills-first hiring. This was the idea that we could translate people's experiences into a set of skills, and by that we could help them really start balancing the marketplace with a much different system. But instead of saying, "I need to have this talent," you can say, "I need someone who can do negotiation, and I need someone who can really help me understand how to deescalate a customer situation." You find a lot of people in hospitality have about 70% of the skills you need for customer service and of course, you could train off the rest. We started seeing the skills-first hiring really start taking off. At this point, roughly 47% of our recruiters will come in, explicitly use skills when they start looking for candidates. That's a pretty big change that we're actually seeing hold. I know it's early in some of these changes, but it's a change where I think people are still continuing to start looking at skills. Another one was this concept of, there's a lot more people who are starting to look for jobs by values. They were saying, "Look, most job sites work by you come in and you look for a job and a title, and that's how you navigate the world." We started realizing a lot of people wanted to come in and instead of look at it like that, they may say, "Look, I really want a job. This aligned with my purpose."…

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