Katherine Thompson & Bob Moesta: JTBD Hiring and Careers

Prepare for a shift in your perspective whether you’re looking to hire and retain top talent or considering a change in your own career. Katherine and Bob have conducted extensive interviews with job switchers to uncover the underlying factors that lead to career moves.

By sharing their research findings in the Jobs for Jobs talk, they shed light on the unexpected motivations that drive job switches and provide insights on enhancing your hiring process. Discover common patterns and hurdles that hinder career growth, and gain valuable knowledge to attract and retain the talent you require.

Slides

Transcript

Katherine Thompson
Too short!

Bob Moesta
I’m not sure for the last out like this is a dated thing it shouldn’t she really doesn’t get this but I say we’re the last song in the album, which is usually the worst song because it’s like, yeah, we need one more song to put on the album to make it a complete thing. So

Katherine Thompson
are we the B Side last song?

Bob Moesta
B side last song. But the other part is we could be the Encore? So we don’t know which.

So I want to start with how many people have gotten a new job in the last two years? How many people have struggled in the last two years to hire new people? Right. So this is gonna be very different than every other talk in the sense that we’re going to give you some information, as Clay would say we’re going to create a space in the brain for a solution to fall into. But the reality is we don’t have a solution. We want to help we want to design, we have actually have like, too many solutions. And so we want to evoke you guys to help us figure out what to go build with this information we’ve uncovered. So one of the things we’ve been studying basically people I’ve been, I’ve been fascinated with what causes somebody to leave one company and go to a new company for over five years. And Katherine andI, Katherine, we’ll do a quick intro in a second. But Katherine, I’ve been working on this. And we’re now writing a book. And what we figured we come here to do. And the nice part about Mark is he lets me come here to prototype what I want to build next. So if anybody of you were in 2019, you heard me go on my, my thing about learning to build it was 482 slides. No kidding. I got through all of them. If you watch it, you have to watch it at half speed or a quarter speed.

Katherine Thompson
Just people are still recovering. They’re still recovering from it. Don’t bring it back.

Bob Moesta
So we want to talk about this whole notion of employment. And basically thinking about it from the employee side, because we feel there’s a big flip that happened in the last five years, which is employees hire companies more than companies hire employees. And if that’s true, what do we have to change? Okay.

Katherine Thompson
All right, Bob’s already getting some of our good stuff.

Bob Moesta
That’s all right. So those who don’t know me, basically, I’m from Detroit, I’ve basically been building products for 40 years, I’ve done over 3500 products, I’ve done seven startups. And one of the first hard thing for me was sales. The second hard thing for me is managing and hiring people. It’s just one of those things where it’s like, I feel like it’s a really important topic. And to be honest, when I was an employee, like, the funniest question I get is, When did you decide you wanted to be an entrepreneur? I decided to be an entrepreneur when nobody would hire me. Like I had no choice. Entrepreneurship wasn’t a thing back when I was young in the 80s, right or that. So it’s one of those things where I had to do that. And so Katherine and I have been able to connect on this topic.

Katherine Thompson
So Bob and I are here. In the capacity of our side hustle, we’d like to say I’m a principal at the rewired group. So in our day job, Bob and I do big consulting engagements, using jobs to be done strategy, all of that. I come from a background in education, I spent about 10 years as a teacher, coach, advisor, dorm parents, in a dorm have 114 year old girls, which is a talk unto itself as well. And I have been a job changer, myself, I moved not just from education to consulting, but prior to that, I worked at a big corporate law firm. And in fact, I was here at a conference in this very hotel about 15 years ago focused on paralegal management of all things. So I can assure you BoS is a lot more fun than that was.

Bob Moesta
But the interesting part is when you think about her journey, 15 years ago to today, it looks random. I randomly got here, and then it got to there. And if you look back in your career, it looks completely random. But it’s not. And that’s what we want to start to talk about is what’s the causation behind it? So the underlying premise here is that it comes from jobs to be done, which is that whole premise of people don’t buy things. They hire things to make progress in their life.

You don’t buy you don’t just buy a CRM, you hire it so you can actually get better at sales. Right? And so part of this is understanding the progress that people try to make It starts with a struggling moment. Nobody buys something new if they don’t struggle. So if we can actually understand the struggling moment, and then we can understand the outcomes they want, we can actually design better solutions. So one of the ways that I’ve been able to develop so many products is I don’t build a technology that try to find people, I literally look for people, and where do they struggle, and then design products to fit in those struggling moments. So right now I know people are struggling to find job. And I know people are struggling to hire, like, I’m literally gonna develop a product that’s in the middle of that mess.

By the way, I really don’t want to be in the middle of that, HR has always been kind of my nemesis, right? But they need help. And so part of this is us diving into this,

Katherine Thompson
he doesn’t get invited to a lot of HR conferences.

Bob Moesta
No I do not. I do not. Can I tell him the joke? I always say if legal and finance had a baby, it would be HR.

Again, I don’t get invited to any HR conferences. You might have to edit that out in the video, that might be a big bleep. But I’ve used that premise of jobs we’ve done in all these different applications in different places. And it’s one of those things where now I’m trying to figure out where like, where I’m looking for search, I’m searching for struggling moments. And the thing is, is I’ve been coaching people for over 10 years about like what they should do next. And I’m constantly surprised about how little people know about themselves and how how they actually they, they only come when things get they get so fed up at work, like oh my god, like I gotta leave, it just can’t stand it anymore. And so this is where we started is just starting to look like what causes people to finally say, Today’s the day? And how do they decide where they want to go next. Right?

Okay. So, Clay Christensen is very first PhD student was Ethan Bernstein. That gentleman, and the other one is Michael Horn. And they basically kind of pushed us to really start to do this, because Ethan is in the organisation behaviour side of the business. And so he said, like, Would you be willing to go do some interviews to understand what what this looks like? So we started to do the interviews, and we just started to gather more and more data that just kind of helped us almost see the matrix, we can actually I could see when people were gonna be ready to quit, I could see how like if they came to me what decision they were going to make, but they couldn’t even see it themselves. And so this research has really helped us kind of get some night vision goggles on kind of this employment problem.

So the basic premise is this is that the interesting part is the way work has changed over the last 20 years. Like, here’s the thing is, most people would have to work two jobs because they needed more money. Now, people work two jobs because they love to do something else. And they have a side gig, and you can do other things. And you can actually do a lot of different things. And so you start to realise, like, what in the world is going on what causes people to do these things, and this whole aspect that employs hire companies is at the centre of it. And the moment you switch your lens to go, like, one, why would they pick us? And ultimately, why would they leave? And by studying it from that perspective, you start to realise it’s a very, very complicated problem, in terms of how we’ve thought about it, and how we’re trying to be more efficient, but we’re actually less effective. And so we want to actually strip this back to getting how do we get more effective, but necessarily less efficient? And we’re gonna talk about how to do that. Right?

The number one common phrase across all the interviews we did, I have to say, I got here, it was just so random. Every single person would say that their career path has been random. But when you dive deep into, like, what happened? What caused you? What was going on? What did you say? And you start to realise like it, there’s a lead up, and it’s a set of dominoes. And it’s actually turns out to be extremely predictable. Right. And so this is where you start to realise if you keep calling it random, I feel like that’s the word random in my house is a four letter word. You’re not allowed to say it, because random causes you to wait. If it’s random, that I’m just waiting for something to happen, right? But the reality is it’s caused. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about as the dominoes that have to fall in people’s lives. To have them say, Today’s the day I’m going to leave this company and come to yours, or they’re gonna leave your company and go to somebody else. Either way, they’re making progress. And that’s how we have to start to view it.

So a lot of you know, the forces of progress, right? It’s this notion that there’s something that has to push people to say, Today’s the day that’s there, if there’s no push, they’re not even looking. They’re happy. But the moment that these pushes start to arise, they kind of go like, Ooh, I shouldn’t kind of look I wonder what’s out there. I wonder what my salary is. If I can get right I like all these different things. And so partners that are saying, what are these triggers that cause people to finally start to look? And then the other side of it is what other people go like well I wasn’t pushed, but I was attracted to this other thing, this other job, I wanted to do this or that, like, what was it about it. And so you start to realise there’s these forces that are at play. But here’s the thing is there’s these other two forces, there’s anxiety of the new, who’s my team, I don’t know if I can meet everybody. Like, I don’t know if I can do this job. There’s all this anxiety that holds people back. And then there’s the habit of like, Oh, my God, I love these people, or I love this product, or I wanted. And so you start to realise there’s frictional coefficients that keep people from it. So like, I want to go, but I can’t go, and you start to realise is there’s energy in the system, and then it just escalates to the point where it’s like, gotta go. But the trigger is trade offs.

What trade offs are they willing to make, to actually make progress? And what I will tell you is, the number one lie, is that they got more money. Almost everybody says, they got more money, because they figure you can’t counter it. And then when you counter it, they still say no, because it’s not about money. Right? It’s about respect. It’s about I have to earn more, because my family is growing. Money is intricate, are a pseudo thing that actually has lots of implications of why they want more money. And we never ask why we just say, oh, we’ll give you more money. Right? So part of this is to actually understand what do they really want? And how do we actually negotiate with them for the things they want versus just money and benefits?

The other thing is to realise is that there’s a timeline, there’s a first thought, really bad day at work. My favourite question, it’s a very simple question, How was work today? And if I hear four or five of these things, I’m gonna show you you’re gonna go like, okay, they’re leaving in 90 days, I already know it. And the thing is, is it’s not one in it’s not two. But if there’s four there, I can tell you that they’re there. They’re already into passive looking, if not active looking. But you have to realise the threshold of where people go to active looking is, is where it’s like, I gotta get my resume. I gotta figure out how to have an interview. How do I find the time there’s all this sneaking around? Right? And so part of is thinking about how do we actually understand how people make these changes. But at the same time, the fact this is, what’s really interesting, the counter factual to this is the number of people who go look and decide they don’t want that job. They actually love their job more. And so the whole notion of you not letting people interview is actually a mistake.

So part of this is to realise they have a timeline, and how they actually go through it, and to realise, like, you’re usually only at the point of deciding, but why are they leaving the old job? And I will tell you this, the other thing is those what do they call them exit interviews, the exit interviews that HR has, oh, my God, those are like, Why did I get more money? Right. And so you start to realise when you actually do the interrogation, why people really leave your company, or why people really come to your company, you start to actually get really good insights of kind of what the culture is for the business. And so that’s what we’re going to share. Now, you’re up!

Katherine Thompson
So all of this in mind, Bob and I, this is now four or five years ago set out to use what we know from jobs to be done. I know many of you have done jobs, we’ve done interviews, done projects, we did exactly our typical process; we went out and we found a whole host of people to talk to us about their decision to change jobs, we found people who change within the past few months or so from an array of backgrounds.

We talked to teachers, we talked to construction workers, we talked to entrepreneurs, we talked to coaches, we talked to consultants, we talked to a consultant who became a basketball coach. We talked to lawyers, we talked to lawyers who became a hockey coach, we talked remember when we talked to the wine and beer saleswoman. We found some interesting, I always enjoy finding the breadth of occupations out there. But after talking at this point, we’ve talked to 200 some people from all different walks of life, all different areas, all different backgrounds,

Bob Moesta
And part is understanding the dominoes that are at play, when we’re in this space. So part of is the breadth is really about, like what are those things and what are the common dominoes that people have? And so ultimately, is our people tried to step up, or they tried to step back, or they tried to step down. Like you start to realise there’s different roles that different people can play and we tend to think we want this kind of person or somebody who has this experience, but you start to realise like at some point in time, we need to actually prototype who we want to see. So trying to apply a lot of the notion of product to HR.

Katherine Thompson
And you might not expect a venture capitalist to have the same job to be done as a fast food worker.

Bob Moesta
But they do. That’s the crazy part.

Katherine Thompson
So we proceeded to go through our analysis to understand the patterns we saw from that wide group of people, to go back to the forces of progress, understand each of the individuals forces and then synthesise what are the common dominoes, the set of dominoes from this whole swath of humanity of people that push people what’s going on? What are the things that are going on in people’s lives at work, and in their whole life that are causing them to start to say, Huh, my current solution just isn’t doing it?

Bob Moesta
So I want you to think about a time where you left one position or one company and went to another one, just get in your mind that, that switch. That moment. And we’re going to show you a list and I want you just to count the number of things that were part of your story as why you left that company to go to the next one. Okay.

Katherine Thompson
So these are the pushes we found and I apologise for violating every best practice of powerpoint,

So pushes me frame as when I am so what’s going on? What’s the context you’re in? So again, out of the whole set of interviews, we distil them down to these dozen or so I’ll forgive me reading them quickly. If it’s hard to see in the back.

• When I don’t respect or trust the people I work with.
• I feel like the work I’m doing has little or no impact on the company or world.
• The way I managed is wearing me down.
• My current company is struggling in the end feels near.
• End up with a new manager and feel like I’m starting over
• Feel disrespected or not trusted.
• Realise I’m at a personal milestone or life event – that could be graduating from school that could be getting married, having a baby, all those sorts of things. Retirement, Exit.
• Reach a milestone in my career
• Realise work is dominating my life and I’m sacrificing time for myself or my family.
• I’m challenged beyond my ability or logic or ethics.
• I’m not challenged or bored.
• I can’t say see a place for me to go or grow.
• Finally, I’m feel like I’m on my own ignored and not supported at work.

Bob Moesta
So I want you to hold up your hand on how many of those were present. When you switched five, four, three, five, I’ve got four. I’ve got four. I’ve got three. I’ve got five fives a lot of fives, right. Yeah, I got seven. Oh, they are which is great, right? So this is the thing, right? It’s not one, everybody’s always looking for the one thing that we’re doing wrong. By the way, we’re not doing anything wrong, because some of it is like, I just turned 30. And if I can’t, if I can’t do my startup, by the time, I’m 30, like I need to go it has nothing to do with you as to them. And so part of this is to realise sometimes it’s you sometimes it’s them, but it’s a set of things. It’s set theory. Again, if you don’t know me, I’m a math guy. And so this is where I’m trying to create the variables to say what variables have to be present.

So if I ask somebody go like, Hey, how was your day? Oh, let me tell you. And they mentioned any four of those. I know within 90 days that they’re going to be looking; where do I put my resume? How do I update all stuff? So my thing is, is these are the signals to the employers to realise like, when you give somebody a new boss, you have to realise how traumatising, that is, it’s like a step back three times, and especially if they were up for the job, and they didn’t get it. . So how do you actually help understand these kinds of things?

So the interesting part about this is people let it accumulate, it gets to a breaking point, like, Oh, my God, I can’t take this anymore. And then they become desperate. And they take the first job that they can get to get out. I got to escape, right? And what happens is that nine times out of 10, they end up finding the exact same job or worse, because they run from one thing to the next because they don’t know really what they want. And so part of this is actually helping people realise, like I appreciate you don’t want these things, but the lack of these things don’t make you satisfied. Right.

So the other side is the pulls. So it was like what pulled you to this company? Why did you go here? What was going on and you start to realise that there’s a list of things that they rightfully or wrongfully assumed were going to be part of this. And so all of a sudden there’s these these criteria and … reveal.

Katherine Thompson
We frame these as ‘so I can’. So what will this new solution enable you to do:

• have more time to spend with others.
• So my values and beliefs are aligned with the company.
• The job fits into my existing life.
• So I can reset my life and start over entirely.
• So I can gain new skills for a future career.
• So I can be acknowledged, respected and trusted to do great work.
• So I can find an employer who values my experience and credentials.
• I feel like the job is a step forward for me. And in the eyes of others,
• I have the freedom and flexibility to do my best work.
• I have time for me.
• So I can be recognised for my works impact.
• So I can have a supportive boss who guides me.
• So I can be part of a tight knit team.
• Be challenged, learn and grow.
• Find a job I know I can do and support my growing responsibilities.

That all sounds pretty good to me. Yeah.

Bob Moesta
But here’s the thing. So how many of these, how many of these did you have six, nine, ten, five, here’s, here’s the thing. This is what I hate about design thinking. Everybody wants all that.

Katherine Thompson
Sign me up!

Bob Moesta
But here’s the reality. You don’t get it all? What are the things you’re willing to give up to get? What are the trade offs you’re willing to make? And a lot of times we almost fantasise ourselves or humour, some say, Oh, this, my boss would be way better here though. You’d never even ask the question. So like, we definitely like so what did you ask in the interview? And one of the reasons why they’re leaving is their micromanage? Did you ask how their run? Like, no, I just asked how much vacation I got, and what was the salary? Like, how do you not know you’re gonna get into the same problem. And so part of this is a two sided problem. So it’s not just the employee, but it’s the employer. Right, and the way we talk and the way we actually kind of hide things, so we’re going to talk about how to be more transparent of why you’re moving, what progress do you want to make as an employee? And ultimately, what progress Do you want to make as the employer? And how do we actually define fit from that perspective?

Again, it’s not random.

This is where everybody would tell the story and it seemed all very unique. But when you actually hear all the phrases, and you pull them up, and you do it by the kind of the jobs approach, you end up in a place where you start to realise, by the way, what’s the one word that’s missing? Can you just go back a slide? Sorry, can we go backwards? What’s the one word that’s missing?

Money? And what’s the number one thing everybody says? Money!

But what did we do? We asked why? Why do you want more money. And that’s where you get I want more respect, if they’re paying me more than they respect me if they’re paying me more, because look, I now have a family I gotta do a lot more. So there’s, it’s money is an intermediate product here where it’s like, they’ll say they want money, but you need to actually understand why they need more money. So part of this is being able to understand like, this is why when we’re doing sales, and somebody says, Oh, I can’t buy because it’s price. It’s never about price. It’s about value. And so how do we actually unpack the same frame in the HR space.

Katherine Thompson
So we went on, and detailed our clusters and arrived a set of out of all of these four jobs to be done: four paths, four reasons, four context and outcomes that folks are in when they make the decision to change. So we’ll show you the kind of high level summary of each of the jobs.

The first one is best expressed as the way I managed is wearing me down and I can’t see a way to grow in this job, helped me find a supportive environment so I can be challenged, learn and grow on the job.

Bob Moesta
So this is where somebody thinks challenged, is about actually pushing them on something they like, as opposed that look, I’m gonna give you so much work your challenged, but it’s challenged with bullsh*t work I don’t want to do. And so by not understanding what drives them, we end up piling them up with stuff and they go like, dude, I’m out. Like, I can’t do this anymore.

Katherine Thompson
These are people that are burned out, they’re just burned out,

Two. when I’m overwhelmed at work helped me find an employer who values my experience so that I can regain freedom over how I allocate my time.

Bob Moesta
This one is actually way more about like, the people that I love. I have been sacrificing because I’m sacrificing to go to work and I now need time to balance back at my life. And so this whole aspect here is this is where that it’s it’s the notion that they have this obsession to be at work, but the fact is, is they’re dropping their part of the ball

Katherine Thompson
They may be being micromanaged as well and called back into the office. No, you have to work in our space. You can’t work from home. They’re losing some of that flexibility, some of that control over how they feel they work best and how they want to design their work.

Three, when I’ve reached a personal milestone, and my responsibilities are growing, help me find an employer where I can take the next step in my career.

Bob Moesta
Sometimes that’s money, sometimes that’s responsibility. It’s it, there’s many different variables in there.

Katherine Thompson
And, finally, for when my current employer does not value, my experience or credentials, help me find an employer who will appreciate my expertise, so that I’m respected and acknowledged, we interviewed in this job a great example of a real woman we interviewed was a social worker finished her social work degree, she was working in a school,

Bob Moesta
a Master’s in Social

Katherine Thompson
masters and social work. And the school had dangled over her head the promise of a counselling job. But instead, she found herself assigned to supervise students and community service work pulling weeds, and you could just feel that moment of her frustration. I’m here pulling weeds. I’ve invested so much in my skills, and I care so much for students, I want and I’ve earned that that position to do more.

Bob Moesta
As you look through your career, how many people have had a job one situation?

How many people have had a job two situation?

How many people have had a job three situation?

How many people have a job four situation?

So here’s the thing. These are not people segments. These are situations.

Katherine Thompson
people raise their hand multiple times, by the way?

Bob Moesta
Right. And so part of this is to realise like this is very contextual. So just because this is why when we see a resume, I still don’t know where the heck they’re coming from. I don’t know what progress they want to make. I don’t like they talk about all the things that they did. But I don’t know why. And so part of this is actually starting to get, like how do we actually get resumes to be better, like, my mind is literally blown by all the things I think we can do. But at the same time, I’m literally frustrated, like, I don’t even know the first step. Well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

Katherine Thompson
This wasn’t enough for us. So if you know, Bob, especially now just leaving it at the jobs to be done and ending the presentation. And setting this aside was not enough. That’s when we both have a real passion around helping people and helping make work great for people. So we’ve spent the past several years now prototyping, using the learnings from the jobs to be done to help individuals make progress in their careers. And now we’re prototyping how to help companies make work better.

Bob Moesta
But the key is the essence of the problem, which is really it’s a two sided problem, just like a two sided market. Right. Next slide, I think, which is the old paradigm is companies hire employees, and a resume, like, the thing is, is that there’s an exaggeration of what the market looks like, because we get 1000 resumes. And we think there’s 1000 people out there, but the reality is like, I think in March, we saw a 5 million people resigned from their job. And we saw 15 million new job postings. And so you start to realise it’s flipped from there’s more people than there is work to now there’s more work than there are people. And now it changes the whole lens to a different way of like that. We actually hire employees or employees hire us. Katherine hired me more than I hired her.

Katherine Thompson
I will find I’ll turn it over now. Because I got out of sync. You’ve earned it.

Bob Moesta
Yeah. So here’s the thing is, is so if you if you think about supply, side demand side, where supply side is the company, I’ve got this job, right, and the demand side is like, hey, I need a job, you start to realise like it’s a very different world. And it’s the same problem we have with product. It’s a product market fit. It’s an employer, employee, employee, employee, employer fit. There’s so much bad language here like this. We’re gonna look at this and five years ago, look, what were we talking about? Because it like the job of jobs and like, just too much language, we’re gonna get it better, don’t worry.

But here’s the thing. We have a job opening, somebody’s leaving. First thing we do? Go to HR, I need some resumes. We say we’re hiring, we write a job description, we put it out there. The other side is like, Finally somebody has to be like, God, I can’t take this anymore. And they have to basically go like I need to get a new job. And that requires a lot of work. Right? And so think about it. How do we actually make this actually a little bit better? But when you dig in, it gets worse. Much, much worse. Here’s the thing. Let me ask this, how do you guys write a job description? What’s the first step in all job descriptions?

Copy, Paste. We’re not We’re not at this point where we need my accent, I’m just kind of being right. If we were ready, we’re gonna get ready in a minute. There’s a little bit slower this right? But it’s copy and paste. Let me go look at six other job descriptions of what people have done, what have everybody else post, right? Good, like, Oh, my God required requirements, and then basically be sent a wishing go ask some people. And then we get this big mess. And we lay it back out, right? And we end up writing this product description. Five years experience, what does that mean? Why do I want somebody with five years experience? How do I get past it? Because it might be saying with three years experience, who actually has all the skills you want, but you don’t do it. And so we don’t unpack the requirements, we literally have product requirements that are better than our job requirements. Imagine if you copy and pasted your product requirements from the competitor. Ridiculous. It has been done!

But the interesting part about this is you end up with something very simple. A unicorn, I need somebody who’s creative and out of the box and literally can do a budget hold people accountable, like does that person even exist in this world? Right. And so what we end up doing is hiring somebody who has five of the seven things we need. And then we after two years, they have those two things we knew they couldn’t do, and we just beat him up. But we’re gonna put you on a pip for these two things you really suck at and then eventually been fired because they can’t do the two things. And we knew it upfront. It’s crazy. So like this is this is insane to me about how we write requirements. But this is even better. How many have how many dread the resume? Oh my God, it is. I actually had somebody write my resume because I was a plant and

Katherine Thompson
having that job, what I imagined having that job, right, Bob mess does resume.

Bob Moesta
And the whole notion is like I’m looking to beat like, so I have to do it for applying for to teach. So I’m applying to be a professor. And then I also was on a couple boards. So I need to have a CV or whatever. It came back. I was like, Who is this person? What are you even talking about? Number one word on the resume, business leader. I’ve never called myself a business leader in my life. It said it eight times. I’m like What in the world? Like, what’s up? And they go, Well, there’s these algorithms. What are you talking about algorithms? Well, if you don’t have it meant they do a word cloud of your your resume. And whatever the big word cloud is the only way that they actually put you through the filter. So now I’ve got I’ve got a I’ve got a system that’s literally filtering people who don’t actually know what we want. It’s crazy. To think of the resume. I’ve got a career up and down good and bad. You know, I’ve done some good good products, I’ve actually had a lot of failures as well, like, it’s all the way around. But what happens is, as you start to build it out and write it out, it turns out that it ends up looking like Wonder Woman. You’re amazing. You did all this stuff, you should be able to help us. So then all of a sudden, Wonder Woman meets the unicorn. Right? And oh, my god is that trouble? Because it’s never right. It’s never there. I’ve got many ideas on how to fix this. But the problem is like, do you guys see the problem? Do you feel the problem?

So help me with this. This is where we need the mics.

Here’s the thing. We really don’t know what to do with all this. We have 1000 ideas of what we could do. But in this room are mostly founders. And what we want to know is like how can you utilise it to help you? What are the ideas that you guys can come up with? That would be like, hey, like so as you think about your next interview? What would you do differently? Let’s get some conversation going. Can I come down? kind of walk they’d seen it enough for me. I just like to be down here. Sorry, Catherine. You’re making people’s now you’re taller than me. That’s

Katherine Thompson
I know. Finally,

Audience Member
Yes. So the first thing that came to mind and maybe this is obvious, but I don’t know when what form exactly but having literally a questionnaire go out to our employees about these pushes and pulls that you mentioned. Just get a read from everybody on where they’re at if any of those are occurring. Yep. So you can have a more informed discussion with them as opposed to relying on them telling you stuff

Bob Moesta
Have you prepared for the answers? That’s the hard part. That’s the hard part. So, so one of the most interesting things, though, is we’ve helped over 1000 people do this. And something like 48% of them didn’t find a new job, they actually found a new appreciation for their current job by figuring out what they’re good at, what they never knew why they loved the work they did. And two little things caused them to think they want to do something better. And as they look, they realise like, yeah, nothing’s better than this. I just have to learn to tolerate those things, to trade offs.

Katherine Thompson
Or the employer said, Oh, we didn’t know that was an issue for you. That’s solvable.

Bob Moesta
So so like one of the things Catherine and I talk every quarter, we talked about what she struggles with, I talk about what I struggle with. Right? I talk about what progress she made, I talked about what progress she helped me make. And one of the things she talked about is like, and I really miss kids, I really miss being in schools and helping students and that kind of stuff. And I’m like, Okay, we’re not getting any kids in this partnership. This just doesn’t work that way. So what we did is she went off and said, Well, what if I join Big Brothers Big Sisters, so perfect. So she goes off, and she becomes a big sister to somebody in Detroit, which is amazing. And she comes into me like, June and says, like, Oh, I’m sorry, I’m leaving at three o’clock, because I want to go be with my little sister where I’m going to take her to get ice cream. Like, why are you asking? And she’s like, well, you know, it’s not work. I’m like, No, you don’t understand. Like, if you don’t do that you won’t stay here. This is part of work to me and part of your life. And I need to know if I can’t fulfil those, you need to find other places to fulfil it. And ultimately, it’s okay. You don’t have to ask. So it’s a very different view of measuring time and saying, How many hours did she put in? But the fact is, I know that she will do make up whatever she needs makeup or if she has to, but it’s like, this is part of work. I wanted to realise like, this is something we want you to do for the community because you want to do it for the community. What else

Audience Member
The push and pull factors? I found those super interesting. I think the more straightforward one is the push factors. Because I think that gives us a list to discuss with all our staff. I mean, my personal feeling is when I get home, I should discuss it with everyone. So it doesn’t look like I’ve singled out Bob, because I obviously think Bob’s gonna leave, which is why I’ve decided to have this conversation. Yeah, I think it’s very useful, particularly if people have pains quite often before they can identify what the payment is. That’s right, aware of the pain. So I think enabling us to have a conversation to say, actually, you know, I’m being micromanaged or I’m not happy. I think the more interesting one potentially is the pull factor. Because I think there is a balance and as caring employees, sometimes we feel it is time for people to move on. We’re also dealing with adults, so if they want to regard the grass, the other side is greener, that’s up to them. And I think we’re not there as nursemaids for our staff, either, right? We care about them. But if they want to make a decision at the end of the day, that’s their decision. I think where it is useful is trying to have a grown up conversation and saying, maybe it is time you leave, maybe that’s not what you’ve got. So that’s how I personally see those two lists as being very useful for this. I think there is a problem that we don’t want to come across as saying sour grapes, so it’s going to be shit everywhere, wherever. Don’t leave it. Yeah, I think that’s the catch.

Bob Moesta
And this is where we’ve learned the subtlety of language. And when you say the words like, oh, you know, maybe it’s time for you to leave. It’s very negative, it makes them feel not wanted. But it’s maybe like, it’s maybe time for you to move on to make progress. Because you’re better than this. The job we have for you. And the openings we have aren’t really available. And you really have a passion over here, or a passion over there and helping people find their passion. I think that’s part of this thing is we actually have been that’s what we’ve been spending is like, how do we actually understand what people are good at? What do they love to do? What gives them energy, what sucks their energy, and you start to realise like, they’re like, most people have no idea about this. And the moment we say like, Hey, think about it this way. They’ll spend weeks reflecting on things. You’re like, oh my god, I love these little moments where there’s three of us, and we get to do this and we’re on the whiteboard. And we’re like, okay, how do we find more of those moments in your life? But most people aren’t even inventory that

Audience Member
I think we’re doing a really good job of developing our staff, that we will only feel at all times that you’ve actually outgrown our businesses, What’s also important when people leave is everyone isn’t leaving. looks at how you treat people.

Bob Moesta
The other thing that’s interesting is the more you actually help people find their passion and where they need to be more people want to work for you. I have a lineup out the door because Catherine tells everybody what she’s doing and she’s like, Oh my God, how do I get job like that? I’m like, like, at some point time when you start to actually care about your employees and help them make progress because again, they’re not you and the job that has to be done. is not as concrete as we all think it is. We designed the work to be most efficient, but not necessarily most effective. This is where the church of finance has embedded into us kind of like, what’s the dollar per hour to do this, and we’re gonna need to get as much out of people as possible. I will tell you, when you do the work you love, you don’t keep track time, and you’re productive as hell. This is the thing is, I feel like we’ve missed the humanity of work. And we’re trying to mechanise it. And we don’t understand trade offs. We’re trying to build that ideal list of, hey, you have all these things like nobody has all those things. But I’d rather have a I’d rather have a little less money and a great boss. Or, look, I need the money. And I’m willing to tolerate a shitty boss for enough money. But nobody thinks about the trade offs. Like in product. There’s trade offs. Right. Anything else?

Audience Member
Okay. So when I look at the pushes list, the thing that I see the most is, a lot of this really should come into or come out of a really powerful one to one. The one to one is the mechanism through which a lot of these pushes can actually be sussed out. I think it speaks a lot to what is our leadership style? What are our current leadership skills as owners, operators, managers, etc? Because with really powership, our power ship, with a really powerful leadership skills, I think it really comes down to are we asking the right questions? And also, are we creating a safe environment where employees can actually are these truthfully, honestly about feeling judgement? So to kind of go back to what both of you were saying? Yeah, I completely agree. I think what I would ask the room here would be, how can we approach our one to ones differently? Yep. And also, how can we create a safe environment where these conversations can actually happen without judgement, while also of course, addressing the pushes on the pulse? Yep.

Bob Moesta
I think that’s great. Thanks. So one of the things that Catherine I talked about, is, like, what went well, what didn’t go well in the last quarter. And one of the things like so there was a point where she was fairly new, and I would, sorry, I’ll go up back up here.

Katherine Thompson
Can’t see you. They can’t want to see how they didn’t want to see the legend.

Bob Moesta
there was a moment where like, we had, I remember this very vividly of like, like, I would get pulled out of a meeting, we’d have clients in it. And she was fairly new. And it was like, Oh, my God, I don’t know if I should leave, and I gotta leave. And I’d leave her with him. And I happened to do it like three or four times in a week. And I was feeling horrible. Right. And we had to review at the end of the week. And I said, you know, you know, let me tell you what I’m struggling with, you know, I don’t feel like I feel like I’m dumping on you these other things. And she goes, You know what, I love the fact that you leave me alone with a client. It’s amazing. You’re giving me the confidence, you’re helping me understand it, I know what to do. I know, you’ll be back. Turns out, I was completely wrong.

The other part, she’s like, turns out I really liked to coach. I’m like, well, we don’t have really any coaching. But you know, let me see if I can do, I put it out there, I got five people who want to be coached. So we end up starting little coaching practice that she that fills her need, creates revenue for us. And at the same time, it’s kind of amazing to like, help us grow up this prototype. So this one of the reason why we call it our side gig is like, it’s not the core of the business. But I actually feel that this is probably one of the biggest markets I’ve ever seen where so many people are struggling and nobody knows what to do. And all they’re doing is trying to be more efficient and effective. How do we screen better? How do we get more resume, it’s like all the wrong approach. And so this is where we have to realise, like, we have to have empathetic perspective of what it’s like to be in their shoes. And half the time, we don’t know what it’s like to be in their shoes, because we don’t know the rest of their lives. Because we’ve been told not to ask.

We’re humans. If I had a sh*tty weekend, we should tell you, if I had a great weekend, I should tell you, I need to know what drives I want to know what drives people. So I can actually help them be better. And when they can be better. They’ll help me do what I want to do. That’s the key.

Katherine Thompson
And the foundation of all of that, which is what you’re alluding to is trust. Right? Because it’s not easy sometimes to say to your boss, cya, please leave me alone, I got this. But we have spent a lot of time together building trust. So I think as you that’s the, that’s the lead up to those one on ones. That’s the space you have to create that that essence of safety so that you you feel reciprocally respected and heard and trusted. And it can be hard to flip that switch.

Sometimes you have to you have to invest in those relationships and that can take time before people truly feel comfortable unpacking those layers and not just saying yeah, everything’s great. Or I wish you know, I had a little bit more work life balance, but really taking the time to go deeper and under Standard what that means and why it’s important. Take some reciprocal understanding and trust. I remember

Bob Moesta
talking at breakfast or lunch with somebody where they said, like, I asked somebody and they said, everything’s great. And they said everything great next day, and next day, then Monday, they come and say, Yeah, I’m quitting. And you’re like, wait a second, you told me was great Friday, what happened between the weekend and didn’t even ask it like, these are the things where it’s like, things are piling up, but we don’t see it. What we’re trying to do is give you the language or the vision to kind of go like, look, these things are going on below the waterline, and you need to be to pay attention to them, because that’s what’s going on. So we’ve built two prototypes. And and to be honest, they’re okay. They’re really not that good. And, and at the same time, something that’s really not that good. We’re surprised at how powerful it’s been able to help people. Right? So this process is I’ll say, it’s more Catherine than me.

Katherine Thompson
You just said it wasn’t that good. And then you put it on me?!

Bob Moesta
Okay, it was mine. And she made it so much better

Katherine Thompson
A whole bunch of witness.

Bob Moesta
Sorry, go ahead, walk them through your process your

Katherine Thompson
we took. We took an approach to focus first on the individual on the employee, how do you help individuals understand what they are not just what their resume says they’ve done, not just the skills they’ve acquired the experience they have, but what really drives them? What are they looking for? How do they shape that light bulb of the pushes and pulls the the job to be done? So we built and when Bob says MVP, I mean, it’s a Google Drive folder of videos I recorded and a miro board. But we’ve walked people, we’ve coached people one on one through this process and had people go through it asynchronously with Office Hours. And what it’s designed to do is to start encouraging people to reflect back on the experiences they’ve had look back at your whole timeline. Don’t look at it from the standpoint of your resume. But look back at it from the standpoint of what have you done? And more importantly, what drove your energy? What were those moments you were in flow? Or were those moments you didn’t even know Time was passing? And in contrast, what were those moments where your energy was drained? Someone said to me the other day, those tasks that you put off till you can’t possibly put them off any longer? What are those common themes that emerge over the course of your career?

So we we use that in a reflective sense, looking back at your past roles, your current role. And then we take people through an exercise of using all those inputs, all those postits on the miro board, grouping them together into a set of dimensions, a set of drivers that, throughout your experience, have really made the difference that are important to you. So These might be things like I want to have impact. That’s certainly important to me, I want to be creative.

Bob Moesta
But here’s the thing, the key is the unpacking. Somebody says I want to feel like I have impact with the person across from me, a nurse who’s saying like, I want impact on an individual, small basis. And there’s other people’s like, I want the concept of impact. I want to build something that a million people will use. So in their mind a million people’s impact. So it’s not just getting to a hierarchical level of things is literally unpacking what do you mean by impact? Tell me when you had impact tell me when you didn’t have impact, literally being able to actually get there there definite their personal definition of impact, or I like to be challenged? Well, let’s talk about there’s different kinds of challenges. What are those challenges you’d like? Sometimes it turns into two, I like to learn new things, versus I like to actually solve really complicated problems. Great. What are those give me examples. The other part they’re doing is they’re then creating stories from their life. So they can tell people when they go to a to an interview about the things they love to do. And oh, by the way, we also emphasise the fact of what are the things that you suck at? We really spend time because at some point in time, nine times out of 10, like my experience with HR was, I was really good at this never even got acknowledged for it. And all I would get acknowledged for it, like ooh, you suck at spelling and communication. You need to learn to work on that. Well, of course, I’m dyslexic, of course I’m bad at that. And I spent 35 years of my life spelling every day for an hour. And at 35 I gave up I get seven hours back a weak man. Kind of amazing to go do now stuff that I don’t have to worry about. And so part of this is to actually know the inventory and the other part is to know like for every strength which is an asset There’s a liability. Nobody thinks about the natural liabilities we have. So how do we figure out and understand. So this is really about personal discovery. I have a 22 year old going through this right now. And he’s done it now for four weeks. And he’s goes, I’ve learned more about myself in four weeks than I have in my entire life. And he goes, I thought, I want to do this, but now I know what I really want to be able to do. And he goes, I thought it can only be in this, this category. But I realised I can do this in this many categories, or this different job positions. And so it’s enabling to see what they’re good at giving them confidence, understanding and acknowledging what they’re not good at. So they can then realise like, no job is perfect.

Katherine Thompson
So the next exercise is taking people through prototyping. This is Bob’s passion. If you read his new book, you can learn more about his experience prototyping his tips for prototyping, but we’ve applied this to the job world. So you know, many people have done informational interviews or coffee conversations with prospective employers or people in an industry you’re interested in. But we’ve sort of reframed this in a way of looking wide; looking across a spectrum of different functions, different industries, different roles, talking to people, not just with the expectation of maybe yielding a job offer one day, but really bouncing your own dimensions, your own energy drivers, your own values against that person that role to understand, well, it’s important to me to be creative. And here’s my definition of creative. Here’s what it means to me. How is that possible? And you’re is that possible in this position?

Bob Moesta
So again, this is she’s gonna cut me off.

Katherine Thompson
So I’m just gonna, like, well, we’re all gonna, we’re gonna get the cane. Yeah, got it.

Bob Moesta
So this, this is this thing. So I have two examples. One is somebody so there’s this fantasy level of job position, that is absolutely horrible. Oh, my God, I want to be a product manager, it’s gonna be amazing to be a product manager. Do me a favour, go talk to four product managers figure out what they do on a day to day basis, oh, my God, I don’t want to be a product manager, oh, my god!

Or I need these other skills to get to being a product manager. And so you start to realise there’s this fantasy of where they want to be, and what the real job is. So my I have four children. In part, one of the reasons why

Katherine Thompson
this is recorded, you’re not allowed to talk about, okay, hold on, I got to do this. Someone else, you know,

Bob Moesta
I can’t do it, but the notion is is what we do is we have people go to LinkedIn and say, if you want the job like this, go find somebody who’s in that job. And now talk to them about the job relative to your dimensions. There’s always somebody within two degrees that has a job that you’re looking at, you don’t want their job, but you want to know what it’s like, especially if you’ve never had it. And you start to realise that they start to understand there’s trade offs they have to make, I can go to this company, and I can get this experience. But I can’t get this and this and this aren’t, what am I going to do or I could go to that company and do this. And so part of it is, the more that they know what they want, it’s actually the easier for you to hire. So we’ve actually started this for one company where we’ve done this as the in board of like, before we get them to the resume, let’s have them go through this. And oh, you know, you can go over here, oh, we got a company over there. And they’re literally only pulling the people who are relevant to their business. But they’re also then sending people who are candidates to their friends and other companies to literally help them find a job because they can actually see where people want to go.

Katherine Thompson
The final step is focused on trade offs. You’ve heard us talk about trade offs a lot today, both on your side, the supply side is the employer and on the employee side to both sides need to think be thinking about trade off. So we have a weighting system relative to the dimensions relative to past jobs relative to prospective jobs, that people can come back to to really bring to life, the trade offs, while I might get more autonomy, but I’m not going to be able to be as creative as I want to be.

Bob Moesta
So the reason why this is is everybody’s jobs are relative to themselves. And so what we end up doing is helping them understand like what’s important to you? How is this relative to your old job or your past job or the job you really loved, and help people understand and manage the trade offs. And what that does is it helps people realise like, I don’t like they want it all, but they can’t get what you can’t get it all. It’s just not possible. So how do we actually get the things you really are important to you.

Katherine Thompson
So I just want to underscore the fundamental premise. The Insight This is built on is that we are all more than our resume and our set of experience and our education and and all of that just because you have a strength in something, it may drain your energy. It may drive you nuts, and just because you have a weakness in something, it may actually be something you love to work on, and you get energy from learning and growing. So, this is built with the intent to help people peel back that onion, and uncover not just what I’m good at what I’ve done, what I might do and be pigeonholed. But think about more sort of broadly more holistically, what really drives me.

Bob Moesta
Russell is a middle manager to market a CPG company in the marketing realm. They basically say we’re gonna move the world headquarters to a to a big city. This is I happen to be in a small city. And he’s like, Yeah, I don’t want to go. And so we’re in the middle of kind of building this thing out, and I said, Hey, why don’t we take some time and help you figure this out? So ultimately, we take the time, and we haven’t do this map that basically is a timeline.

Where the first thing is just like, What are your positions you had? How long were you there? What were your responsibilities? And then ultimately, what are the things you did in that job that gave you energy? And what things did you do in that job that sucked your energy? And then what were the underlying causal mechanisms that made you move. And so it’s a way of just having an inventory. And to be honest, we’ve had people try to do this in a week or two. And it’s actually very traumatic for people. Because they need to have the time to reflect on what really gave them energy, because all of a sudden, they’re thinking about it, and they’re doing something Oh, my God, I love that I had that in this job. And they start to remember things. And so it needs some time to kind of ferment. But after that, we have them then identify those themes. And we have them unpack it too. What is it more about? What is it less about, give me an example or two. And then what we do is we haven’t built dimensions out of that, and then map each position that they had on that. So it’s benchmarking.

They’re benchmarking their positions to figure out what they want to do next. Amazing, right. And the first thing they learned here is like, Oh, my God, this job sucked for this reason. But that job sucked for that reason. But I love this job because of this reason. And they realised that there’s now trade offs, there’s mechanisms between it; can’t do it all. And then what we do is we haven’t go prototype. And so he had, I could go to an agency, I could literally become an entrepreneur, I could go work for not for profit, I could literally go get another senior director job in, in a different CPG. And as he literally went and started to just talk to people around it, and he started to score things out. And he was able to kind of look at things the whole time.

What was so interesting is he kept informing his boss on what he was doing. Because she’s like, well when are you leaving, he’s like, well, and they gave him like nine months to figure this out. Six months into it, he’s like, Well, this is what I want to do. This is what I really love to do. I don’t want to do this anymore. And all of a sudden, they’re like, We need that position. Oh, my God, you would be great if you actually became a coach to help us on the innovation side. And next thing, you know, he’s writing his own job description.

Now, the best part is he realised that what was missing from his work: two things. One is they didn’t do enough development work. So he said, Look, I’ll take this job and it was it turns out, it was a lateral. So it wasn’t a promotion, because I want to be able to get this training from this school on these things within the next two years. HR says, Sure. Here’s the kicker. One thing he really was it was really bothering him to say like, I don’t give enough back to the community because I’m so busy. He goes, I want to be able to work two days a month at the foundation. Guess what HR said? Hell yeah. Why don’t we want that? And so all of a sudden, now he’s got a job where you got no direct reports, he’s coaching everybody he loves to do. He’s doing innovation and being very creative. He’s a actually able to go learn and learn new things. And he gets to go give back to the community as part of his job description. This guy’s like on cloud nine. So he didn’t actually leave though. He had to go through the exercise to leave to then be articulate to his boss to say like, here’s what I want to be able to do. And once he was articulate, they were able to find that three putt, he actually had three different places he could have gone. And so part of this is by helping people know what they want. It actually helps you place where they want to go and where you need what you need them better.

Katherine Thompson
So these are just food for thought prompts to think about as you have those one on ones as you talk. This can be for yourself. This could be questions you ask your family members. This is a great exercise for students to go through. My poor kids. Yes, we’ve had many guinea pigs in the family, go through:

• what makes you wake up excited in the morning?
• When are you in flow?
• Think about those energy drivers, what gets you going?
• And conversely, what drains your energy? What are those tasks you put off? What do you dread?

Those are some of the questions we’ve framed and coach people through. I know, we’re over.

Bob Moesta
five minutes?

Katherine Thompson
Okay, I want to I do want to underscore this too, because Bob has alluded to this. And I, I think I’ve been fortunate to be able to be a good example of this. It’s not just about the job. It’s about your whole life. So Bob, and I have worked together to understand my energy drivers, energy drains, and as you alluded to, one thing I miss a lot is coaching, working with students. So I joined Big Brother,

so I have a little sister now, I miss being in school operations. And I was a school administrator, I’ve joined the school board. Those are ways that I hit some of those things that give me energy and drive me that I may not get in my day job. And I’m sure many of you are the same to you don’t necessarily get everything out of your job. And you may need to look other places. What are those things? What are those opportunities that you can pull in? To supplement what you already do?

Bob Moesta
This is what Clay would talk about is modularity; How do we actually figure out like, here’s the core thing, but can we plug some other things that actually make and create space and time so they can do these other things? Because she’s way happier doing these other things makes her actually more happy at the work we do. And so it’s that notion of like this, these are not there’s no work life, like people think they have two lives until they realise they have one. You only have one. So how do we help employers? Can you cover that?

Katherine Thompson
Part of this is the the simplest thing I think we know how to do to help employees, they get to your point about one on ones is asking more, asking better questions. Building on that environment of trust in which you can do that, that safe space where you can go deeper, where you can ask what’s really going on. What are the struggling moments and be comfortable yourself, as a business owner or founder operator, with the answers you might get.

But go deeper, you know, if you’ve done jobs to be done interviews, you know, you gotta go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, keep asking those questions to really understand what’s going on with your employees. And this can again, this can be what’s going on at work, but also in their own lives. Bob and I spend every Monday morning talking all about what we’ve done over the weekend. Sharing different anecdotes getting it’s a way for us to build trust and kick off the week and understand each other better.

Bob Moesta
But the other part is I’m always listening for where she gets joy, and where she struggles and stuff that didn’t go well over the weekend is equally as important stuff that went well over the weekend. I know she likes beer, and she loves cats. I know she hates to be on stage.

Katherine Thompson
I wish you’d made me sound more intellectual. Just beer and cats.

Bob Moesta
oh my gosh, I can’t win right now.

Duolingo! I’ll lead with those next, time. She does like beer cats. Yes.

Katherine Thompson
All right. So that’s that’s the easiest way think about their pushes and pulls. Sorry, we’re flying. As usual. So this one of our weaknesses is estimating time.

Bob Moesta
But but the other part here is this is where we talked about there’s three layers of language. There’s the pablum layer. Oh, how are things? Oh, they’re great. And if anybody sat with me to table any of this time, say, Oh, it’s great. What do you mean, my great, what makes it great? What’s not great. So you have to go past it. And you get to this level where the next level is called this fantasy nightmare layer. Oh my god, it’s so great because of blah, blah, blah, or it’s so bad because of blah, blah, blah. But it’s still descriptive language.

And what I want to know is the next layer down, which is really this layer of the causal layer, what made it great, what caused it to be great. And when you get to this layer, this is where you start to realise how to understand how to add things together. And that’s what jobs to be done has always been about, but I feel like we’re recruiting at this pablum layer of like, oh my god, I got this great job and oh my god, I’m a superstar like, you’re literally like, I don’t even know who this person is. And I don’t even know what this company is because you’re not sharing things down to what makes your company great or what makes you really productive.

Katherine Thompson
Take it to the supply side, think about your own company. Obviously, you can’t make every trade off to the earlier comment, you have work you need to get done. You have businesses you need to run. You can’t accommodate every single thing. But what are the boundaries? What’s the sandbox? What’s the flexibility, you might have to rethink work to rethink how you pair people how you allocate work? What jobs do you serve? Well, out of those four, which maybe are not a good fit, depending on you know, the stage you’re in and what you’re doing.

Bob Moesta
Can I tell one story? How many people know enterprise rent a car? How many people have rented from enterprise rent a car? Okay. What’s the one thing you know about the personal? What’s the one thing about enterprise that’s so great. They pick you up at your house. That’s mostly where like some Well, if it’s your in the city that does that. But their strategy of employment was brilliant. They wanted nobody to be there longer than three years. And what they promised is that if you come work for us for three years, we’re going to teach you how to sell, we’re going to teach you business operations, we’re going to teach you all these basics. And they would take kids right out of school, and that 97% of them got hired by somebody they picked up. And so they designed it, so there was churn. And so there are very few people who have been in an enterprise for a long time, because they knew the business model is like, we’re better off trying to figure out how to leverage new people than trying to keep people for a long time. And to be honest, they’ve done amazing from a return perspective, because at some point, their labour’s the number one cost, and all of a sudden, they’re training, preparing and helping people make progress. And that’s a good example of how this is how we’re thinking about this is how do we actually help you understand like, most people are trying to hire people for life? How do you actually hire them for a period of time so they can make progress in your in your company? And oh, by the way, my belief is when they leave, they’ll actually help you find more people because of the experience you created.

So this is a very early thinking about what we’re at, and what we would love. So I think there’s a QR code somewhere in here. So here’s a QR code. We’re in the midst of launching a, a, like just the training on the employee side. So what I would say is any of your children, anybody you mentor, if you want to try it, it’s literally will end up having a discount code for anybody who’s here. But it’s literally just like helping you walk through what are you good at? What do you what gives you energy? What doesn’t give you? What are the reasons why you love the job you have? Or what are the things that you actually need to start to supplement?

So the one thing I know is I have a business partner, Greg Engel, who has been my business partner for 17 years and he is the exact opposite of me. For all practical purposes we should hate each other. But and he knows I say this and I’m saying it on camera, he completes me. She can confer like everything I’m good at. He’s not an everything he’s good at I’m not. And to be honest, we argue we aren’t we screaming each other.

Katherine Thompson
I can confirm

Bob Moesta
and, and literally we check out like if you’ve ever seen wily coyote and and the Sheepdog, it’s the same thing where we’re literally tried to jam each other up all the time. But in the end, we’re like, Hey, let’s go have a beer. And it’s one of those things where it’s very, very interesting. The moment that I can admit my weaknesses is when the people come into my life that will compliment me and make me better. And that’s ultimately to me what diversity is about is we need diversity of people diversity of thinking, diversity of experiences, and we’re not looking at diversity deep enough yet. So that’s it,

Katherine Thompson
Please get in touch with us because as Bob said, this is very much a work in progress. So we’re eager for input and

Bob Moesta
If there’s something you want to do, or you want to think about where love to prototype will have products, probably two years from now, but this is where we’re in the midst of writing a book. But as we get the language solidified, then we can actually build products off of

Katherine Thompson
And the last thing if you want to empathise with me and understand what my day to day life is like, listen, Bob has a podcast called the Circuit Breakers can get a flavour for the arguing he alluded to and the office dynamics

Bob Moesta
wanted to call it fly on the wall because it’s like, what is it like to be in the room when Greg and I are arguing about something and so everything he does, he always starts out Hey, Bob, I’m like, Hey, Greg, I don’t know any of the topic. He literally is a cold topic, no prep, and we just dive deep in.

Mark Littlewood
Few quick things then I’ll put that deck up and put it out on Twitter and in Slack, because there’s a few slides that we missed. We’ll take a couple of questions. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that you’ll be hanging around here, like,

Bob Moesta
We’ll be around, we’ll be around for thank you for being part of our prototype

Mark Littlewood
Most of the day, so don’t think they’re going to run away, and you’ll never see them. They generally have to get swept out of the building. So yeah, if you’ve got more questions, stick around and ask afterwards.

Audience Member
Thanks. I wonder what are the dimensions that you figured out? For kind of like analysing the thesis of what what is important for people? Yeah. And how did you find that they apply across people? Yeah, across companies.

Katherine Thompson
So you want to go they’re very individual, very individual. So my dimensions are very different from Bob’s, and even if we both might have a shared dimension of impact, our definition of impact completely different is radically different. I always use the example like Bob said, of, you know, the nurse or the teacher wanting to have an impact on the student or patient in front of them. versus, you know, think Bill Gates, like the global impact and everything. So it’s hard. There are certainly a, a, there are certainly recurring dimensions, commonly recurring dimensions, but they’re very personal. And that’s how you know, you’ve kind of gone deep enough when you’re able to articulate them from

Bob Moesta
And this is the danger and trying to scale this, people going to want to create similar dimensions, and we assume what people mean. And what we found is that the words that people use, we can all go, Yeah, I know, impact, but it’s my version of impact versus your inversion impact. And you start to realise, like, at some point, we need to take it deeper. And so the I’ll say the, the part of the problem is, I don’t know how to scale any of this, because nobody’s definition is the same right now. And so that’s where I think it’s, that’s a challenge. And as we think about building something, but isn’t that

Audience Member
the equivalent challenge of doing product development? Or customers have?

Bob Moesta
Exactly that finishes of everything? Exactly. So So part of it is, is what we’re thinking about is can we ask a series of questions that then give them as they give their answers that we can actually then have dimension. And so that word has its own personal definition? So it might be in like, we might be at one level have impact in, you know, creativity? And but ultimately, how do we get you to tell your definition, but through experience, as opposed to? Here’s our definition? Do you agree with it? I don’t know if it’s right or not. But that’s how we’re approaching it.

Audience Member
Just one last little Yeah. Is there any way to follow what how you’re developing the dimensions, and

Bob Moesta
I think we have some of it in in, in the training that we’re gonna be doing. But I think the one of the things, one of the reasons why we’re writing a book, and we have Ethan and Michael to help us is we’re trying to build a common language or a new set of language, which is really hard to do by yourself. And so there, I’ll say they’re pushing us to learn. And to be honest, I don’t know the HR space. And so part of it is to be able to make sure we can get to the right combination of language, that’s different enough, but not so it’s like think of jobs to be done versus market segmentation had to come up with a whole new language. It’s we’re in that phase right now.

Mark Littlewood
Thank you.

Bob Moesta
He’s last hit, by the way, just so we’re clear, he’s last. He’s last.

Audience Member
Ray always gets final word at any BoS Conference. It’s an unwritten rule. So my question is you you post this rather elegant movie of the unicorn meets Wonder Woman? Yeah, I wonder you’ve obviously identified the problem, whether you could be even clever and give us the solution either as companies or potential employees as to how we avoid this rather unfortunate disaster movie from happening?

Bob Moesta
Yep. So I think that’s the thing is, what I’m trying to get agreement on is that this is a problem. And this is a problem with solving. So this is why we haven’t actually built too many products or over invested yet, because we’re really trying to actually understand is this something people can resonate with, and I want to actually get the problem to resonate stronger before I go build something. Because what I know is I will end up over engineering the crap out of it. And it probably only needs to be 10% of what I want it to be to be really helpful to a lot of people. Thank you, Catherine, for helping me do that. But the aspect here is like, what I’ve learned is that the more we can do, the more we can understand the problem, the easier it is to build. And so I don’t want to run off and go build things. I want to actually spend more time here because it’ll make it so much faster to go build. So that’s why we’re again, it seems like a long time, but this is where we’re, we’re patient is as hungry as I am and as driven as I am. I have to be equally patient to let it emerge. So I don’t have answers for you. I have things I’m willing to try. I’m willing to talk about like hey, let’s try this. Let’s try that but I don’t have have an answer. And I don’t think we’ll have one for a while.

Okay, Ray. Last one.

Audience Member
Thank you for a wonderful talk. I really appreciate it. If we could turn our attention to the part where you have the least information, at least trust, and the part that nears I can tell is a disaster every day of the week, the hiring interview? Yeah, oh, God, the the situations you’ve described so far are where you’re have a trust relationship with the person you’re talking to. To understand themselves better, great. What you’re talking about having an employee, you’ve had them on payroll for a while you’ve built up trust relationship, you’re talking about your own trust relationship between the two of you, and you’re able to make better decisions based on that. Great. But there’s a moment a moment before the higher Yes, where you’re probably considering is this higher among 50 others, you don’t know this person, you’ve never met this person, you are constrained by law, that certain kinds of questions you’re allowed to ask, do you have advice? Do you have experience that we could bring out of this conference? To be better at interviewing, especially as you are the single greatest interviewer?

Bob Moesta
Not that I fool you? I’m not that good. Do you want to?

Katherine Thompson
I’ll answer from the side of the how we’ve coached employees in that situation, because you’re right, it is a fraught moment. And what we’ve encouraged employees to do who’ve gone through this is use their own dimensions to ask questions, rather than how much PTO do I get? You know, do you have a gym membership? Not to say those things aren’t important to know as well, but really use the questions as an opportunity to reflect on what they know about themselves, and test how, again, their definition of creativity or whatever is important to them matches the employer. So it’s really important to me to be creative in my job, and I measure creativity by XYZ. How does that is that feasible here, how does that manifest itself here, and I think you could flip the lens a little bit from the employer side as well. And think about how you as an organisation define your values and the way you work, unpack those down and take the time in those interviews to sort of drill down and explain this is an environment that values x, y, z, and this is how we define them. How does that resonate with you? So what would you add? Yeah, 100x, we might argue it with which we do a lot.

Bob Moesta
I think two things. One is I think the thing that helps people, so like people call me when they get the offer. Oh, my God, I got this offer, like, should I take it? Should I take it? I don’t want to take it. And all I do is ask them questions? How is this different from your old job? How many other offers Do you have? Do you need to actually get more offers? To actually put this in perspective? What are you going to give up because of this? Right? So I think if I was an employer, one of the things I would talk about is, and again, I don’t really know how to do this, but this is my one of my thoughts is how do I give them actually three different kinds of positions? Because they can eliminate to what like, oh, no, I don’t want this one. Oh, this one might be okay. This is like it or how do I actually help them compare and contrast? Because if they can’t compare contrast that one of the reasons why April’s thing was, what was it 40 to 60% of proposals go on, unresolved is because we don’t have enough choice. We don’t know what to do. There’s too much friction behind it. Right? And so part of this is to ask, you know, what are you worried about? What’s holding you back? What are you going to miss most from your old job? Those if you actually work not on not on the pushing the pole, but you work on the anxiety and habit in the interview, you might actually be able to convince them just like I was able to help people move by, by my house because I had moving because the biggest things I didn’t hear was, how am I going to pack all my stuff. And so part of this is if you can work at the lower side, I think that will help. But again, these are things I want to start to prototype, but I just like it’s just so wide open. And and what I would say is I am very limited in how I’ve been doing it, and I need to figure out how to help others do it. So it’s a good question. Thank you.

Katherine Thompson
Thank you.

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