If you think a recession is a good time to sleep on hiring, you need to wake up. Take it from Reid Hoffman, who started LinkedIn during the dot-com bust and grew it through the 2008 crash. Hoffman knows a few things about hiring. Aside from creating one of the internet's most powerful tools for both job creators and job seekers, the LinkedIn co-founder and former CEO have a commanding view of the job market from his current perch as a partner at the powerful venture capital firm Greylock, as well as from his many interviews with entrepreneurs for his podcast Masters of Scale. As he prepares for the inaugural Masters of Scale Summit, this October 18-20 in San Francisco and online, he took time to discuss hiring amid economic volatility, technological change, and the fast-evolving workplace. Now, as the pandemic reshapes markets and another downturn looms, Hoffman, a 2011 Inc. 5000 honoree, returns to Inc. with advice on finding and retaining top talent.
How will hiring change in the next year?
During volatile periods, many businesses mistakenly play defense instead of offense when it comes to hiring. But if you have the capital and revenue, now is the time to hire, because others aren't doing that. That will put you in a really strong position in two to five years.
The next decade?
People will want to get back to the office once they realize they're missing opportunities to be creative with one another, build social capital and trust, and be better positioned for promotions. But we've also been remote for over two years. That's going to have a lasting effect on hiring patterns. If the best person for a project or team lives in another city, managers will compromise by having them come down to headquarters for a week every six weeks or something like that. Successful managers will learn how to identify what types of people fit well in this hybrid structure--and get the right ongoing training to lead and retain them.
Where can entrepreneurs make an impact?
How do you foster office culture in a virtual environment? How do you create better spaces for collaboration? There's a whole stack of hybrid work-process things that either haven't been created for the hybrid future or are just emerging. Tools like Coda, for example, adapt to your process rather than having you adapt to theirs, but I think we're still in the first inning of building all that. Technology doesn't get built in one or two years. It gets built in five or 10.
What about non-tech businesses?
Every company needs a digital strategy--even, say, steel manufacturing. Your smelter might look the same as it did 40 years ago, but what about the marketplace? Your supply chain? Your logistics channel? You have to hire with the goal of advancing your technological evolution.