WIRED25: The Future of Work With Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn

It is with tremendous pleasure that I welcome

the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, welcome.

(audience applauds)

Thank you.

Hey, everyone.

Where is the icon?

(audience laughing) Where's the icon?

You mentioned there's an icon comin' up here.

(laughing) Yeah. (mumbles and laughs)

You are the icon. No.

You are an incredibly important person in this world.

And one thing that I love about you...

Is that your career...

Dates to 1994. Yeah.

And an essay that you read in Wired magazine.

That's a true story.

And how would you know that anybody who did any prep

on you, any Wired editor who did any prep on you

would not notice that and want the first question

to be explain how a review of Nicholas Negroponte's book

led you to become the man you are?

Well, first of all, it's great to be here.

So thank you for having me.

And it's all true.

I'm not sure I'd be sitting in this seat today

if it weren't for Wired.

I was first introduced to the Internet

prior to its commercialization while I was still in school.

And as a senior at Wharton undergrad,

I was on a consulting project with a buddy of mine,

three DuPont engineers who were interested

in leveraging this thing called the Internet

for desktop teleconferencing.

And so was exposed to the technology

and became really fascinated by the implications.

And kind of developed this thesis

that it was gonna change everything.

There'd be this concept of convergence.

And I had always been interested in education reform,

and so I really started to roll my sleeves

to better understand the opportunities

and how it would impact society.

Fast forward, I ended up joining

the corporate development group of Warner Brothers.

I'd been in Boston in a consulting firm for a little while.

And shortly after joining, I read my copy of Wired

that month.

It is probably close to 24 years to the day.

And I used to read Wired cover to cover.

Not sure about you or the audience but I literally,

it was one of the few magazines.

Just everything about it was fascinating to me,

the look, the feel, the narration, the voice,

how unique it was.

And of course, it was covering something

I was so fascinated by.

So I would read it cover to cover.

I would even read the book reviews.

Uh-huh, excellent.

And there was a book review on this particular edition

about being digital, which was Nicholas Negroponte's book,

and his vision for the future, the digital future.

And essentially, I ended up buying the book.

I read the book, and before I was even done,

the preface, though he didn't use these words,

essentially, what I picked up from it was,

everything that could be converted from an atom

to a bit ultimately would be.

And I had just joined Warner Brothers.

So I was lookin' around at Warner Brothers

I was like-- (Nicholas laughs)

Everything about this place is gonna be transformed.

And within a month or two of that revelation,

the guy who was running corporate development at the time

said Warner Brothers needed an interactive division.

It would have a CD-ROM component, which was all the rage

back then.

It would have an online component, which most people

in the group didn't really understand

or have experience with.

I had just joined AOL about nine months prior.

And it was gonna have an out-of-home

interactive entertainment component, a kiosk.

That fell by the wayside.

The CD-ROM never got approved.

But I volunteered to write the online business plan.

And 24 years later here we are.

(laughing) That is extraordinary.

And that is, of course, one of the most important ideas

of the last 25 years, right?

Everything that's an atom will be a bit.

So let me ask you a very simple follow up question.

What is the equivalent idea today?

(audience laughs)

I know, let's get Nicholas Negroponte on the phone

to find out or Joi Ito who's running the MIT Media Lab.

Well, I'm gonna go in a completely different direction

than-- Totally fair.

You may not have had anything in mind.

For me it's far less about the technology today,

and it's far more about the implications of technology

on society. Yep.

And I think increasingly we need

to proactively ask ourselves far more difficult,

challenging questions, provocative questions

about the potential unintended consequences

of these technologies.

And to the best of our ability try to understand

the implications for society.

I think it's safe to say...

Certainly for those founders and CEOs that I know

and work with in the Valley, people have the best

of intentions when they are innovating,

when they're creating these breakthroughs,

their visions for their companies.

But you can see it feels like every week

there's another headline that is talking

about how some of this stuff is going

in the wrong direction.

And technology certainly didn't create tribalism.

Tribalism is a part of human nature and protects us.

The whole idea of in-groups keep us safe and secure,

but technology is dramatically accelerating

and reinforcing tribalism at a time

when increasingly we need to be coming together

as a society.

And you can talk about society in a town, a city,

a state, a country, the world.

When we increasingly need to be coming together

to solve some pretty big challenges.

So to me it would be about understanding the impact

of technology as proactively as possible,

and trying to create as much value,

and trying to bring people together

to the best of our ability.

Alright, so you...

Set up an easy question in your answer there

which is you worry about the worst possible

unintended consequences of technology.

What is the worst possible unintended consequence

of LinkedIn?

So our vision is to create economic opportunity

for every member of the global workforce.

There's over three billion in the global workforce.

And that vision was originally put into place

to inspire our employees.

It was true north.

It was the dream.

It wasn't necessarily something we were gonna measure

ourselves against.

That was our mission.

That was the role of the mission which is to connect

the world's professionals to make them more productive

and successful.

There's roughly 780 million knowledge workers

or professionals, pre-professionals,

students that aspire to become white-collar professionals

in the world.

Three billion people in the global workforce.

The unintended consequence of too closely focusing

on our mission without truly thinking through

how we're gonna operationalize division

is to reinforce unconscious bias,

to reinforce these growing socio-economic chasms

on a global basis, especially here in the United States,

by providing more and more opportunity

for those that went to the right schools,

worked at the right companies,

and already have the right networks.

Oh, I see.

So your network could possibly reinforce

all of the biases just built-in--

Oh, there's no, it's not quite possibly,

it does. It does.

And it does for all of us.

And despite, again, the best of our intentions,

people have a tendency to want to work with

and recruit those that look like them

that sound like them.

And it's not through, more often than not,

it's not through explicit bias.

These are unconscious biases.

And so I'll give you a perfect anecdote here.

We recently rolled out an ask-for-a-referral capability

on LinkedIn.

And this makes all the sense in the world

when you consider how many people find their jobs

by virtue of who they know.

So just a quick show of hands.

How many people here have ever gotten a job

by virtue of their network?

Someone they knew at the company?

So, it's about 90 plus percent.

So we rolled out this functionality.

It made all the sense in the world.

And it took off.

And the results were incredible.

We found that people asking for a referral

within an organization they were interested in working for

by virtue of a job post on LinkedIn

and then tapping the power of their LinkedIn network

were eight times more likely to get the job.

Eight times more likely to be hired.

And it creates a more effective, efficient process

for the prospect for the company themselves, et cetera.

So our head of social impact, a woman

named Meg Garlinghouse, who I've been working with

for a really long time.

We first met at Yahoo!

And she's one of, if not the best in the business.

She pulled me aside shortly after we launched this thing.

And she said, I understand everyone's celebrating

the success of this product but have we considered

the unintended consequences?

And I said, What do you mean?

She said, What about the people

that don't have the networks?

(sighs) Just stopped me cold in my tracks.

She said, as you well know, I mean we have

the wonderful privilege of working

with some extraordinary organizations

both here in the community locally and more broadly,

Boys and Girls Clubs of the Peninsula, Europe,

organizations like this where you've got

extraordinary talent that just doesn't necessarily

have access to the right for your diploma

or the right people.

But we work with these people.

We hire them.

We're thrilled to have them join the company

because they are so capable.

They have all the raw materials, all the aptitude,

the resiliency, the grit, the learning curves,

the compassion by virtue of the experiences

they've had in their life.

But they don't have the networks.

And so with questions like that raised,

we are able to ask ourselves these tough questions

and then answer them hopefully in the right way.

And what we ended up doing with that kind of ethos

in mind to broaden this aperture,

to create economic opportunity for every member

of the global workforce.

We created something called the Career Advice Hub.

And the Career Advice Hub enables any member of LinkedIn

to raise their hand and ask for help,

and for any member of LinkedIn to volunteer to help them,

to mentor them.

And within a few short months after launching that

we've already had 2 million people ask for help,

and we've had over a million people volunteer

to mentor folks ideally outside of their network.

So that would be an example of how we're addressing that.

Oh, I...

Yeah. (everyone applauding)

When I get a LinkedIn connection request,

I usually sort them by has mutual connections to,

has no mutual connections.

So I will commit to reversing that.

Flip from lowest to highest now.

So it's wonderful to hear that.

And in all seriousness, we wanna potentially

try to productize this. Yeah.

To raise greater awareness for how people can begin

to diversify their networks.

Because again, there's this almost self-fulfilling prophecy,

this reinforcing, self-reinforcing dynamic

just sticking with the people you know.

So it's wonderful to hear you're doing that.

We're gonna try to facilitate that for everyone.

And you've also, I noticed it was a couple weeks ago.

I don't know if the timing's right.

You rolled out an AI system to help hirers

find more diverse candidates.

Is that an initiative that came out

of the same realization, the same conversation?

To some extent.

I mean it-- How does it work?

Yeah, so we...

Started to think about the concept

of diversity and really extending diversity

to include inclusion and belonging.

We don't think diversity is enough.

Oftentimes with regard to diversity initiatives

people will look to hire folks into their organization

that are more reflective of the customers that they serve

which is wonderful.

But all too often that becomes a numbers exercise,

and it needs to be much more than that.

Because you can bring a more diverse group of people

into your company, but if they're not included

in the right discussions where decisions are being made

then it's not gonna achieve the objective

that you were looking for.

So there's gotta be diversity.

There has to be inclusion.

And inclusion is not enough.

Oftentimes now you'll hear people talking

about diversity and inclusion, DNI.

At LinkedIn, we also feel like it's really important

to focus on belonging.

So if you use meaning as the metaphor,

and diversity is making sure you have the right people

within your organization.

And inclusion is making sure they're invited

to the right meetings.

Belonging is ensuring that once those people

are in the meetings when they look up at the people

around the table they actually feel like they belong there.

And if you don't go that last mile,

you may have the right people around the table,

but they look up and they don't see people

that look like them or sound like them

or have the right, or similar backgrounds or experiences.

And when they don't feel like they belong,

they're not operating at their best.

Do you mean that LinkedIn...

LinkedIn can solve that problem at LinkedIn, right?

Yeah.

You as the CEO can change the way

your corporate culture works. Yeah.

And you can solve problem of recruiting

at Wired or any other company, but do you actually think

that LinkedIn can solve culture problems

within outside organizations?

Or is it just LinkedIn can solve pipeline

of people coming in?

So when you say solve-- Solve.

Cultural or societal issues--

Yeah, can you solve the-- Yeah, that's a--

Can you solve diversity in American, Jeff?

I would love to think that we can help solve.

The serious version is do you view

LinkedIn's mission as...

Working on this problem, on the outside,

working on this problem as it relates to people

coming into the organizations or do you view it

as going higher up in the stack of how organizations

are managed and run?

It's the beauty of the vision

is it's all of it.

So when we talk about every member of the global workforce,

we mean it.

So every employee of LinkedIn at this point,

we are, it's not just the vision.

We're operationalizing the vision.

We are going to try to create economic opportunity

for all three billion members of the global workforce.

And there's really two components this every,

which is by far and away the most important word

in that vision statement.

One is going beyond our core, the white-collar worker,

the knowledge professional, to include front-line workers,

middle-scale workers, and blue-collar workers.

I mean there's some really exciting initiatives underway

along those lines.

And then it goes to the point we're talking about earlier.

There are also professional aspirants.

There are folks that want to become knowledgeable workers.

Folks that are working towards that end

that would fall more within our core addressable opportunity

in terms of knowledge workers.

Who, to the point we were just discussing,

don't necessarily have the right networks

or don't necessarily have the right degrees.

And so we are very focused on that as well.

And it comes from the kinds of products

that I was talking about earlier.

The kinds of AI efforts, talent pooling,

searching capabilities, that we're developing

to facilitate the way in which companies can go out

and create a more diverse workforce.

And create a greater sense of inclusion.

It also includes the way we do business.

So it's on both fronts.

And one example of that would be within

our engineering ranks, for example.

We've recently taken a page out of the German playbook,

the vocational training playbook,

and we created an apprenticeship program

for people that don't have a traditional

four-year CS background.

And as long as they've completed a coding bootcamp,

we will train them and apprentice them.

And hopefully be in a position where we can hire them

as software engineers.

And it's not just on the R&D front,

our head of recruiting just recently

created an apprenticeship program we call Ramp,

which seeks to tap folks from underserved segments

of our member population, under-represented minorities,

opportunity youth, veterans, people in the later stages

of their career who are in midstream of making a huge change

and may have trouble getting work.

And we're training them to be recruiters,

because they have the networks that enable us

to become more diverse.

And with success, we wanna open-source that.

This is not gonna be proprietary.

As much as we believer that could create

a competitive advantage, it's too important.

It's too aligned with our vision statement.

So in the success, Brendan Browne, the head of recruiting,

wants to graduate a thousand apprenticeships,

a thousand recruiters over the ten years

just within LinkedIn.

And then we wanna open that up

and share best practices with other companies.

Take that to the next level.

I will say that as someone who worked

in Silicon Valley for a Linux company in 1997,

the fact that everybody at Microsoft is now talking

about open source.

It's like the most extraordinary evolution--

(audience laughing)

I've seen.

Let me ask you a little bit about the data you have.

You probably have the best data set on the workforce,

the world's workforce.

Probably better than any government.

If not now, it will be soon.

What are you seeing in the way jobs are changing

and the way churn is happening?

I'm seeing lots of people are worried

about the way AI will change jobs and robotics

will change jobs.

What have you seen in the data set and where are we headed?

What do you know about how jobs will change

that most of us don't know?

So in terms of forecasting the crystal ball,

the data is a reflection of what's happening now

or what was happening.

And we can certainly use that to try to connect dots

and see some patterns, but we also partner

with third-parties, some incredibly bright folks,

think tanks, consulting firms to better understand

these trends given...

What we're trying to accomplish.

McKinsey Global Institute would be a perfect example.

They're estimating, currently, roughly half

of our work activities are susceptible,

will be impacted by AI.

So that's current.

This isn't science fiction.

And they more recently came out with a study

that suggested between 400 and 800 million jobs

could be displaced on a global basis by virtue of AI.

That's not a net number, and jobs will be created.

But clearly, this is gonna have massive impact on society.

So how can folks begin to get ahead of those trends?

And that's where our data can become,

I think, really valuable for companies

who are trying to answer these questions

and develop the right workforce strategies

so they can create work for their employees

for the jobs that are and will be

and not just the jobs that once were.

Because we have a tendency to be looking

in the rear view mirror too often here.

And our workforce strategies could be a bit antiquated

if we're not looking proactively into the future.

So we've developed one methodology in particular

that enables us to look at this data

in a really unique and hopefully valuable way,

which we call skills gap analytics.

So for any given locality for anywhere in the world,

we can better understand the fastest growing jobs

within that locality, the skills required

to obtain those jobs.

The aggregate skills of the workforce

within that locality measure the size of the gap

and then make that data accessible to people

who are trying to fix it.

And so that could be working with local governments.

It could be working with local schools.

It could be in cooperation with public and private sector.

And then last year, we rolled out a product

called LinkedIn Talent Insights that was opened up

as a beta, a pilot program.

We just rolled it out.

Generally available to all of our customers.

And that enables them to do the same workforce planning

within their organizations that we can do

for governments around the world.

Two really interesting trends we're seeing here

in the US.

When I talk about a skills gap here on stage,

what's the first thing that comes to mind?

What's the first skill you think there would be a gap on?

[Man] Coding.

Coding.

It's what everyone says.

So software development, software engineering,

cloud computing, data storage, web development,

mobile development, and of course, AI.

Very top of mind.

And when I meet with and talk to customers

all over the world, I'm feeling a far greater sense

of urgency on that front.

But it turns out that's not the biggest skills gap

in the United States.

The biggest skills gap in the United States is soft skills.

(audience laughing lightly)

Written communication, oral communication,

team building, people leadership, collaboration

for jobs like sales, sales development,

business development, customer service.

This is the biggest gap.

And it's counter-intuitive.

Everyone's so keenly focused on technology and AI.

It's related though.

The good news is it comes on two fronts

with regard to this particular gap.

The first is that for as powerful as AI

will ultimately become and is becoming,

we're still a ways away from computers being able

to replicate and replace human interaction

and human touch.

So there's wonderful incentive for people

to develop these skills because those jobs

are gonna be more stable for a longer period of time.

We're also capable of closing these gaps now, today.

Companies have the expertise within their organizations

to train and re-skill their current workforce

and future prospects.

So that's the good news on that front.

With regard to technology, this is also

a bit counter-intuitive, because rather than try

to just train everyone to become a software engineer,

one of the things it's gonna be most important

in terms of preparing the workforce to re-skill

for that trend we were talking about earlier

is that people just have basic digital fluency skills.

Before you start thinking about becoming

an AI scientist, you need to know how to send email,

how to work a spreadsheet, how to do word processing.

And believe it or not, there are broad swaths

of the population and the workforce

that don't have those skills.

And it turns out if you don't have

these foundational skills, if you're in a position

where you need to re-skill for a more advanced technology,

if you don't have that foundation in place

it becomes almost prohibitively complex

to learn multiple skills at the same time.

So that's an area we wanna help people focus on as well.

Alright, so...

Do not tell your children be engineers,

but do tell them to go on the streams and to like

and to comment and to share.

'Cause that is a very important soft skill.

Thank you very much, Jeff.

That was a fantastic conversation.

(audience applauding)

A great way to start.