Why Great Hires Fail and How to Fix Talent Market Fit | Ep. 327 with Deepali Vyas of Founder & CEO, Vyas Media & 'The Elite Recruiter'

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So Deepali, when I was in my corporate environment, what I noticed was people were getting fired

and many times it was because they were not the right fit for the position, but the corporation

is like, put them on a performance improvement plan. The amazing PIP, put them on that,

and then basically get them out, like, whatever, or higher, slow, fire, fast. That was like,

you know, do these things, and what I always found is as a leader, as I continued to move up,

that people were just not in the right position, and they're forced to doing a job that did not

fit for them. How do you see this? First of all, I think this happens more often than you think,

and that seems to be the age-old problem around organizational design, right? When you see people

on PIPs, it's not because they were incapable, it's because they were misaligned, right? It was a

wrong role, wrong stage, wrong manager, wrong pressure profile, but I think the uncomfortable truth

is that, you know, sometimes it's not fire-fast, it's diagnosed correctly. So I think the corporate

mistake here is corporations assume if someone isn't performing in this role, they're underperforming

as a person, and that's flawed thinking, right? Performance is contextual, and so if a person

has high potential, but they're in the wrong function, that's a problem. If they're strategic

in an execution-heavy role, also a problem. If they're executional in a strategic role,

also a problem, so they're never going to win. So I think the leadership question here is,

why are they failing? And where would this person win? And that's fundamentally different

leadership posture. And I think that there's the diagnostic for this, right? Before you PIP someone,

figure out what is their capability? Like, do they actually have a skill set that's required?

Not from before, but like, what are they really, really good at? And then where's the energy fit?

Where does this work drain them versus what energizes them? If someone who would have asked me that

early on in my career, Dan, it would have been super obvious where I thrive versus where I

suck at details. Period. Full stop. I suck at it. But I am really good at it. Empowering people,

setting big vision, energizing people towards a really big goal. And if they would have seen

that early on, they wouldn't have put me in, you know, spreadsheet land, right? Because that's not

where I thrive. And then the last part is, you know, well, I talked about autonomy fit, but like,

the stage fit, right? Like, is the company in a phase that matches their wiring, right? Because

sometimes you can be in a high growth company and you're the kind of person that's like, look,

I want to be really pragmatic and methodical and whatever. You don't fit there because they want to

move fast and break things, right? And so that's where all of these things kind of go wrong. And the

wires get super crossed, which leads me to this thought around most founders are obsessing over

product market fit. You argue about talent market fit. How do you recognize this before you even

put someone in a position? So if you're going to interview someone and you're going to match them

to a position, and then what do you do the moment they're in there if you're realizing it might not

be that fit? So founders do obsess with product market fit, which is fair, right? But most of them

don't think about the talent market sit. And that's why a lot of these great hires fail.

So what is talent market fit, right? It's not the impressive resume, the big brand logo,

the years of experience, the raw intelligence. It's really the alignment between a person's

wiring and the company's current stage and the pressure and the market reality. That's talent

market fit to be really, really clear, right? So here's where founders, I feel go wrong.

They will hire the quote unquote best candidate, the most experienced operator, the person who

crushed it at a bigger company. But they forget that the environment changed the outcome, right?

So I always say this a lot. You can come from a really big branded logo.

You really have to ask yourself as a founder hiring that person, did that person

you know make the logo or did the logo make the person, right? That's a really big difference.

Because could they stand up on their own without the logo? And does that matter for you now, right?

So like a VP who thrived in a 3000 person infrastructure, they had a deep bench, they had clear

process, they had brand gravity. Those people will typically fail in a 40 person chaos, right?

ambiguous strategy, founder led decision making, capital constraints, like that VP is smart.

They're different. There's different results that they have in that organization, not in this

organization. So we had a guest on before Francis Frye, a Harvard professor and she helped the

transformation through Uber when it was the founder to the to the new CEO. And I was fascinated

to hear about this whole like founder CEO when the company skills you now need a new CEO because

of the fits of the company. What do you see around C sweet fit as the company scales over time?

So I have a confession. My team and I, my team actually worked on the Uber CEO

search. So life has come full circle to talk about it. It was really difficult. And

where Uber was at the time, because it was founder led, if you think about where they were going,

at the inflection point that they were. And you know, Francis probably can, you know, go more deeply

into this. They needed institutional gravity. They needed institutional process. And Dara

was one of the few people that had built several companies to a stage that had these institutional

processes that could really build world class frameworks and process and get everybody organized

to row in a in in one direction, right? And he had done that over and over again. He also had

a bit of gray hair. And he also had the maturity. And he also had the longer term vision because

he had been a visionary previously, right? Not to take anything away from from Travis. But I would say

that there is an inflection point that happens. And by the way, like not even just Uber, you know,

you I'm sure you've watched shows like Silicon Valley. Right. And so when those things do ring true

in real life, right? The CEO profile has to evolve based on the stage that the company is at,

right? And so I just gave you the sort of microcosm version of a VP that thrives in these types

of environments won't really thrive in that. The reverse is also true, right? If you have just

played sort of quote-unquote small ball and you really need to go to this level, what does all

of that infrastructure need in order to get to that level? And you need the right CEO profile. So

that's what we're really talking about. It's fascinating. I mean, it's very fascinating around

what happens with your company as you continue to grow. And also like where where would I want my

company to even go? And what do I need to sacrifice as a founder? I know many that were

kicked out of their company or the board or whoever investors removed them and put somebody else in.

It's very interesting around what happens with the people as a company grows. But let's say

there's a organization maybe less than 20 people. They're not thinking about people so much because

they're still thinking about growing and scaling the organization. Is there a simple audit or

something that they can do to look at their organization and see if the people they do have

are correct? The audit, I would say like if you think about it from like a board level because

that's typically why these things come about. What stage are we actually in? Not what stage

we're aspiring to be, but what stage are we actually in? What problems dominate this stage? Is

it innovation, scale, governance, turnaround? What is it? And then do the leaders in our organization,

whether it's at this small stage, but they're all basically leaders. Does that pattern history

match that pressure? Does past patterns predict future behavior? Can they handle it? That's the

diagnostic. The hard truth is sometimes the most dangerous CEO is not a weak one. It's the

almost right one. That's where boards and the leadership teams really have to take

audit or take stock of where they are. By the way, like you mentioned something earlier,

I'm literally working with a founder right now that got pushed out by a board even though they

had had multiple exits, you know, had had 300 million in revenue in their previous companies,

but she got replaced by a man and there was a whole dynamic there as well. And there was a reason

for that because when they were raising the next level of capital, they needed the face that was

going to represent what that next face was going to be. So there's a lot of dynamics that get

played out in the boardroom. We just had another guest on who is talking about this issue around

many times women founders seem to be removed from their company without them. And I've talked to

some really well-known companies before, not on this show just privately, who if I said their names,

people would know them, like household names. They were all removed from their companies. It's great.

There's a whole group of women that meet up, I guess, who have all been removed to talk about like

what you can do in the future. Why do you think this is happening? And is it related to what you

were just saying around the future of the company? Is it only, is it because there's not a lot of

women who are founding larger companies? What do you think it is? So I think that there's, first of all,

I don't think it's random, right? High profile founder removals have happened to men and women,

but the pattern feels different for women. And there's actually sort of structural reasons

that I believe, right? One is the capital dynamic. Venture capital is still overwhelmingly male. That's

a fact. Boards are still overwhelmingly male, also a fact. And power networks are still relationship

based. So the tension kind of arises where, you know, there's founder vision, board pressure,

and growth expectations. And the person with less embedded power losses, that's where the

conversation takes place. And women founders statistically raised less capital have fewer,

deeply embedded board allies. And they get scrutinized earlier for leadership maturity. And that

compounds under stress. My, I'm blown. My mind is blown. Like, I never, the power dynamic, I never

even heard of this, to be honest, like the power dynamics of what's going, this is why I never

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It's money because I was too afraid of the power, giving up the power.

And I'm a three-time founder and I have raised money and it is a slog in the mud. And I do

realize I'm a female founder, right? By the way, in my seat, raising money and I raised over

a million dollars for my last venture, even just by the way, the zero to a million is the hardest,

I would say. I was scrutinized like a series A company versus a seed company as a female founder.

That's first-hand experience.

Hope it changes, because I know I have your situation.

The amount of money going to women is very small. We just had the previous founder of task

rabbit who started her own VC firm now to hopefully try and solve this, but obviously it's something

huge. When you look at the future of what the workplace will be, a couple of years ago,

this was like the topic everywhere. Well, people go back to the office,

hybrid, then all of a sudden it became a topic again. And there was a company recently just laid

off 4,000 people and said it was because of AI. I'm sure it wasn't because of just AI, but

this is really becoming a thing, right? Like a lot of jobs are being lost to AI. And I have

a family member who has always never had a problem getting a job. It just took her like two years

to get a job. And she's like in a very specific niche job that normally she never has a time

without a job. So how do you see the future of how this is going to play out with obviously AI

and robotics just advancing so fast? So I live in the world of data and AI from a search,

executive search perspective. So, you know, a lot of times even I get a lot of

pushbacks and you know, you're the reason why all of this stuff is happening. You're putting these AI

officers in these seats and all of the stuff. I think first of all, I know the company that you're

talking about when companies say that they laid off 4,000 people because of AI, it's almost never

purely AI. But let me tell you what's happening in this market because I did a video about this

recently and kind of connecting the dots here. There's a few things. At the leadership level,

AI is being discussed at nauseam. I also think a lot of people don't understand AI in depth.

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit which, you know, most CEOs and boards want to take advantage of,

but they don't know how. So I call this sort of level one, level two, level three thinking.

Level one is have your employees experiment with this stuff, whether it's chat, whether it's,

you know, Gemini, whether it's Claude, whatever it is. When you're doing it individually, you are now

maybe 20, 30% more productive because you're using these things with that amount of utility.

Level two is when you think about the workflows in your organization of, hey, my team has to

deliver this. So there's a lot of different people in a lot of different places in these workflows

that really need to connect the dots via AI enablement to actually get that thing in a place where

it is saves 30, 40% more time or cost savings or whatever it is. That is the layer that really needs to

be built out in corporate America, right? And the third layer is the whole system redesign.

What companies are making a mistake right now is there's level one and then there's level three,

but the missing middle is where the ROI is really at. And that's why there's frustration and that's

why you're seeing this overcutting, right? You're seeing all these layoffs saying, well,

EA is going to solve everything, but they haven't done layer two. So they think they're just going

to redesign stuff. And I guarantee you the people that overcut now will overhire again in the next

sort of pendulum swing. So I think that there's a bit of a somewhat of a misinformation and myths

out there. And then MIT came out with the study saying 95% of companies are not getting the ROI on AI,

but when you dig in a layer deeper, it's because there's 12 power users of Microsoft co-pilot and

nobody else in that organization because they haven't really been taught how to do all of these

things, right? So that's the reality. And that's why I did that video on like these things will only

move as fast as budgets can approve, right? Or, you know, roadmaps can be approved. And that's going

to be a longer cycle. Now, block did this, you know, layoff. And I think that it wasn't purely about

it, but they're taking advantage of the time where, you know, they, there's sort of cheap capital

that's disappearing. There's margin pressure, whatever it is. But they want to signal that they are

AI accelerating. I thought of a funny show. We, we as humans give all of everything, all our jobs

to AI and robots. Then the robots become human. They unionize. Then they want days off. They only

want to work 20 hours a week. And then humans have to take back over. I think, I think that might be

what's going to happen. When you, which leads me into, I'm seeing a lot of younger people,

let's say in their 20s, taking on jobs at like, Claude, for example, who just gave out like

billions or hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options to their employees, private options.

You can work out like SpaceX and get private options. And then it goes public. I wonder how in the

next two or three years, they will become multi, multi millionaires. Some of these companies,

I'm seeing like, if you're getting stock like this and it goes public, or even it already is public,

or they're, they're getting paid $500,000 to work at meta, I wonder if they're only going to work

for a few years and then stop working. So that's a great point. And a lot of the stuff that I talk

about, you know, on my sort of elite recruiter platform when I'm out there is the rise of the portfolio

career. I think the traditional career staying at one company for a very long time is over.

And I think the future of work is going to be everyone is sort of stacking skills within these

organizations, getting a lot of, you know, compensation for it. But I think that they are going to

learn and do all of these things and then say, hey, if I can do it here, I can do it across the board.

And so they will stand up multiple income streams based on their expertise. And that's

what a portfolio career looks like where they will eventually become independent consultants. But

now the rise of independent consultants and being able to advise or do sprint work or do advisory

work or do advise, you know, fractional work with multiple companies because those companies need

that expertise from these very few people. I think you're going to see a rise in the ultimate portfolio

career. So it's sort of like single consulting houses, solopreneurs, or they will get their friends

together and build this whole consulting collective that goes against all of the big professional

services companies that we see today and break those models in half. The big firms need to watch out.

It makes sense. I'm also wondering like, because we've been talking with other guests around the

wealth transfer. I keep thinking about this. It's like $80 trillion in wealth in the US that's

transferring from baby boomers to Gen Z and millennial in the next few years as they age out.

They're getting these jobs that could be making a potentially a lot of money.

If they can take a few hundred thousand dollars home in dividends,

I don't know if they want to work because I, you know, like they, it seems like they're,

they want to work for, they want to be passionate workers, they want to travel,

they want to dance on TikTok or they want to be content creators. I don't know if they want a

hustle and grind. Like I'd say like older millennials enough, we were, you know, you and I like,

we got a hustle, we got a grind, but if I'm making $200,000 a year and just from dividends or

$250, I'm not sure if I'm one of them. If I'm going to work anymore, which I wonder what happens to

that, that base of probably highly educated skilled workers, they are just gone. What do you think?

First of all, you are kind to lump me into older millennial because I'm definitely not that.

I am much older than you, but I appreciate that. You know, Dan, that's such an honest question

and it's layered, right? Because what you're really asking is if people don't have to work,

will they still choose to work? And that happens to a talent, and what happens to that sort of talent

base, like you said, highly educated. So let's kind of break this down. I think the dividend illusion,

right? First, the number of people truly living off of 200,000 passive income is still relatively small.

And I know that those numbers are like really highlighted. It's still relatively small when you,

when you think about like the distribution of it. So here's what social media sort of amplifies.

They amplify the crypto wins, the exit liquidity, the creator revenue spikes, the dividend screenshots,

all that. But statistically, I think most people do not have permanent sustainable passive income

at that level, right? There's a loud minority effect that's happening there. Let's be really real.

And I think that work motivation is shifting. It's not disappearing. So like older millennials

and Gen X, right? We work from the point of view of like we need to survive, we need security,

we need status, right? The younger cohorts work is sort of optional identity expression, right?

It's economic context. So if you grew up during, oh, wait, and you were watching layoffs and you see

loyalty unrewarded, you're going to equate optionality with safety, meaning I'm not going to work for

that one employer that can lay me off one day or go under, right? And I think if someone truly has

$200,000 in passive income, here's the interesting part. I think those people will build that passive

income. They do have ambition. They understand leverage. They enjoy building. They like status. They

like influence, right? None of that stuff is going to disappear. They're going to pivot and they're

going to become angel investors. They're going to become fractional advisors. They're going to

become creators. They're going to become portfolio operators. They're going to become board members,

consultants, whatever. They may not grind 80 hours, but they're not going to vanish from productivity.

And I think this is where I feel, look at me, right? I don't need to work if I don't really want to.

I'm doing it out of the sheer sort of passion that I have for it. So I think even this younger

audience, this younger sort of cohort that's coming up, they're going to want to do meaningful work.

And that might not yield like the comp that we might be used to, but they're okay with that,

because they have this passive income back there. And that's where it's going to win. The new

equation I'm going to say is income is really leverage plus skill plus distribution. I think

that's the equation. I've never, I think I've talked to over 1,400 people in six years. I've never

heard this before. I like to have a guest on who's telling me something I've never heard before.

And really, my mind is suddenly expanded. Like that is very interesting. I could see this whole like

it's like the rise of the gig economy, like the fractional type. Like I don't want to work full

time for one job, which I don't blame anyone. I remember the last job that I had. And I was miserable.

And they would never really allow me, even though I kept, they kept promoting me. But every time

they promoted me, I was even more miserable than the previous time. And it was like the only option

I had. Like I wanted to move somewhere. So I had to be feeling different. Like I would rather like,

okay, I work here for a few months. I work there for a few months. I do this. I work five different

places for like three hours a week. But damn, that's a structural thing, right? Because corporations

are not allowing that type of flow. Exactly. If they were to allow that type of flow in and out

and not be burdened by, you know, if, again, if you, let's zoom out 30,000 feet for that to happen,

for your lifestyle that you just described to happen, you need to make sure that, you know,

you have some benefits in the background. You have, you know, something that you have sort of

the savings account, et cetera, et cetera. But you are free to move through the system. And until we

get there, that's a structural problem. However, I think we as the employee base or the solo

manure base or whatever it is, when we start disrupting the system this way that like, hey,

we're not going to do this. We're going to do this on a 1099. We're going to do it on a three-month

contract. And we're going to be in and out. And, you know, I will find a way a marketplace that's

going to have all my benefits and help me with my quote unquote 401k or an equivalent there of,

I feel very good about being in and out. Most people feel stuck because they don't have the

understanding of what optionality looks like. I feel like people and corporations need your help.

Yeah, that's right. The students like to me. So if they want to get in touch with you,

because they all need to, how can they do so? So they can reach me. I have my website,

depolyvias.com. I'm on Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn and all of the things. But hello,

at depolyvias.com. They can reach me there. And then your book will come out eventually. We'll

have to read that. The fact that you're you're wearing Vios media sweater, like I need to get a sweater.

This has been great. I appreciate it. I learned a lot. I learned a lot. Thank you. I learned a lot

today and a lot of sound bites. So I can't wait to share this with everyone. So thank you for

joining us. Appreciate it. The maps app that came with your phone, it's fine. If you enjoy waiting

and guessing and inefficient routes, or you could use MapQuest. MapQuest is back with live

directions, real-time traffic and faster routes. It moves when you move. Best of all, no

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Download the MapQuest app on the app store or visit MapQuest.com. MapQuest. Still getting you there.

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