Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about Foresight and Talent
Some of the most significant innovations in talent management and talent acquisition originated in the tech sector. From Edison’s revolutionary use of teamwork to Netflix’s principle of Talent Density, cutting-edge thinking about technology has often also involved cutting-edge thinking about talent.
What might the history of technology teach us about the future impact of AI on talent practices?
My guest this week is Jamie Dobson, CEO of Container Solutions and author of the forthcoming book, “Visionaries, Rebels and Machines,” on the history of technology. In our conversation, Jamie identifies some of the talent innovations the tech sector has given us, shares how he applied some of this thinking to his own business, and we discuss what the future might look like
In the interview, we discuss:
• How can historical context help us understand the future?
• Examples of talent innovations that have come out of the tech sector
• Teamwork and talent density
• The problem with copying the artifacts but not the thought processes behind them
• Lessons from elite sports
• How technology changes, but human nature doesn’t
• What does the future look like
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00:00
Matt Alder
How does technology innovation drive talent innovation? And what lessons can we learn from the past to help understand the impact of AI on recruiting in the future? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from Smart Recruiters. Are you looking to supercharge your hiring? Meet Winston Smart Recruiter’s AI powered companion. I’ve had a demo of Winston. The capabilities are extremely powerful and it’s been crafted to elevate hiring to a whole new level. This AI sidekick goes beyond the usual assistant handling all the time consuming admin work so you can focus on connecting with top talent and making better hiring decisions. From screening candidates to scheduling interviews, Winston manages it all with AI precision, keeping the hiring process fast, smart and effective. Head over to smartrecruiters.com and see how Winston can deliver superhuman results. Hi there.
01:20
Matt Alder
Welcome to episode 713 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in foresight. Influence talent and technology. This episode is about foresight and talent. Some of the most significant innovations in talent management and talent acquisition originated in the tech sector. From Edison’s revolutionary use of teamwork to Netflix principle of talent density, cutting edge thinking about technology has often also involved cutting edge thinking about talent. So what might the history of technology teach us about the future impact of AI on talent practices? My guest this week is Jamie Dobson, CEO of Container Solutions and author of the forthcoming book on the history of technology, visionaries, rebels and machines.
02:22
Matt Alder
In our conversation, Jamie identifies some of the talent innovations the tech sector has given us, shares how he applies some of this thinking to his own business, and we discuss what the future might look like.
02:35
Matt Alder
Hi Jamie and welcome to the podcast.
02:37
Jamie Dobson
Hello Matt. Thank you so much for having me.
02:39
Matt Alder
Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
02:47
Jamie Dobson
Well, for those of your listeners who are not from the UK, I’m from England. My name is Jamie. I live down in London where I help run a very cool company called Container Solutions. But I also, I love to joke with my American friends that yes, there’s a reason I don’t sound like Hugh Grant and it’s because I’m from the north of England and my background, Matt, is in computer programming. But I learned pretty early in my career that management and sort of leadership, when you’re good with People and good with tech, you can really get quite far. And in the end, I base my career on that.
03:20
Matt Alder
Fantastic. And you have got a book coming out in the next few weeks.
03:25
Matt Alder
Tell us about that.
03:26
Matt Alder
What’s it about? Why did you. And why did you write it?
03:28
Jamie Dobson
Visionaries, Rebels and Machines. Well, I think there’s two questions in there. Why do I think I wrote it and why did I start the process? When I, when I began it was all about trying to tell the story about the cloud. Somebody asked me, what is cloud computing? And actually it stopped me dead in my tracks because that’s my line of work. It’s something I’ve been busy with for, well, decades at this point. And I can definitely answer the question, but I couldn’t answer it quickly. And as I started to think about that, well, how do you answer that question? I came to this kind of conclusion. Well, you have to understand the cloud in its own historical context. Where did it come from? And, and once you’ve done that, you start to get to this next question.
04:10
Jamie Dobson
Well, if it came from there, where might it take us? And so I thought, oh, well, I know the story really well. I’m a computer science graduate. I studied up in Edinburgh, High performance computing. No problem, I’ll start typing now and I’ll be finished by Christmas. That was about five years ago. And interestingly enough, as I was about halfway through the book, I spoke to a gaggle of young, recent graduates and they asked me about the olden days. And I was thinking, oh, fantastic. You know, they said, we don’t get much history at university. Would I be happy to answer a few questions about the olden days? And so I was stood there thinking, oh, exciting. I can talk about time sharing and the creation of the personal computer.
04:51
Jamie Dobson
And as I started to answer their questions, they stopped me and said, oh, no, we didn’t mean those times. We were Talking about the 1990s when the web arrived. And all of a sudden it dawned on me. A lot of people younger than me don’t understand the history of computing. And so in a way, I wrote it for those people as well.
05:07
Matt Alder
Fantastic. Yeah, it’s kind of, I suppose it’s difficult, isn’t it? Sort of live through it doesn’t really. And you understand how everything was kind of put together. It’s some. You kind of presume everyone else does, but obviously that context is really important. One of the interesting things about the book is very much in the history of technology. It’s really kind of been the tech pioneers and the tech companies that have really driven innovation also in talent acquisition and talent management, as they’ve looked to kind of resource their projects and move things forward and obviously have a lot of innovation in their DNA. Naturally you kind of, you have a whole chapter on talent in the book, but it kind of runs throughout it, doesn’t it? I mean, talk us through how sort of talent practices have developed with the technology and computing.
05:51
Jamie Dobson
Well, I think one of the most interesting things about the history of computing is most of the most innovative management and leadership ideas didn’t come from managers and leaders last in the last century. They came from the world of technology. And I like to sort of tease people and I say to them, if I ask you, what did Thomas Edison invent at Menlo Park? Well, what would you say, Matt? What is your answer?
06:13
Matt Alder
Well, the light bulb comes to mind.
06:16
Jamie Dobson
Of course, that’s what everybody says. And of course that’s fair. That’s what he did invent there. And once he had the light bulb, the whole idea of the grid made sense. But what he also invented was a type of research institution that would actually foreshadow everything that would come next. Bell Labs, that the work of Robert Oppenheimer when he built the atomic bomb, and of course all the research campuses of Google and Microsoft and Facebook more recently. And so actually, because technology tends to be built in systems and systems components are built by specialists, if you don’t get those specialists to play well during the development process, then the things they’re building won’t play well when they eventually get brought together and they make contact with the real world with its peculiar users and rules and regulations.
07:03
Jamie Dobson
Now explicitly something I think genuinely remarkable happened in the 1950s. Abraham Maslow, of course, famously in his 1943 paper, wrote about the hierarchy of needs. He never visualized it as a pyramid. That came much later. I think some wicked management consultant did that. He never visualized it as a pyramid. And that’s because you can be satisfied many needs at once. You don’t need to, you know, clear the bottom pyramid level before you go up. Well, anyway, a fellow called Andrew K. Working in California, he was running a small semiconductor factory and he read Maslow’s, I think it was, oh, what was it called? Not a theory of human motivation. Oh, I should know this map from the top of my head. Well, never mind.
07:52
Jamie Dobson
He read one of Maslow’s later books about, you know, humanistic psychology, and he started to think, well, what if I transferred that to management? So what If I, for example, allow people to get into flow, and what if I remove the obstacles from their work? And of course, one of those obstacles was bureaucratic controls, and another one was making sure work flowed around. And so, of all people, a semiconductor entrepreneur out of California, essentially building on Maslow, invented what we would call humanistic management. And so the marriage of technology and humanistic management happened. And a divorce has yet to occur because Andy Grove of Intel ran with those ideas and all of them reappeared at David Shaw, at Amazon, and then later at Netflix. So it’s almost like a hidden history of management.
08:44
Jamie Dobson
And the problem is we focus so much of the cool stuff, the light bulbs and the artificial intelligence and the cloud. We actually overlook the fact that the amazing innovations in management and leadership and talent came from the tech industry.
08:57
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. I think when you really think about it, you’ve also got some of the things that Google was doing in its early days with spend 20% of your time working on this and all of these kind of things. I mean, there’s a huge amount of it there. You kind of specifically write about Netflix and talent density. Talk us through that a little bit.
09:15
Jamie Dobson
Well, talent density has become quite a common term, but as far as I can tell, it did emerge inside of Netflix. And the story goes something like this. Reed Hastings was the second chief executive of Netflix. He was. He was an investor and he was on the board. And then Mark Randolph, who had the idea to start an online video store, which was actually crazy before you could stream movies because posting VHS cassettes was extraordinarily difficult. You know, some turbulence had come their way around about the.com time, and there were about 90 people working at Netflix at the time. And Reed Hastings came to the conclusion that, well, goodness me, we can’t really afford to keep everybody, and, you know, if we do, there’ll be no business. And so he had the very unenviable task of cutting the workforce.
10:06
Jamie Dobson
So he sat together with Patty McCord, Mark Randolph. Patty McCord is Netflix’s famous chief talent officer. So the Netflix culture deck and a lot of the cool stuff was. Was ran by McCord. And so they made some sort of criteria. Does the person do good work? Was one of them. But another one was, does the person play well with others? You know, basically, are they a jackass or not? And so essentially they were writing down their value system. What is it that we value in an employee? And anybody who didn’t make the. The, you know, the list was, you know, they reluctantly let them go. And Hastings braced himself for a backlash that didn’t actually come. And he realized within a few days, people were happier, they were humming and productivity was going up. And that’s when he started.
10:54
Jamie Dobson
He actually called it a Road to Damascus moment. And bearing in mind he was an experienced manager, an entrepreneur, he wasn’t. This wasn’t his first time at the rodeo. So it’s kind of signed that Even in your 40s and 50s, you can still have huge aha moments. And this was his aha moment. He basically said, you know, the talent we’ve got was diluted by those who didn’t share our values. And once we had taken those people out, the density, let’s call it the ratio of super talented people to the rest of the workforce had increased. So this became the concept of talent density. And in a way, at least according to him, it shaped everything that came next. The hiring, the firing, the management structures. And voila, gave us the system of management that Netflix has today.
11:40
Matt Alder
Fantastic. Now, I know that you’ve done something like this in your own business, and let’s talk about that in a second. Before we do, though, you got a really interesting example in the book of someone who tried to copy Netflix, but it was never going to work. Tell us about that.
11:54
Jamie Dobson
Well, you know, there’s a Simon Wardley, a very famous sort of commentator on technology, talks about, I think it was Simon at least talks about meme copying. So if you, for example, observe a successful business, you know, maybe they’ve got dashboards there, maybe they’ve got a culture deck. Whatever you end up copying the artifacts and not the thought process that created them. So many people have stolen or borrowed ideas from Netflix. Famously, they invented a piece of software called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey is hilarious. It’s a program that works on its own and destroys part of Netflix’s own infrastructure. And what they’re trying to do is test how resilient that is. But when something breaks, Netflix have got brilliant processes and procedures to fix the damn thing. Well, you shouldn’t use their Chaos Monkey unless you’re geared up for that.
12:48
Jamie Dobson
So lots of companies have tried to sort of borrow ideas from Netflix, and especially the technical ideas, and then we’re left wondering, well, why on earth are we not like Netflix? And indeed, I once discussed this with an executive who I was hoping would become a customer of Container Solutions. And so I asked him, well, what are you going to do about hiring? You know, the type of work you’re going to be doing next is radically different to what you used to do. Some people you know will be fit for this new world, but other people, unfortunately, you might have to let go. And if you don’t get a match between your people and what needs to be done, your motivation is going to be shot to hell.
13:24
Jamie Dobson
Now, he looked at me like I was daft, crossed his arms, scowled at me, and I was thinking, oh, my God, what have I done here? And he was. And then what? I realized he’d become really frustrated because he thought were talking about technology. And that’s why he invited me in. And I tried to explain, well, there will be no cloud technology or anything like this or anything Netflix like, unless you sort your talent management out. Well, needless to say, I was escorted out the building. And that company, unfortunately, went on to make a lot of extremely expensive mistakes.
13:58
Matt Alder
Talk us through your own business. How have you sort of applied some of these techniques and ways of thinking in your own company?
14:06
Jamie Dobson
Well, it started for me and I’ve only really started speaking about this after I put the book together, so. Mainly because I think I was a bit embarrassed. I did read Maslow many years ago and he said, you know, as a therapist, I can maybe help one people, one person at a time, or a couple of people at a time. And in group therapy, maybe I can help eight. However, if I was somehow able to embed awesome sort of talent management practices within a company, we could help people psychologically grow, thus, you know, creating better citizens, better parents and a better society. So I had this idea that if I could take everything I know about computing and mesh it with Maslow’s idea of sort of helping to improve society, then maybe I could contribute.
14:52
Jamie Dobson
Because I’m no politician, I’m not a teacher or anything like that. So that was kind of the genesis. And then as things progressed, it became about looking at best practices. What do Netflix do? What can we do that’s different? Because obviously we live in Europe and we have different regulations. And fortunately for me, I’ve been a rugby coach at quite high performing teams for many years. And it turns out a lot of the stuff about focusing on process, being honest, having great hiring procedures that you might see in a high performance sports team were very transferable to what were trying to do at Container Solutions. And the upshot was we removed buys from the process. We had a really high ratio of male to female engineers, male to female managers and leaders.
15:39
Jamie Dobson
And so the type of things you might get promoted for in other businesses, being loud and gobby and sticking your Hand up for a job you’re not qualified to do, which is the type of thing men tend to do. We eradicate all of that. So our process is delivered as brilliant engineers and managers that fitted in really well. And in a way, that’s what we built the whole company on.
16:00
Matt Alder
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually.
16:01
Matt Alder
I’ve had quite a lot of stuff.
16:03
Matt Alder
On the podcast before about high performing sports, elite sports and the lessons that come across into companies and managing humans and recruitment and all that sort of stuff. And I suppose it makes sense because in sport, the product is the sum total of the humans that contribute. There isn’t anything, there isn’t anything else kind of out on the pitch or in the boat or whatever it might be.
16:25
Jamie Dobson
Well, it’s funny because Reed Hastings talks about, we’re not a family, we’re a high performing sports team. He’s not the first person to have that idea, I’m pretty sure. I used to say that before I knew anything about Netflix and when we started Container Solutions, people used to sell, is it going to be like a family? I would like a family. And I was like, what are you talking about? Families miscommunicate, they cross each other’s boundaries and they get drunk at Christmas and ruin everything. We are definitely not going to be a family. We are going to be a high performing team. And I used to say to people, the moment that you can’t perform to the level you’re at is the moment your journey ends up.
16:59
Jamie Dobson
But I will hold myself to those same standards and one day will come when I won’t be fit to be the leader at Container Solutions and then I will step back and somebody more capable will step in. That’s how teams work, 100%.
17:13
Matt Alder
So with all that said, we’re kind of potentially a bit of a sort of a tipping point now with AI. So huge amounts of talk about AI taking jobs, doing this, managing that, all this, you know, all this kind of thing. How does that sort of shape the future, do you think, in terms of talent? Because it’s obviously interesting that we talk about AI taking over, but all these AI companies still employ lots of people who are developing the technology. What’s your kind of view on all of that?
17:42
Jamie Dobson
I think in the first instance there’s quite a disastrous effect currently happening. So what most people know, so we talk about AI is if it’s some general term and there’s some master computer behind the scenes that will eventually enslave the human race or destroy us. But the truth is that artificial intelligence systems are usually based on neural networks, and a neural network is trained on historical data. So such a system can tell you nothing about the future, but it can tell you quite a lot about the past. Now, for example, let’s say there’s a racist and a misogynist company out there and it’s not difficult to imagine, and previously only white men had succeeded there.
18:23
Jamie Dobson
Now, if you train a computer system on that data, it will recommend in the future that you hire more white men, because historically those are the type of people who’ve succeeded. So in terms of breaking existing power structures and modernizing companies, it’s an absolute disaster presently. So that’s one thing. The second thing is a lot of companies have automated the screening of CVs and qualifications, but this has led to this peculiar arms race where a person will use ChatGPT to produce 5,000 letters, apparently. So. So the, you know, the news media is reporting, send them to 5000 companies where on the company side, AIs are then filtering that stuff. So I don’t know if the system has become more effective. It’s definitely become less humane.
19:09
Jamie Dobson
And I can put my hand on my heart is we’re not doing that and we would never do that because, number one, people don’t deserve to be treated like that. But number two, I just don’t think it’s going to work. That’s the present situation. Now, moving forward, I must admit, Matt, I don’t know his answer to that question. I don’t know where this is going to go famously. I think Klarna fired a lot of people because it said we have got a generative AI system that can do all of their work. And last week they announced, oh, we’ve made a terrible mistake and we’re bringing all our people back.
19:41
Matt Alder
Yeah, I think it’s a very confusing time because there’s just lots of nuance out there. And I think that I’ve noticed there’s almost this kind of rotating news cycle. Like one week, it’s like, AI is amazing. We’ve done this, we’ve done that, you know, all this sort of stuff. Then next week, oh, it’s a disaster. We can’t do it. And you know, well done to Klarna for appearing in both sides of the news cycle in a very short time. But I think it’s just because it’s a really complex thing. I think people are trying to simplify it, to understand it. And, you know, as you say, it probably just needs a bit of time to play out, we can get our heads around it.
20:14
Jamie Dobson
One of the, one of themes in the book is about Amara’s Law. And Amara’s Law, simply stated, is that we 10 to overestimate what a system can do in the short term, but we underestimate what might happen in the long term. So typically when a new technology comes out, we say, oh, we’re going to have driverless cars and all of this. And then ultimately the technology disappoints and the headlines finally recede and then we move on. But what happens in the background is practitioners like myself and you researchers, research institutions, start to do the laborious work of finding use cases for these technologies. So already there are lots of very sensible uses of artificial intelligence. The ability to look for biomarkers on gestating fetuses. This is a great use case.
21:00
Jamie Dobson
And it’s not dehumanizing the work of medical professionals because around the world there’s many countries can’t afford the type of machinery we might have in the West. So I don’t subscribe to this idea that all automation is dehumanizing, although lots of it is. So I think the hype is bound to. It has to come to an end. I don’t think anybody can take anymore. It will come to an end. And just like it took about 35 years to find all of the applications for the electricity grid, it’s probably going to take at least 10 years to find all the best use cases for the AI systems we’re building today.
21:33
Matt Alder
No, absolutely. I think that, that kind of makes sense. I think if you look through all the tech cycles, this is kind of tends to be what happens, you know, perhaps with AI is just happening faster. And on that note, I know we sort of said it’s kind of very difficult to say what the teacher holds, but I kind of want to make, I want you to make a bit of a prediction here. So if you were doing another version of the book in 10 years time, what else do you think you’d be adding to it?
21:59
Jamie Dobson
Okay, a slight confession I will make. If I was going to, if I had a chance to rewrite the book and I’m looking forward to doing a second edition, many amazing female engineers and leaders have been written out of the history of computing. I tried to correct that, but I wish I could have another look at that. And a number of the characters in the book are male. They’re great people, by the way, good people. I would love to have readdressed that balance and only towards the end of my process did I realize I could have done something slightly different there. So I think I would probably focus on that as a slight correction and probably I’ve got on my desk, from Margaret o’ Myra, a book called the Code. I would be more critical of Silicon Valley now you’ve read the book.
22:42
Jamie Dobson
I’m pretty critical in chapter in part five. I’m kind of proud that I take the gloves off and I land blows to the industry because I think it’s important to hold it to account whilst I’m holding myself to account. So I’ll probably do some things a bit differently there now if I was to write the book in 10 years time. So this is a fact. Technology changes all the time. Human nature does not. So the reason those management principles principals worked at Menlo park in the Victorian times, and then they worked again in the 1940s at Bell Labs and then again at Netflix and Container Solutions. It’s because human nature doesn’t change. Bureaucracy gets in the way of creation. If you make somebody feel, you know, small and pathetic as a manager, you’re going to demotivate them, you’re going to lose them.
23:23
Jamie Dobson
So human nature doesn’t change. So that means there’ll still be greedy capitalists saying, oh, this is the end of work. There’ll still be people writing headlines that capture the imagination, although there’ll be different headlines. So all of the noise and the greed and the hope that we pin onto these technologies, that will still be there. However, looking at the book and what I’ve learned doing my research is it’s the use case question. The transistor found use cases, the personal computer, which unbelievably the inventors thought nobody would use. They really believe that. And now we have a personal computer in our pockets, we call them telephones. And the joke is that right now a computer can fit in your pocket. But 50 years ago, hundreds of people could literally fit into a machine, into a computer, you know, because they were the size of warehouses.
24:10
Jamie Dobson
So I expect specific use cases certainly around healthcare. So diagnostics, scheduling in the hospitals, the scheduling of beds. I think we’re going to get a lot better at that. I’ve got some hope that humanity will clean up their data sets. So bias is throughout data, that’s fine, but we do know how to correct it. And I’m hoping that we’ll grab the mantle and we’ll start to do the laborious work of cleaning data up, which we need to train artificial neural networks I think we’d probably see more. Yeah, I hate to say this, I think there will be more inroads into creativity. So creativity was the last bastion of humanity. You know, it’s like a computer and a machine will never be able to create. But we’ve seen that’s not true. It was a computer that famously made move 37 in a game of Go.
25:02
Jamie Dobson
That had never been done before and now human players have copied the machine. So whether that’s a fluke, a statistical chance, one way or another, the body of knowledge is improved. So whether through chance or better models, I think elements of creativity will fall away. And I understand people say, well, clearly that poem was written by Chat GPT. And I’m like, yeah, but it is a poem. And, and so right now, writers and artists and computer programmers, some people think it’s the end of their profession. Some people think, oh well, these tools will amplify us. So there was a lot of disagreement. I think it will be a mixture of both. I think we’re, we will all become more effective because of the assistance from these systems.
25:47
Jamie Dobson
And I think many tasks that we do now and we get paid well to do will probably vanish.
25:52
Matt Alder
Fantastic. So lastly, when’s the book out and where can people find it?
25:56
Jamie Dobson
The book will be out on 19 June to pre order, that’s the hardback. I would recommend people do that if they really want a copy because it’s going to be signed, there’s going to be a small note attached to it and there really are only a handful of copies. The Green book will never ever be printed again. Now the paperback will then come out about a month later, I think the end of July, the beginning of August. And the idea there is that when you’re off to the airport or you’re going on your summer holidays, you pick up this book, which was written as a page to Henna. It’s not a textbook, it’s a book full of characters, full of exciting stories. And the idea is that you’ll fly through it either on the beach or on the airplane.
26:34
Jamie Dobson
So that’ll be last week of July, first week of August, something like that.
26:38
Matt Alder
Jamie, thank you very much for talking to me.
26:41
Jamie Dobson
Thank you so much, Matt. It was wonderful to be here.
26:44
Matt Alder
My thanks to Jamie. You can follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
