Kathryn Minshew, CEO of The Muse, Discusses Career Platforms

are seeking jobs. Uh. This is kind of a fascinating conversation in that there aren't a lot of relatively young women entrepreneurs who have successfully navigated the entire startup, venture capital, et cetera. There are many, but we don't know them uh as well as we know some of the more infamous male counterparts in the world of tech and and I found this to be very fascinating and eye opening um conversation. So, with no further ado, my conversation with

Katherine Minshew. My special guest today is Katherine Minshew. She is the founder and chief executive officer of the Muse dot com, a career platform which has been used by over fifty million millennials to help manage their careers. Uh. The Muse has five million unique monthly visitors tens of

thousands of career advice articles. Katherine is also the author of a national best seller, The New Rules of Work, and she is an operating partner at X factor Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in the next generation of female founders. Katherine Minshew, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here and I've been looking forward to having you for a number of reasons. Um we'll get into some of them later on. One of the reasons I really wanted to speak to you is your

relative rarity in the world of finance and tech. There aren't a lot of women co founders. Let's let's put a pin in that and come back to it later. Let's talk more. Start talking about the whole background of the Muse. You you founded the site in two thousand and eleven. What was the inspiration for the site and what was the muse behind the name the Muse. So, the very short version is I wanted it and it

didn't exist. Um. The slightly longer version is um so in two thousand, eight, thousand nine, I was living here in New York City working at McKinsey and Company as a consultant, and I knew that I didn't want to be a career consultant, but I wasn't sure what it was I did want to do. So, you know, like many people my age, I sort of on the older

end of the millennial demographic. I went online and I looked at all the big job boards, the major sites that everyone here is familiar with, and I just kept thinking,

there is something really broken about this experience. To give you an example, on one of the biggest job aggregators, I was typing in Business Strategy Director and it was showing me assistant store manager, seven eleven cea Caucus, New Jersey, and I remember thinking, like, this can't be the best there is, and even you know I'm a big fan of LinkedIn, it was just showing me more consulting jobs, the same thing I've been doing, but more of the same.

And I kept thinking, you know, when I look at other people in my peer set, people that are getting started in their career, people that in their early thirties changing jobs, many of them are making decisions about where they want to work based on things like the growth, opportunities involved in the role, the culture and values of the organization, and none of that was evident on most of the job search sites that I was seeing and using, and so I thought, well, what would it look like

to create a better one? And my co found and I we had a you know, a white board a living room in Brooklyn. It was very, very stereotypical, but we started to imagine this much more visual, personalized, immersive career site that really took people by the hand and helped them navigate their careers and for companies, helped them tell a story about what it was like to work there, why would somebody want to come join their organization, and what sort of person would be most successful or most

happy there? Um, And that's and that's really where the idea for the news came from. So so that raises a question that's fascinating. And I don't requal if I read this on the site or in your book, but the phrase career satisfaction comes up over and over again. What is career satisfaction? Career satisfaction is um feeling like you are in the place that you're meant to be, or that you can wake up on most days not every day, but most days on the balance, you wake

up and you're fairly excited to go into work. Um you know, I mean, I'm a realist. No job is going to be perfect. We're not talking about sort of this, you know, follow your bliss kind of um pie in the sky thing. But at the same time, I think all of us see in our relationships and our friends and our family the difference between when someone is at some measure satisfied or or content in their role at their company and their career, and when someone is deeply dissatisfied.

And I believe that the benefits both to the individual but also frankly at a at a macro level, to the economy, to companies when you have people in the right spots are massive. And I think we're at a point where we can and should expect more from our careers and and that sort of career satisfaction is one of the things that I think a lot of people are driving. So how do you get from a consultant at Mackenzie to making the leap to Hey, everything is

broken and we can't even patch it. We have to start by building a new site from the ground up. How does that transition take place, and and the big consultancies like Mackenzie, they're a pretty cushy gig. It's very challenging to say I'm going to give up all the money and the and the career job security and make a leap. How did that come about? You know, UM, call me crazy, but I have always been willing to take a a jump if it was something that I was,

you know, significantly passionate about. And UM for the idea behind the muse. It actually started smaller at first, so UM. In fall of two thousand ten, I started a UM I guess you could call it an online blog, a community that was aimed at sort of you know, driven, UM ambitious women in their twenties and thirties. And I started it with a couple other women and it was it was it was a side project for all of us.

We had other roles. I actually left Mackenzie in goodness June and moved to Kigali, Rwanda to work with the Clinton Health Access Initiative on vaccine introduction, which is a whole other story. But I had come back from Rwanda, was still working for Chai and UM and all four of us started this project. No no, sorry, Chaia's Clinton Health Access Initiative. That just a mouthful. It's it's the sort of health wing of the international nonprofit that does

um vaccine introduction, HIV AIDS work, et cetera. So that was my day job. And the other women were all at McKinsey, including my co founder of the Muse, Alex and we just we started building this small community. And what was so interesting to me is other people, other women in the community, had the same issues that I was having around the broader search for a satisfying career,

finding the right job, the right company. UM. And I don't know, it wasn't so much you know, a single individual lightning bolt as a series of small ideas and moves.

And once I realized that the entire industry was effectively ignoring a lot of the needs of the millennial population, it suddenly just became so clear to me that there was this massive opportunity and if you know, if if I didn't step in and try and build something, um, who would Let's talk a little bit about the old business model, which you have described the old business model for finding, recruiting and hiring new employees. You've described that

as broken. I think the days when a company can expect to just stick an advertisement for a job on the Internet and that the best and brightest talent in the world are gonna walk right up and compete for that job. Those days are over and um what I'm seeing in the market, and I think one of the principles that the Muse was built on is that the balance of power between candidates and companies is changing. Companies and the MUS works with around seven hundred of many

of the best, most recognizable brands in the world. They're competing for great talent, and they're not just competing with their traditional competitors. You know, a major technology company might be competing with a large global financial institution who might be competing with a with a CpG or consumer you know, consumer goods company. And I think especially when you look at talent like um engineers, top sales people, many of them want to join a business where they feel like

the values of the organization align with their own. They're looking for growth opportunities. We call it the three piece people, purpose, and path. But they're looking for these things within their employer, and companies are starting to have to focus on their talent, brand recruitment, marketing and other elements of really um showcasing themselves and competing for talent in the open market. And I think that's opening a really interesting set of opportunities

for the businesses that are doing it well. So let me push back a little bit on a phrase you said that quote my ear, which is candidates want to work for a place that aligns with their values. Now, theoretically that sounds wonderful, but realistically in the real world, how significant a factor is that? Is this something that

is genuine? Is it a function of a fairly fully employed workforce and the balance of power at least at this phase of the cycle, seems to have shifted to the employee or is this a permanent change in how employees or potential employees get to behave Yeah, I believe the change is permanent, although you'll see it flex stronger and weaker as the economy cycles through. A couple data

points I think are really interesting here. So Deloitte recently did a millennial survey that indicated that of millennials had turned down a job because they didn't like the values of the employer brand of the company that the job offer came from. Similarly, in a survey about what UM what's important to you in life of millennials indicated that meaningful work was a core component of what was satisfying them. And this was this was I believe, a Wells Fargo study.

And so when you look across the demographic, they're raising the expectations on employers. And of course this isn't going to be a perfect alignment. But I think even recently politically, there's been a lot of talk about UM some of the chief executives withdrawing from various presidential advisory councils. Some of that has also been driven by internal employee groups and advocy groups standing up and saying, as employees, these are our values and pushing their chief executives to take

a stand. And I think that this is a really interesting time because again we are we're sort of redefining the contract between individual employees and the organizations that they support UM. And I do think some of these changes are permanent, and I think the businesses that understand how to navigate them, they're going to have a huge edge in recruiting and retaining great people over the businesses that

don't understand this. So who I want to better understand the business model of the muse and the natural comparison is linked in. So who are the clients? Are your clients these companies? Are they the millennials who are potential hires? Is that the nexus the marketplace between the two. How

does MWS actually operate? Yeah, so we started as a marketplace. UM. As you mentioned, we have fifty million people every year who come to the MEWS to navigate their careers and that is our sort of most important and initial user community, etcetera. But our business model is based on the employers and it's a few things. UM. One, we're able because we have this massive community to leverage a huge amount of data and information about what matters to the individuals. UM.

Sometimes we call ourselves the voice of the candidate. UM. You know, it's funny because not all of our users are candidates. Many of them are happily employed and they come to the views in between changing jobs as well as when they're looking for a new role. But from the from the individual user side, we're able to really help people find new jobs, explore companies and career paths, take classes, get advice and information. And that's a mostly

free service that we provide for the community. On the employer side, as I said, we have about seven customers and it's essentially an annual subscription product as sas business in which we're helping them essentially capture, create, distribute, and measure elements of their talent brand. So without getting hyper specific of them, I'm happy to go as deep into it as you want. Fascinating, I want to. I want to get into the nitty gritty. Yeah, So so let's

start with the beginning. So capture um. The days at which a company could just say we're a great place to work or we value diversity and inclusion, those days are gone. Companies now exactly trust us. That doesn't work anymore. Companies now have to show, not tell, and the best way to do that is through the voices of their

current employees. In fact, research has shown continuously that candidates are much more likely to trust a specific story, a real human anecdote from one of your people, than they are some sort of generic marketing jargon. And so we actually help companies go in and we have a we have a sort of story capture technology that allows them to source both qualitative and quantitative data about what their

current employees think. Why do their best people show up every day and how does that vary based on the Dallas office versus the Chicago office or different parts of the company. Then, armed with both the data about what is this company's talent brand, what are their own employees saying about it, and the stories that those employees are telling, we can then help the companies create all of the

materials that they might use in their recruitment marketing. So this is everything from helping them build out a better career website, helping them understand when their recruiters are reaching out and contacting people, how are they telling a story about why somebody would want to take a look at the opportunity that's actually going to resonate with a candidate UM.

And then we can help them sort of distribute and optimize those messages so they understand what's working in the market, what's not and and essentially the goal is to help UM for the companies make sure the right sort of message gets to the right person at the right time. And for candidates, we want to make the entire process of UM applying for a job and going through the interview process feel much more personalized, feel more human, and to help candidates feel like they can make an accurate

assessment of is this a good company for me? So, who are the competitors of the music? I want to say glass Door but not exactly and linked In but not exactly. You're kind of your own entity. Who do you perceive as your own competitors? You know, it's funny when we when we started out, and when I started the business, it was very much as you said, the glass Doors and the LinkedIn's of the world. UM. As

we've grown, we've seen that. You know, there are certainly areas in which we sort of rub up against those companies, But I think we're also competing with UM, frankly, with with complacency of businesses who do nothing. UM. We've seen, UM, some companies are starting to enter the what's been called

the recruitment marketing space. UM. I honestly I hesitate with that word because if I were an individual thinking about where I'm going to join to spend the next you know, two or three, four or five years of my life, I wouldn't exactly want to be recruitment marketed to. But that's the category name as it exists now. We tend to play really nice with those companies were partners with many of them because we both have the same goal and we're targeting the different parts of UM the talent

acquisition and and sort of Canada experience space. I think that's one of the challenges is we're essentially seeing a new category being created right now within HR and Human Capital UM and it's kind of changing up, well, who are competitors with who? Given that there's a lot of white space that companies recognize they need to do something about, and I think the businesses that solve that need are just being built today. Let's talk a little bit about

the New Rules of Work? What are they? So? The New Rules of Work was our attempt to take all of the lessons we've learned over the past five years of building out the news and focus on what does an individual today navigating their career need to know. So we took the three main phases of career as we see it. The first being people who are understanding what do you want so, out of all of the possible career paths and roles, what direction do you want to head in. The second large step is how do you

go and get it? So tactics of finding jobs applying to them interviewing, etcetera. And then the third is, once you're in a new role, how do you make sure that you're succeeding so dealing with difficult colleagues, UM, impressing your boss, handling performance reviews, communication in the office, etcetera, etcetera. And for each of those we looked at the old way of doing things and the new. So, for example, everything from um, you know, technology has completely changed the

way some people interview. There are video interviews that are synchronous, like a Skype of Google hangout. There's asynchronous where somebody might give you a sort of link to record your answers to questions and then send that off to a hiring manager. And the rules are subtly changing and in some ways that are very obvious, and um, in others that are harder to to sort of put your finger on.

How important is the aspect? And I'm projecting here a little bit of managing your career as a millennial or even someone in their early thirties, it was something I never really gave a lot of thought to. Although granted that was a previous century, it wasn't this century, but still are are is this generation that astute that even

in their twenties, they're already managing their own careers. Yes, absolutely, And I think if I had to distill the entire book down to one single idea, it would be that you are in the driver's seat of your career and it's no one else's job to get where you want to go. And that plays out in a lot of really interesting ways. But yes, even people who are graduating from college today are expected much more than five or ten years ago to really articulate what they want and

to go out and take steps to get there. And I think that that in some ways that there are you know that there are opportunities that arise because of this, but there's also huge challenges because there's a lot you have to figure out if you're expected to drive your own career. I've always seen this come up in terms of, for lack of a better word, brand loyalty, that companies are much less loyal to employees. They they are big

layoffs when they need need to. And conversely, employees seem to know, hey, that really independent contractors, even though they may be working for some or you don't know how long that's going to last for Has that really changed the dynamics of of how either this generation or the

one before or participating in in the labor force. Yes. Absolutely, And I think when you look at at the millennial generation, you have to understand that this is a generation that in many cases was coming of age or entering the workforce right around the Great Recession, and so many of

them UM, that was a very formative experience. And I think when you look at the relationships they have with companies, it's interesting because you see these almost two themes that might seem to be contradictory ones that there's less loyalty between companies and employees. People are you know, considered the sort of the CEO of you inc. Or the the as we're saying, the driver's seat of their own career. They need to be responsible for their own professional development,

their own advancement. At the same time, UM, individuals are raising the expectations they have for companies. They want to, as we were saying, find an organization where there's some alignment of values. They care about the UM sort of

the employees experience, the company culture UM. And I think that when you dig a little bit deeper, these aren't I don't believe they're contradictory at all, because I think it gets to this sense that the relationship is becoming one in which individuals are saying, you know, not only do I want a paycheck, that's sort of the base case, but I want a paycheck and growth opportunities, or a paycheck and a chance to advance in my career, or

a paycheck and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. They're looking for companies to provide something more than just the bare minimum. There was a statistic on your site that I found astonishing and I have to share it with you of job candidates first seek out of companies social media presence to learn more about a potential employer. So people are taking a Facebook and Twitter to check out a company that's recruiting them. Is that unique to this generation? Has that

ever existed before in history? You know, I don't know that it was possible ten years ago. When you think about, you know, the access to information that a job seeker has at their fingertips today compared to a decade ago, it's a massive shift, and that's impacting everything about the way companies recruit. You know, ten years ago, if you were lucky, you could ask your buddy who worked for a company. Hey, what's what's it really like over there?

You know, what's the scoop. But if you didn't have somebody you personally knew, or if you if you weren't sort of well networked in the industry that you were looking to move into, what else are you going to do? You might go on the corporate website. Um, you know, but that's not necessarily known for being a paragon and

sort of trust in authenticity. And now you know, not only can you look on LinkedIn and see whether you have connections, but um, it's much more common for companies to, for example, UM put photo and video of their offices and their employees online. That was the original product that the Views built our business model on, was and humanize cold corporate entities so they look more appealing to potential employees. There's so much that they look more appealing. But it's

it's this concept of fit, right, Um. You know, five years ago when I started the business, I used to have a slide where I took some sentences off the career pages of Dell, Intel and IBM, and I had the three logos of the companies and the three paragraphs, and I said which ones which, and frankly, nobody could tell the difference because it was all, you know, we're

committed to authenticity, where this where that. But what's fascinating is if you went into Dell, people all talked about certain themes and certain things that they valued about the culture there, and that was very, very different from Intel, which had this really kind of cool, very competitive different offices, and those things are going to fit different types of people very well. But from the outside, you know, from looking at a job description or their company website, you'd

never be able to tell the difference. And I think that seemed like such a missed opportunity. So it's less about making companies quote unquote look good. In fact, we can get into this, but I don't know that I believe in a sort of vertical sense of, oh, this company is good and this company is bad. I think it's more who are you and what are you looking for?

Do you want a company where people are constantly pushing each other to succeed, competing against each other or the clock or the Singapore office, you know, it's very go go go, very driven. Or do you want a company where people really care about each other, where things are, you know, and I'm kind of creating a silly sense of opposites. But companies have personalities just like people or humans do, and the best company for one person it

might not be the best one for another. And so I think that to me, it's just fascinating, you know, how can you help companies show that personality? And to your question about social channels, that's exactly what candidates are looking for. They're saying, Okay, how do they tweet? Do they have an Instagram account where their employees can post day in the lifestyle pictures? What happens on Facebook? When I when I scoped this out, you know, there was

a fascinating another statistic that the average candidate consumes. I think it's fourteen pieces of content before they apply for a job. That's kind of wild when you think about just what candidates had access to several years ago. But now people are doing their research and they're saying, Okay, before I answer this recruiter's email, before I go, you know, spend twenty or thirty minutes filling out my cover letter and my resume and everything. Um, okay, you know, do

I want what you're offering in the first place? And again, this is especially true of the most talented individuals, which are the people that everybody's fighting over. I want to get into the millennials and the modern workforce, but before I do, I have to talk a little bit about all the craziness that's been going on with venture capital farms out in California and technology firms, and the role of women in these entities. This really has very quickly

been revealed as an old boys club. Only there's we mentioned social media before. There's so much of an intense spotlight and so much there is no hiding anymore. This seems to be coming to the four and changing very rapidly. You have a unique perspective on the industry. What do you say? You know, it's a fascinating time to be in tech right now. Um. When I started my business two thousand eleven, it was very different. I was often

one of the only women at tech events. UM. I would regularly get asked who I was there for, whether I was there because I was dating somebody or you know, somebody's assistants. Like now I founded a company and UM, you know what's interesting is is most people didn't mean badly assistant though that's a little insulting honey, could you get me a cup of coffee? I mean, that's a little you know, that's right out of mad men practice, and and and it was to some extent. But you

also have to take the intention behind it, right. Some people mean it badly and and some people are just they're just clueless, they don't realize. UM. And I do think what's interesting is, you know, there's always been lots of good people working in technology, but frankly, any industry is going to have its bad apples. I think the challenge in tech was that for a long time, the industry didn't want to talk about the problems, so the

bad apples just kept doing their thing. And what's been interesting to me is, as we've seen some of these revelations recently, women are coming out and saying that, um, you know that that certain venture capitalists have behaved highly, highly inappropriately. It's often many, many, many women, you know, with the same people. Because when you have a culture that allows certain behavior to go on with impunity. UM, I think what you often happen is is a few

people that are serial offenders. And UM, to be totally candid, it's it's been really refreshing the summer that a few of the most egregious harassers and tech have finally suffered some consequences. And this again, this is both on the technology company and the venture count. There have been lots of resignations and lots of founders, CEOs others stepping down over the past not even twelve months, six months, it's

been a sea change. Is this a temporary blip and then everything will go back to normal or is this really a secular change that's taking place. I hope it's a more permanent change. And the reason I believe that that's likely is um, I can't tell you how many men in the industry I've talked to who said, God, this the stuff is terrible, some of these stories that

are coming out. You know, I'm I don't want our industry to be a place where this sort of behavior happens unchecked because when I think you look at when you look at the technology industry again, you have a lot of great people who want to work with the best of the best. Be those people men, women, black, white.

You know, there's a lot of people who are very committed to the idea of of making the best ideas sort of uh, you know, surface to the top, yes, exactly, which, unfortunately that word has been used in the past to play down some of the very real issues of bias and discrimination that that do exist. UM. But I'm happy that that as an industry we're talking about it because I think awareness of the problem is the first step

to making a change. Second step is obviously consequences for people that are the most um, sort of pervasive harassers. The one other thing I want to make sure it doesn't get lost in this discussion is it's very easy to write, um, you know, an our dicle. I mean, I don't mean this in any way downplaying that. A lot of the articles that have come out have been

the result of of sort of exhaustive research. But let's just say that it's it's easy for someone reading an article about severe gender based harassment UM to be outraged by that. Right, you know, nobody should be put in a position where someone else is saying, UM, i'll fund you if you sleep with me, and we I think we've all I hope acknowledged that that's just not appropriate. UM. And so I think that it's it's great that the

industry is waking up and saying that's not okay. But what I think shouldn't get lost in this discussion is that there's also a lot of more subtle bias, what's called unconscious bias that also can can can sort of hold not only women entrepreneurs back, but entrepreneurs that don't look like the standard, uh, the you know, the classic

hoodie wearing young guy who's a Harvard dropout. Um. There's a lot of research that's starting to come out, and and Harvard Business Reviews on a really interesting job publishing some of the latest that across the board. Male and female investors ask different questions of female entrepreneurs than male entrepreneurs. They're more likely to see young male entrepreneurs as promising

and young female entrepreneurs is inexperienced. They ask more questions around women how do they protect themselves against risk, whereas male entrepreneurs how do you capitalize on opportunities? Which leads

to very different sorts of assessments of those entrepreneurs. And what's been fascinating is there's even been studies where they've actually had entrepreneurs present the exact same pitch, but they play with the gender and the attractiveness level of the entrepreneur, and they found that attractive men were the most likely to get funded, followed by unattractive men, followed by unattractive women, followed by attractive women. These people are making these unconscious assessments, um.

And I think that, you know, first again, the first step to UH, to realizing this as an investor is to being aware of how unconscious bias can play out. But I also think as an industry, we're starting to grapple with you know, what does it really mean to create a technology industry where people can get funded with great sort of industry changing ideas regardless of whether they quote unquote look like the person you'd expect to lead,

you know, to lead a successful business. You know, I've I've seen two specific unrelated to tech areas where they've done blind um for lack of a better word, interviews. One is in professional orchestras, philharmonics, what have you, where the player is actually behind a screen and you don't get to see them, you only hear them, because after all, that's all that matters if you're a violinist or a saxophonist or wherever. And that process has completely changed the

way orchestras quote unquote. Look, it's more genda diverse, it's more race diverse. It is become a blind meritocracy. And I think it might have been Samantha Beast program. When they were hiring comedy writers, they made sure someone literally went through all the applications stripped out the name or any other identifying characteristics, and people were hired just on

the quality of their work. And lo and behold, you end up with a more diverse group of comedy writers, a group of musicians, and net net you get a better product. There's a fascinating study as well, um where I think it's adjunct professors were asked to grade mathematics proofs and when they completely objective and not a subjective

sort of you would think so. And when they changed the gender of the names on top of the proofs, um and this again, this was a you know, an academic sort of fully um, I don't even know the right words for it. It was it was the sort of study that a university puts out and gets behind with all the right protocols. When they change the gender of the names on top of the mathematics proof female names scored on average lower I believe than male names.

On substantial. You know, in your example about the about the orchest straw. Before they instituted blind auditions, a lot of orchestra leaders would say, look, it's nothing personal. I'm not discriminating. Women just don't have the lung capacity to play these instruments at the same level. They genuinely believed that they were hearing a difference. It was only when that difference was physically removed that the disparity in male versus female musicians musicians who are hired went away. And

I do think. I mean it's challenging in technology because to some extent an investor is betting on the entrepreneur, they are betting on the founder. But the way that investors measure things like grit, perseverance, determination, ambition, they code those things differently in some cases in their assessment of male versus female founders. Like grit is a key component of an entry level tech job, right is or is

that just an excuse? Well, you know, I think that, Um, I don't think in some cases people mean to make excuses. I think people go with what they're familiar with, and unfortunately, in tech, what they're familiar with looks like one thing. It often leaves out. I think some of the best talent and ideas right now that that can help us, you know, make big things happen. You would think market efficiencies would punish people who were misbehaving in that way.

But before I I spend too much time on this, let's talk about millennials a little bit, because that was what I really wanted to discuss in this UH segment. You mentioned the data point earlier. I have to bring up forty percent of millennials turned down a job because the organization's values did not align with theirs. I can't imagine any previous generation getting away with that. How how is that possible? Hey? Thanks, but I just don't dig your values and I'm going to turn the job down.

Is that a realistic thing? It absolutely is, and it's fascinating and how it plays out. I think we're only going to see that trend grow. So firstly, um, there's projected to be a shortage of one point five million knowledge workers by and in some fields the shortage of talent is even more intense. So for example, there I believe are five open developer jobs for every single developer

looking for work today. So you have these certain parts it's I know, it's staggering, and honestly, it should um you know it, it should really concern you if you're a business that needs technology talent to survive, which by the way, is almost everyone today. And so what what you're seeing when you have these imbalances in the types of talent that businesses are looking for and the number of people with those skill sets in the market, is that those people have the opportunity to be pick here.

And one of the ways that they're voting with their feet is they're saying, no, I want to join an organization with values that align with mine. Now I want to be really clear about what this means. I think sometimes executives will come to me after I've given a talk or a keynote and they'll say, you know, how do I compete with Facebook? They have free snacks, or I hear Google has a slide. But believe me, it's not these sort of flashy perks. They make for great,

you know, magazine articles. But that's not what's driving most millennials to choose one opportunity over another. It goes much deeper. I mentioned people, purpose and path earlier. Those are what we call the three p's internally, But many of the talent that uses the Muse to navigate their careers, they're looking for. Okay, who are the people that I'm going to be working with? Is that you know on my colleagues inspiring to me? Is the leadership someone I can

look up to? What's the purpose of this organization? Does it have a clear sense of mission, whether that's social impact or not. Frankly, it can be UM making a you know, a complicated process much more simple for a specific buyer. But is there some sort of why or reason that the organization exists? And then path what opportunities exist for growth and development? And when we work with companies,

we try and help them really tell that story. UM, and again, your employees are your best advocates because just trying to you know, compete for candidates based on paycheck without taking a look at the rest of it, UM, that is going to be a more and more challenging strategy as time goes on. We have been speaking with Katherine Minshue. She is the founder and CEO of the

Muse dot Com. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and stick around for the podcast extras when we keep the tape rolling and continue discussing all things involving millennial employment. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Be sure and check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com. Follow me on Twitter at Rid Halts. I'm Barry Dhults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome

to the podcast, Catherine. Thank you so much for doing this. I've really been looking forward to chatting with you about this. Were really didn't get to talk about the millennials and as much as I wanted, and I have some questions I have to follow up with you on that because I have a lot of millennials in my office and I find the general I don't want to say complaint, but the general descriptions of that generation to be somewhat

a little off base, a little off kilter. You could take any extreme example and use it to paint a group. So so first question that I find shocking something that's in one of your PDFs is of candidates who have a less than in thrilling experience in an interview, what what do they end up doing with with the experience? So many of them will sever their business relationship with

the organization where they have that bad yet experience. And it's fascinating because when you start to really follow the numbers, you can actually put a pretty substantial business impact to not treating candidates well. And it makes sense right as the expectations that individuals have as consumers. Let's think about, you know, the way that people expect customer service to work, or the types of interactions people expect to have with

just brands in their day to day lives. When you contrast those to how most people are treated as candidates, which frankly is very poorly, you can see that they're starting to be this disconnect and candidates, especially UM individuals that are you know, have skill sets that are more valuable in the market, are starting to stand up and

say no, I won't take it. When we did a survey of users on the muse um, the number one thing that they hate about the current job search and career process today is what they call the black hole. It's when you apply to a company that you never hear anything. And UM similarly, you know, there's there's many cases in which people go through the experience of interviewing for a company and they're treated more like a resume

or a number than an individual human. We've actually started to work with a number of our customers and our partners on Canada experience. You've spent so much time and money getting these people to apply, why would you want them to leave the process with a bad impression of your company? So so that raises two questions I have to ask. The first is about the black hole. Is it better to just politely say thank you, will file this away, or thanks but no thanks, or to actually

turn around and do nothing. Our candidates uniformly would prefer just to know they want to hear I'm sorry we won't be moving forward with you at this time, but thank you for applying. And you know, the best companies leave the door open for the future. Just because it wasn't the right fit today doesn't mean there might not

be a great opportunity. I actually think that that is a great approach that remows that removes some of the hubrists from companies saying you know, no, sorry, you're you're not right, because the truth is a lot of great talent, even if they're not right for you today, they may go off and work at one of your competitors somewhere else in your industry, and you know, six months, three years, ten years down the line, that could be the person

that you're dying to hire. And if you if you haven't at least treated them with a basic sort of minimum of professional respect, you're much less likely to be able to do that. So so that raises the second half of the question, which is how much of this sort of hand fisted I don't want to use the word rude, but just unpleasant experience as a candidate, is the legacy of that power shift? Where it used to

be the company had all the power. They were the ones who are writing the paycheck, and now suddenly that there is a short especially in tech in areas where there's a real shortage of talent. How much of it is just these companies haven't quite recognized, Hey, the power um ratio has shifted and it's now with the potential employee, not the employer. Oh look, some of it is a

legacy of the technology. Early application tracking systems did not make it easy to respond to people, to treat them, you know, well, it was it was very much a processing system. Frankly, and I think that you had and and I'm going to keep the shorks. I don't want to recount the entire history of the online recruitment industry, but you had this phase where all of a sudden, it became so much easier for individuals to apply to

jobs that companies were swamped by applications. I mean, think about just clicked to apply versus having to mail in a cover letter and resume. And when this initially happened, when companies were initially swamped, they responded by just processing the applications as quickly and efficiently as possible, and it became more of a you know, how many applications, how quickly do we move people through? How quickly do we

get a button the seat? And it was less about um cultivating the people that you're turning down today but that could be right in the future. It was also, to some extent, less about fit, because there was more of a sense that as a company, you just got a bunch of applications and you picked the best one

and you moved on. Now companies are starting to wake up and say, what if the talent in the world isn't even applying to my jobs because they're not even thinking about me as a place to work, and that changes the game again, both with the candidates you you receive, but also understanding the way that people talk to each other on social media. You don't want someone to have a bad experience and perhaps they tell their friend or their colleague, you know, oh that place treated me terribly.

Never work there. What if that person is someone that you're trying to recruit. And so I think that companies are starting to both obviously be more aware, but there's also been a lot of data, hard data coming out recently about the business impact in terms of lost dollars, negative employer brand ramifications of having a Canada experience process that does not value candidates as people. I never would have imagined that, but now that you mentioned and it

makes perfect sense. Let's get to some of our favorite standard questions we ask all our guests. What is the most important thing people don't know about your background? All? The most important thing, Uh, that's a tough question to answer. Um. The sort of most fun and random thing is that I love to travel, and I've been to sixty one countries since two thousand four sixte in thirteen years, including the border between Turkey and Iran, the border between Rwanda

and the DRC. I love I love travel, and I love exploring. I think the the other thing is um. You know, I really do believe that the the entire industry around how people find their next job, how they choose what to do in their career, and how companies are able to source great people. I think we're going to see something in five years that looks radically different from how it looks today, and then especially from how it looked a couple of years ago. And and I

am so unbelievably excited to be part of that. Tell us about some of your early mentors who affected how you think of the world and and who affected your career. Yeah, I was very lucky when I first started the muse to have a few other founders, entrepreneurs um, you know, individuals and technology that that took me under their wing and explained some of the dudes and don't so um. There was an incredible woman named Rachel Squar who was very active in media. She actually helped me get on

television the first time that I ever did a TV segment. UM. There was a business mentor from McKinsey, Joanna Barsh, who was incredibly influential UM. Also actually my one of my managers UH at McKinsey was a guy named Dan, who I think was probably responsible more than anyone else for me not seeming like a total and complete idiot when I was twenty three year old walking into these client meetings as a consultant. And I've taken a lot of those lessons with me ever since about UM just you know,

basic UM presence and interaction with h with executives. It's actually been very helpful as the news has started to sell into enterprise clients, and then I think as as as my company has grown. You know, we were part of why Combinator. Several of the partners there really helped us avoid some of the early pitfalls because there's so much you don't know as an entrepreneur. And if you can find those other people to um, you know, to tell you well, you may not want to do that,

because I did it, and here's what happened. That that can save you more more heartache than I can possibly express. Tell us about some um either venture capitalists or technologists who affected the way you built your business. Oh my goodness, UM, I would say, you know here UM here in New York City, I've certainly learned a lot from watching the

way that Rent the Runway has been built. Jen Hymen has done a really incredible job building a company that again that created a fairly new category in the space, and also really proud to be an entrepreneur from New York City. So seeing um, you know, seeing her build that company has been incredible. UM. There's a woman named Nila for Merchant who is a former senior executive an

investor UM. She actually recently came up with a book called Onliness about the concept of of denting the world, bringing what only you can and she has been incredibly influential because I think that early on for me, there were times when people looked at the way I was approaching my business, the way that I, for example, wanted to uh structure the company, or or treat our employees, or just I know, there were so many little things, especially in the early days of the muse, where we

were going kind of against the grain of conventional tech wisdom, and UM, there were a number of people who who were very powerful in in helping me realize that being different didn't necessarily mean we were wrong. So you mentioned Onliness, what other books have you enjoyed. What are you reading currently? My goodness? Well, I loved The Hard Thing About Hard Things,

which is ben horror. What's this book about entrepreneurship? I think he coined the phrase eating glass and staring into the abyss, which is certainly the most accurate description of some of the low points of entrepreneurship. Um. Uh. Eric Reese, who was an early News Seed investor and another person

that I got some incredible guidance from early on. His book The Lean Startup is a classic of how do you break you know, these big complicated ideas and plans down to the most basic m v P minimum viable product and experiment test them in the world. Uh. Nila Fir's book, Sorry, The Power of Onliness is the full title. Um, that's actually just came out. But her, I think ideas, UM and perspective have been very impactful on me for

a long time. And then uh, in terms of what I'm reading now, I'm about halfway through when breath becomes their Uh. Paul Kellnathy, it's a fascinating book. Uh. He was a neuros neurosur gen neuroscientists and UM and eventually was diagnosed with cancer and it's his his story and sort of meditation on life. And uh to say very it's it's very, very impactful. So you joined the technology slash web industry six years ago? Is that about right?

From from mackenzie as a consultant. What has changed over the ensuing six years? And is this a good thing or a bad then? You know, I love being part of the technology industry and I think it's a really great time to be a founder right now. Um, in terms of what has changed, you know, the the the sense of what's trendy has changed. I know when I was first raising capital for the News, everybody that I

talked to was really into daily deal sites. That was when groupon was really big, and you know, investors probably funded twenty five smaller niche opportunities. And you know, now it's obviously AI bots. There's a lot of new trends. Some of them are going to be massively big. I don't I don't mean to discount that, but I think that the you know, the industry, one thing that has not changed is this sort of sense of everyone trying

to figure out what's the one or two next big things. Um. But that said, I think it's a it's a time where as much as there's a lot uh that's very challenging about the world, the political system that we live in, and there's a huge amount of optimism in terms of what can be accomplished with technology and and you know, when you look at just the career industry, for example, there are I could name a half dozen companies that are innovating on different parts of the process, different needs

that individual candidates or that companies have um and I think it's a it's a great time. You know, there's a so one of my favorite books I didn't mention earlier is Arcadia to Play by Tom Stoppard, and one of the characters has this beautiful quote and he says, it's the best possible time to be alive when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. That's that's an interesting quote. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience, My goodness, UM, I

am definitely. I've had some some epic failures as well as obviously some things that have been very successful, and I think you probably learned more from the stuff that goes wrong. The one that that I'll give you the quick story is I mentioned earlier In between UM leaving Mackenzie,

I had moved and then moved back from Rwanda. UM I started a blog, a community essentially a project that became a company with several other women that was sort of the predecessor to The Muse and ended really badly. The four of us disagreed on the right direction to

take the company. We had very different senses of whether it should be, you know, in every man brand or a high end brand, how we wanted to set it up and UM, and we ended up in just this very painful situation that UM for a while, I I ended up feeling like, you know, all of the work had been for nothing, and I felt like a total failure. We uh, you know, we we kind of split two and two and the other two took the site that we've been building and renamed it and sort of moved

on and Alex sand ended up starting over. And what we started over with was the Muse. And it's so funny because looking back, I don't know that we could have done what we've done with The Muse with the company without that experience. But at the time, I mean I was you know, in a fetal position for uh, for a couple of days just thinking to myself, has

this all been a waste? And of course even if the work um feels like it's been a waste, like what you've learned from it, you you carry with you the path to get from here to there require Sometimes so what feels like wasted effort and what feels like well that was not. But very often it isn't tell us what you do to keep either mentally or physically fit or for relaxment or enjoyment outside of the office. Yeah. Um so in terms of keeping mentally fit. I love

language is um. I speak French. I always like last night I was, um, you know, sitting outside reading a book and overheard a couple of French teenagers talking in a very heavy slang, which was really fun to to sort of remember. Um. I used to live in uh in Strasbourg and eastern France, so it's kind of a fun trip down memory lane. But I love um kind of getting and staying plugged in to other languages, other countries, other cultures. Um. My other big kind of hobby right

now is cooking, and it's totally ridiculous. I actually got um. I got a vite a mix a couple of weeks ago, and now I'm just like blending and cooking and making all sorts of things. So those are probably my big two outside of work. I have to share a language story with you. I just got back from Paris, ten days in Paris from my anniversary and having taken French in high school and arriving at Paris in Paris and realizing, wow, three years of French in high school and they did

a terrible job teaching you to speak. Ice downloaded an app called Duo Lingo, and it's just a really simple set of um you could use on your phone, you could use on the computer tablet, and it's I feel like, in a week of playing with Duo Lingo, I've learned more language than I did in years of high school. It's amazing how we've taught people other languages so inappropriately

over the years. When I when I showed up from my first day of my junior year of college at the the big political science university there, I mean I didn't I could literally could not understand anything, and I was probably six years into French language at that point. But then, of course, you know, three or four weeks sort of being I burst in it. I was like, Oh, finally I can understand my professor. That was that was

It was a good moment, all right. And our two favorite questions that we ask all of our guests, and this question is actually really funny to ask you of all people. The the ninth question and we ask all of our guests is always what advice would you give to a millennial or someone just beginning their career? And it's funny because essentially that's what what the muse does

every day. But what sort of advice if if someone came out to you and said, Catherine, I'm thinking of going into technology, hr, whatever, what sort of advice would you give them? Yeah, I'd say that anything worth doing requires grit and persistence. I think that sometimes that can get lost in our culture's focus on overnight success things that just seem to kind of work magically. Um, but literally every person I have talked to be at an entrepreneur,

a successful business leader, executive, whatever it is. Maybe they just um, you know, run a small organization or company or nonprofit or or or thing in a small corner of the world. And they're not you know, necessarily famous or someone you've heard of, but people that are deeply content or satisfied with their career have usually had to

put up with some heart knocks to get there. And I think grit is a is a fairly under appreciated attribute, but certainly, um, I believe it's one of the most critical. There's a new book out grit. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Someone put out a book grit is in the title. When you get a chance take

look at it. And our final question, what is it that you know about technology, venture capital, HR, anything like that today that you wish you knew seven eight years ago when you were first thinking about launching the muse Um. You know, the only constant is change. Um. Just because you have a great idea or a big innovation or something that moves your space or your market forward, UM, that's never enough. That's that's the sort of opening stakes.

You have to constantly keep moving, keep innovative, keep changing as a business. And actually that's a very freeing and powerful thought. But it's certainly important, especially in technology today, because the rules of the game now aren't going to necessarily be the rules of the game in three years. And if you can't commit to sort of learning and innovating and constantly updating your own assumptions. It's going to be harder and harder to keep up. That is fascinating.

We have been speaking with Catherine Minshoe. She is the founder and CEO of the Muse dot com. If you enjoy this conversation, you can look up an intro Down an Inch on Apple iTunes and you can see any of the other hundred and fifty something or so previous shows we've had. Be sure and write to us. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions. Send us an email at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss if I did not thank my crack staff

who helps put these podcasts together. Medina Parwana is my audio engineer and producer part Excellence. Taylor Riggs is in charge of booking and also one of our producers. Michael Batnick is the head of research who helps delve deep into the background of our guests, coming up with better questions than I usually do. I'm Barry Ridholts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.